How to manage revenue in an age of instant information -

A highly anticipated movie coming out later this summer (the Wall Street sequel) contains a great truth in its title: Money Never Sleeps; That is a lesson that financial firms learned long ago, but one that hotels have been slow to internalize.

In the age of 24-hour online bookings, hotels cannot afford to assume that the majority of their reservations and sales will be made during regular office hours, especially since bookings are often coming in from different time zones around the globe.

Yet most properties continue to conduct their sales and revenue management activities with traditional methods, many of which can overburden revenue managers and their staffs, rather than giving them the tools that they need to develop proactive pricing strategies.  This is out of step with the demands and realities of the global, always-open marketplace room sales are made in.

Revenue managers perform more ‘maintenance' tasks now than ever before, because the conditions of room sales fluctuate more wildly and more often than ever before. 

Just to maintain a high occupancy rate and a healthy ADR, a revenue manager must monitor a dizzying array of online sales channels, determine which rate is selling most briskly (or too briskly), reconcile that with in-house reservations and those from a GDS, adjust that rate, allocate inventory to the channel, and communicate this information across the various operating departments within the hotel.  And this must be done every day, even on weekends.

In fact, to maximize RevPAR, this process must be repeated as often as possible, down to the second, all day (and night), every day.  And individual hotels tend not to have offices in Hong Kong and London so even the most capable revenue managers need the right tools to assist them with this process. 

Rate-adjustment perfection is most consistent only by technological means, as is done in financial firms.  The physical and time-consuming actions of manually maintaining the optimal hotel room rate rob a revenue management team of the opportunity to work on more productive, sales-generating initiatives.

The good news is, the technology that created the 24-hour hotel room market can also help hotels master that market.  But to do so, hotels have to embrace stock market principles that allow financial firms to thrive in even more complex markets.  By accepting the best practices- and technological advances- of the financial world, hotels can create competitive advantage for themselves, and start down the path toward healthy, high-growth RevPAR.

In an age of instant information, how can hoteliers leverage the availability of data to their advantage?  How can new ways of approaching revenue management help hotels achieve this edge?  And what, if anything, can hoteliers learn from industries that have always grappled and traded in up-to-the-minute information, like the financial industry?

To find out the answers to these questions and more, download REVPAR GURU's whitepaper called "Revenue Management Lessons from the Stock Market" on the following link: www.revparguru.com/download-whitepaper.html

About REVPAR GURU

REVPAR GURU provides hotels around the world with an alternative revenue management software solution, to manage RevPAR intelligently and effectively, and deliver maximum profits. REVPAR GURU's custom-designed Yield Dynamic Price Engine meets the rapidly changing needs of hotels in a demanding business environment - dynamic rate optimization, real-time pricing, integrated internet and extranet yield channel management, and GDS sales distribution, to increase a hotel's RevPAR while maintaining rate integrity and automated rate parity. It is the only revenue management solution that automatically optimizes and updates hotel rates across all major consumer travel websites, based on all market variables and in real time, and provides a strategic room inventory control.  Once deployed, hotels can boost their occupancy rates and cut their distribution costs dramatically.  Headquartered in Miami, Florida, additional information can be found at www.revparguru.com or by calling +1.786.478.3500.