Why Hotels Envy Airlines When It Comes to Managing Revenue
Photo Credit: Pictured: Stephen Hambleton and Kelly Calvo, both IDeaS product managers in Minnesota, review revenue management dashboards that aim to help hoteliers manage pricing and revenue across an entire estate or individual property. IDeaS
Skift Take
The revenue management industry picked an odd time to have an identity crisis, given the opportunity for additional profit that new rate-setting and distribution software could bring.
Hotels are jealous of airlines when it comes to revenue management.
A standard major airline has a second-degree black belt in optimizing airfares. Multiple times a day, an airline adjusts rates in reaction to fresh data about supply and demand. It also distributes different rates on different websites, mobile apps, and travel agency systems for various dates of travel and advanced-purchase windows.
The typical hotel group, on the other hand, is more like a young student of Taekwondo who is unduly pleased with himself for having side-kicked in half his first wood board.
What gives?
In brief, hotels face large hurdles to shrug off legacy back-end systems. Revenue management and the related issues of marketing and distribution require a full set of data to be done right.
Finger-pointing is one problem. A hotel may be managed by a company that's different from its owner. If the hotel is a franchise, then it has another voice weighing in. Tech investment decisions become fra
