Hotels Strive to Get Savvier About Forecasting Total Revenue
Skift Take
Software may be eating the world, but in hotel tech it's still munching on the appetizers. Hotels have only begun to automate operational forecasts, such as how much revenue restaurants on a property may bring in or how much group business a hotel might steal from a crosstown rival.
Falling hotel occupancy in the first half of 2020 may prompt property managers and owners to adopt new digital tools that extract more value from the guests they have. New tools from vendors IDeaS and Kalibri Labs represent a broader trend.
IDeaS, a SAS-owned company that makes revenue management software, announced this week a new budgeting and planning tool, RevPlan. The tool enables a manager to create a budget that includes precise information about a property's food and beverage outlets, not just guest rooms.
IDeaS is testing RevPlan in three hotel groups. About 120 properties are live. Another 275 properties in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and the Middle East will go live shortly.
The new software pushes the boundaries of what has long been called "hotel revenue management." It's no longer all about pricing rooms and setting rates.
What problem is IDeaS's new software solving? Today hoteliers tend to use spreadsheets to predict how much revenue their food-and-beverage offerings will earn. These ballpark estimates can be rough and off by double-digit percentage points, said James Echert, IDeaS product marketing manager.
Vague forecasts are a problem because food-and-beverage is often the number-two grossing item on their profit-and-loss sheets. Being able to more accurately gauge how much labor a hotel should hire to serve food-and-beverage needs can help flow to the bottom line, as workers are a top variable cost for hotels.
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