REVVING UP

As the hotel business witnesses accelerated change, revenue managers are developing innovative strategies to optimize demand and improve room occupancy

How has the revenue management role changed over a period of time, especially after the pandemic?

Aman Gupta (AG): Historically, the revenue management role was limited to demand management. However, during the pandemic, it evolved into demand generation. Revenue managers constantly need to look at new strategies to create demand during low-demand periods to ensure the topline revenues are optimized while also looking at the profitability aspect of the business.

Also, a lot of decision-making pre-pandemic was done based on historical data. However, the current decision-making is more about forward-looking data, which has made the role of revenue management more critical in guiding the commercial teams at hotels in the right direction

Chandran (C): Post pandemic, the function of revenue management has taken on a whole new dynamic model with its own set of challenges and opportunities.

The revenue managers are working in a newly developed complex business environment with a fundamental shift in the segments and the guest profiles coming to their property.

With seismic trends affecting the hospitality industry with lockdowns, re-openings, closings, and travel restrictions, revenue managers have taken up a leadership role in driving commercial strategy as it requires constant attention and frequent deployment of short-term strategies to capture the available demand and generate demand for the weeks ahead.

With the uncertainty and swift change in the demand, and a limited booking window, the frequency of daily rate changes is doubled, and the pickup is faster than ever before. Revenue Managers become the only ones to know when and how marketing campaigns should run and create offers for the customers value-based in the highly volatile market, which requires close attention.