To make more money, revenue managers need to improvise on several counts. Ritesh Gupta investigates

Developments in mobile distribution and big data allow hotels to upsell more core room product but also to drive fresh ancillary revenue streams like food & beverage, spa and so on.

But successful cross-selling and upselling strategies are built on deep customer knowledge. Today RM executives need to be more prepared by digging deeper into data, while at the same time keeping tabs on new developments like social analytics. Nimble collaboration between other departments is also important.

So how can RM executives improve operational efficiency to drive fresh revenues?:

1.    Keep a tab on booking windows: The best way to understand shifts in booking windows is to compare the booking pace year-on-year by market segments. According to Amit Kaushik, director of revenue management at Madinat Jumeirah this enables revenue management to understand the differences between market segment booking behaviour (booking window, price elasticity and lead time). However, forecasting for shorter booking windows is more complex and requires more dynamic tools.

2.    Collaborate in a meaningful way: With relatively shorter booking windows, faster and effective communication is essential, says Kaushik. For RM and sales to work effectively together, there must be a timely flow of information. For example, RM needs to ensure that account managers have easy access to the latest forecasts, pricing information and bookings on hand for the upcoming booking window. For Chinmai Sharma, vice president of revenue management and distribution, Louvre Hotels Group it’s about putting the necessary information in an easy to view format for the sales team. “In the absence of an automated RM system or a business intelligence tool, revenue managers can still easily develop a custom report on a weekly basis with key information like business-on-books, ADR on books, tentative/definite groups on books and the sell strategy,” he says.

3.    Improve data management/analytics skills: Revenue managers today need strong technological skills as data must be processed across a number of systems including the property management (PMS), customer relationship managment (CRM) or central reservation systems (CRS). It is increasingly common for hotels to have a two-way interface between the PMS and CRS, making it easier to access full transactional data from either source. Sharma adds that the process of adding more meaningful data from ecommerce platforms (traffic/conversion) and from CRM databases is still a new phenomenon and one that needs to become mainstream.

4.    Don’t ignore the last-minute: For Kaushik, ensuring last-minute availability for each market segment and mobile bookings is key to success. When it comes to social media, analytics plays an increasingly important role in understanding customers and their respective buying behaviour. By using tools that can simplify data from a wide range of sources allows brands to position products in a customer centric fashion and price for the future. While some of the new RM systems on the market are able to combine price recommendations with market intelligence like rate comparisons and user review indices, Kaushik says short-term pricing evaluations are not yet possible. “Such pricing assessment is much more complicated due to last minute changes in demand factors,” says Sharma.