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In association with REVENUE MANAGEMENT


retail or best available rate pricing – look at the historical performance of both your and your competitor’s rates and analyse what it tells you about demand or elasticity.


l Put your analysis into context against your benchmarking key performance indica- tors. Are you ignoring your market penetra- tion, average rate and revenue generation indexes? Are the competitive sets inconsistent? l If you can get hold of the data, try to bench- mark your business mix versus competitors. l Make some projections and apply to budgets. Don’t waste valuable analysis. Work with your operations and finance teams to simulate scenarios with changes in pricing and mix, and address possible overdepen- dence on some segments. Arguably, the sheer abundance of data avail- able creates its own headaches (see page 4).


“The key to achieving an intelligent strategy is understanding which


data to prioritise” Warren Mandelbaum


In the past, limited technology meant it was only possible to manage availability, price and distribution reach. Today’s managers need an agile revenue management strategy that can manage cost of acquisition, consumer sentiment and guest reviews along with travel data and intelligence.


Centralising revenue management


Asset manager Sandro Guadagnini oversees 15 of the 28 midmarket Hallmark Hotels owned by property and investment company Topland Group, which also owns the Royal Crescent in Bath and seven leased hotels. Hallmark was created


by Topland in 2015 with its own management team, including HR and IT, and uses IDeaS revenue management technology. It will have its own headquarters in Derby by early 2018. “Groups recognise


that centralising revenue management is a sensible approach. Hilton, for instance, has created a revenue management team in Watford,


www.thecaterer.com


and let them be objective on pricing, inventory and so on. At Topland, we have six revenue managers – each looks after three to five hotels.” Guadagnini, whose


background is in commercial and revenue management at groups such as Hilton, joined Hallmark more than two years ago and works alongside director Lionel Benjamin. “Revenue management was


away from the buzz of hotels,” says Guadagnini. “Rather than take hoteliers into this discipline, they take people who are analytical and good at maths into a hub away from the distractions of a hotel


a novel discipline 20 years ago and not understood,” he says. “Hotelkeepers were starting to use data to tell you what to sell your rooms at. Now, it is more established, and more general managers are coming from a revenue management background.”


“The key to achieving an intelligent strat-


egy is understanding which data to prioritise, which is most relevant to the business and subsequently converting it into actions that deliver optimal revenues,” says Mandelbaum. “Demand and market intelligence continue to evolve and provide insight beyond just-booked data and offer the intention to book, creating a new level of clarity for hoteliers by bridging the gap between return on investment on market- ing efforts and overall revenue strategy.” Sandro Guadagnini, asset manager for


Topland Group’s Hallmark Hotels (see panel on this page), welcomes advancements in data crunching. “Going forward, hotels will be able to feed more external information into their systems, such as flights and schedules, which can indicate what demand might be,” he says. “Today, you can get information from a number of sources, but in future it will be data- mined by artificial intelligence [AI], which works at a faster speed to get more accurate and more comprehensive information. At that level, it will have to be automated. AI is pro- gressing and will increasingly become a topic for all customer service industries.”


Technology Prospectus 2018 | 11





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