Ditching spreadsheets to automate your pricing and inventory updates with a Revenue Management System will save you time and money and even increase revenue.
Then there’s all that hard-to-aggregate commercial data from Sales, Marketing, and F&B that you know would be valuable—if you could just get your arms around it.
Commercial leaders’ number one challenge is assembling data from Revenue, Sales, and Marketing applications and making sense of it.
So what if you supercharged a revenue management system with a data aggregator that makes recommendations for strategic decisions?
Let’s find out.
What’s a Revenue Management System?
A hotel revenue management system (RMS) is an operational solution that optimizes pricing and inventory allocation to maximize revenue. An RMS analyzes large amounts of data to forecast demand and set room prices accordingly.
An RMS is designed to help the revenue management department make more informed decisions about pricing and inventory management. The goal is to sell the right room, at the right price, to the right customer at the right time.
For example, an RMS will recommend setting a higher price in times of high demand, such as during peak season or when large events are happening in the property’s destination; conversely, real-time market data also makes it possible for an RMS to recommend lower pricing during periods of low demand.
The Benefits of Using a Revenue Management System
Hotels using revenue management systems will experience many benefits, including:
- Strategic pricing: An RMS automates pricing strategies and decisions using real-time data to make data-based decisions.
- Saves time and improves operational efficiency: An RMS eliminates the time-consuming data analysis, calculations, and individual channel updates that make up much of a revenue manager’s daily tasks. It enables the revenue management team to focus more on strategy and interdepartmental planning.
What Is a Commercial Strategy Platform?
A commercial strategy platform (CSP) is a tool that holistically analyzes the customer’s willingness to pay and provides pricing recommendations for a hotel’s commercial teams — the revenue, sales, and marketing departments.
A CSPs data is accessible to each of the commercial teams, and the data is the same, which prevents data silos and facilitates collaboration.
With access to consistent, real-time data:
- Revenue managers can dynamically adjust room rates to match demand fluctuations and guests’ price sensitivity, maximizing bookings and revenue.
- Marketers can more effectively target promotions and ad campaigns to reach high-value customer segments, supporting the revenue management team’s efforts to maximize revenue opportunities.
- Sales receive pricing and distribution recommendations that enable them to achieve the optimal business mix to meet the hotel’s overall revenue goals and offer alternative dates for specific groups to balance the revenue impact of the various guest types.
In essence, a unified commercial strategy platform empowers all departments to make smarter, data-based decisions, reduce guesswork, improve operational efficiencies, and drive better collaboration and revenue outcomes across the commercial team.
The Benefits of Using a Commercial Strategy Platform
Like an RMS, a commercial strategy platform can synthesize property, demand, and market data to generate pricing strategy recommendations for your revenue management team.
A commercial strategy platform can provide actionable pricing and operational optimization insights to all your revenue-generation departments, including your revenue management, marketing and sales team.
These real-time recommendations empower your entire commercial team to make data-driven decisions that optimize performance. By replacing intuition with AI-enabled insights, hoteliers can shift from reactive to proactive commercial strategy development, propelling them to new levels of profitability.
Some of the key benefits of a commercial strategy platform include:
- Increased operational efficiency through collaboration: Using a commercial strategy platform, hoteliers will eliminate time-consuming meetings and data analysis report requests, as each team will have access to the same data, available in a variety of report formats and levels of granularity, through the same dashboard. The teams are no longer operating with competing goals or working in a system that introduces bias to the data, which significantly improves collaborative efforts and business outcomes.
- Provides recommendations to the entire commercial team: The actionable insights that a commercial strategy platform offers go far beyond the pricing suggestions; they also offer recommendations for the marketing and sales team, such as marketing promotions (including promotion type, price, and description), recommendations on business mix for the sales team, etc.
Selecting the Right Technology for Your Organization
An RMS is a good investment, especially if your property is currently only using Excel spreadsheets for your pricing updates, but implementing a commercial strategy platform is a GREAT investment because it provides all of the same functionality as an RMS, plus it provides data insights for the entire commercial team and enables inter-departmental collaboration.
Going forward, your hotel’s ongoing profitability largely depends on your revenue-generating teams working together to boost bookings and revenue. Using a commercial strategy platform, your revenue management, marketing, and sales teams will work from the same data, but each will have a personalized view that will enable the smartest, data-based decision-making and keep the entire commercial team working toward a common goal.
So, what are you waiting for?
To learn more about how LodgIQ’s Commercial Strategy Platform can maximize your property’s bookings, RevPAR, and overall profitability, email or phone us or book a meeting with one of our revenue generation experts.
