A common challenge for hotels is having too many cooks in the revenue management kitchen. A revenue manager may leave a strategy meeting confident they’re on the same page as the other departments but find out later that someone changed plans and it ended up negatively impacting the company’s profits. In other words, the strategy was not a recipe for revenue success.
Fortunately, automated revenue management helps hoteliers save time, create consistencies, and benefit the bottom line.
Benefits of using automated pricing in hotels
While the practice of revenue management is not a new concept, the technology behind it is ever-improving, with software progression making it affordable for hotels of all sizes. Whether it’s a small- to mid-sized hotel or a global hotel chain, revenue management software is now widely spread throughout properties around the world.
It is due to these technological advancements that revenue management systems can send pricing and inventory decisions to other selling systems, such as property management or central reservations systems. Simply put automation serves as a sort of binding agent between a solid revenue management strategy and its deployment, with the integration between each system acting as quality control to reduce human errors and ensure consistency.
Automation also bolsters work productivity by using an automated pricing technology in the hotel you significantly reduce the time and energy spent manually collecting, entering, analyzing, and reporting market data. Revenue managers are no longer the only ones able to understand and interact with RM, many modern hoteliers can utilize their revenue management system as their central strategy hub, deploying changes and decisions to their selling systems both routinely and immediately. This frees up more time to focus on revenue strategies and additional work responsibilities, of which there are plenty.
Effectively managing rate distribution also has a heavy reliance on automation, as it streamlines rate deployment across all channels. Manually adjusting rates on multiple channels – potentially multiple times a day – used to be a challenging part of a revenue manager’s role, but advancements in today’s technology have made channel management far easier to manage.
This is also a benefit in evaluating your overall distribution strategy. There are often acquisition costs with third-party sites, with opportunities to strategize different ways to shift from more expensive channels to direct channels that cost you less money. Blending automation and a cohesive distribution strategy allow hoteliers to better control their business – and ultimately drive higher revenues. The role of the traditional revenue manager is extinct; long live automated revenue management.
Wyatt Niblett-Wilson, Marketing Coordinator – Pricepoint