5 Revenue Wins for 2024

Win #1: Understanding Your Property and Market Dynamics

This first win emphasises the critical need for in-depth analytics in establishing successful revenue management strategies to ensure that a hotel’s pricing adapts to changing demand patterns. A comprehensive understanding of the property’s uniqueness and the shifting market dynamics allows hotels to prioritise their value proposition over price, reducing vulnerability to price-sensitive buyers.

In the past few years since the COVID pandemic ended, the hospitality industry experienced some very difficult challenges, including inflation, rising utility costs, increased travel expenses and evolving traveller demands – all of which must be incorporated into a hotel’s revenue management strategy to be successful.

For example, a property with over 200 apartments initially adopted a conservative approach, keeping half its inventory as long-term rentals and pricing short-term bookings very low to maintain high occupancies. With the support of RoomPriceGenie, the property began to analyse its performance at various levels, segment clients based on the purpose of visit and make more informed business decisions. This analysis led to a realisation of the property’s true potential, prompting the implementation of dynamic pricing and a focus on more profitable short stays. As a result of implementing RoomPriceGenie, the property experienced a significant 30% increase in revenue within the first two months compared to the same period in the previous year.

Next Steps: Start by undertaking a SWOT analysis of your property (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats) to establish an internal and external understanding of your property’s current situation. This will illustrate your hotel’s key USPs, your ideal target guest and what they are looking for in their next stay. You’ll also better understand how your competitors are pricing their rooms, which gives you an advantage; use this information to determine how to increase the value offered to potential guests to increase your bookings without undercutting your price point to match the competition’s.

Win #2: Timing is Everything

Hotel demand is dynamic and is regularly affected by many external factors, including the day of the week, holidays, local events and even weather conditions. These factors will influence the overall demand within your destination and the lead time of the booking (a.k.a. how far in advance your guests want to book their hotel in advance of their stay). When you better understand your guests’ booking behaviour, you will optimise your performance, as you can update your pricing in real time according to the accurate demand.

Next Steps: Understanding lead-time demand is crucial, as it allows hotels to optimise performance based on overall demand and maximise revenue opportunities; by waiting until the last minute to adjust rates, hotels will likely end up leaving money on the table.

Win #3: Inventory Control to Maximize Revenue

This win focuses on the importance of inventory control in maximising revenue. What does this mean? Having the right inventory (i.e., room type) available at the right time and set at the optimal price is paramount for a hotel’s ongoing financial success.

Next Steps: Implementing strategies such as Minimum Length of Stay (MLOS), analyzing stay patterns, and using yielding tags and upselling techniques can aid in effective inventory control. Understanding total capacity and adjusting product availability accordingly allows hoteliers to optimize revenue.

Win #4: Automation is Key

Overall, this win focuses on the importance of automating as many operational processes within your property as possible to eliminate time-consuming manual processes; however, revenue management is one operational area where automation will have the most significant ROI.

Historically, revenue management has relied on past data to anticipate future demand. Post-COVID, it became necessary for hoteliers to embrace forward-looking market demand data, as historical data was no longer accurate or useful – and the best way to leverage forward-looking data is using an automated pricing solution.

Hotel Seestern, in Timmendorfer Strand, Germany, leveraged the power of automation to track competitors’ rates and local events more effectively. Previously, the GM had to manually looking up his competitors’ rates and track local events; now, using RoomPriceGenie, he can get all of that information from one dashboard, see the solution’s suggested pricing and make the final decision as to whether he wants to tweak it or leave it alone to do what the solution does best: more accurately price your property’s rooms based on forward-looking demand. By embracing automation, using RoomPriceGenie, the hotel’s GM saved a significant amount of time, improved his operational efficiency and was able to secure more bookings and revenue.

Next Steps: The easiest way to get started is to use comparison sites, such as HotelTechReport, to find out which automated pricing solution would be the best choice for you, based on your specific needs and hotel type. (RoomPriceGenie would be a good place to start! *wink*) Schedule a demo and get started right away. The earlier you start automating your pricing, the more revenue you can make.

Win #5: Your Guests Will Book

One of hoteliers’ most common fears is that changing their prices will result in their property losing bookings, but this is a myth. The truth is that consumers understand supply and demand, so they expect hotel rooms (or flights, train tickets, etc.) will cost more during peak periods. As such, if your property isn’t updating your room rates according to actual demand data, you will be leaving money on the table. Yes, by keeping your prices low, you might have gotten the booking anyway, but if you are using dynamic pricing, you would still have gotten the booking AND your RevPAR would have been much higher. Win/win, right?!

Here’s an example: Hotel Quellenhof in Bad Urach, Germany, went from 69€ for a double room (including breakfast) to 104€ for a double room, excluding breakfast in less than 2 years. The hotel projected a decrease in occupancy of 45%, as well as an increase in negative reviews, but neither issue became a problem.

Next Steps: Implementing dynamic pricing can be achieved through PMS or Channel Management solutions, enabling revenue managers to make timely adjustments to their inventory and pricing according to changes in market demand.

Alternatively, hotels can choose to implement an automated pricing solution (like RoomPriceGenie!), which will ensure that you have the best room rates possible, to ensure the highest occupancy and RevPAR, every single day of the year, without you having to lift a finger.

RoomPriceGenie’s automated pricing solution was designed with the specific needs of smaller, independent properties and BnBs in mind. As such, it’s not just easy to set up; it’s intuitive, user-friendly, and backed by a stellar customer support team who will guide you on your revenue journey. And here’s the best part: many of our hotel clients increase their revenue by 22%, while cutting back on time-consuming manual tasks.

Don’t take our word for it; more than 1,600 hotels worldwide are already using RoomPriceGenie to maximise their bookings and revenue. Will you join them?

Find out more or book your risk-free, 14-day trial of our automated pricing solution by visiting us online.