On this instalment of our ‘Ask The Experts’ series, we were fortunate enough to sit down with Director of Master’s at Les Roches Global Hospitality and all-round hospitality/revenue management guru, Scott Dahl.
With a long history in revenue management as well as academia, we decided to pick Scott’s brains on the type of hospitality technology he would recommend small hotels investing in. Whilst Scott recommended some key players such as a Property Management System (PMS) and a channel manager, he took a keen focus on suitable decision-making technology. For example, revenue management software like ours here at RoomPriceGenie can help you automate your daily pricing tasks without requiring an increase in manpower to run it. It can offer you support in tough decision-making processes such as dynamic pricing without adding to your list of jobs! In fact, Scott was such a fan of the work being done at RoomPriceGenie, he’s joined our board of directors.
Find out more about what Scott had to say on the matter by watching the video below. If you’d like more information on RoomPriceGenie and how we can help your business, contact one of our team of experts today.
RPG: What technology would you recommend investing in as a small hotel?
SD: Clearly you have to have a property management system, in my opinion. I think that any hotel that is trying to do that with paper at this point…I don’t think there’s a return on investment people-wise. I think a property management system is the way to go. There are cloud-based ones that are quite affordable – so I would say that first.
Obviously some form of distribution technology. Clearly, you need to be able to get your product to the electronic channels. Without some sort of channel management system, it is impossible to do that. So clearly some kind of distribution technology.
And finally, some decision-making technology. Some type of assistance in the revenue management effort. And that really is going to be governed by the amount of resources you have to manage the hotel and manage those resources. But even in an operation that can’t really afford to take on a whole lot more responsibility or if there is going to be additional processes, you are also going to have to augment the manpower to manage those processes, there are products like RoomPriceGenie, for example, that do not increase the amount of workload yet do provide decision-making support.
