REVENUE Management BY: Neal Fegan ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// & 1 . 2 . 114 Fall 2017 RMS PROVIDERS, PICK UP YOUR GAME EMAIL TEXT SCRAPING This technology is used in many systems. I can email my receipts to my free accounting software system (Wave apps) and it mines the text and logs it. I can also email my travel email confirmations to my free travel software (TripIt) to mine the text and create a travel itinerary for me, combining air, hotel and car rental into a single itinerary. HOW COULD IT BE USED IN A RMS? Allow sales to email leads to a set address that analyzes it in the RMS and generates an email answer back to the seller. Sellers don’t have to be trained on a new system, as they all know how to use email, and it removes the complaint that group displacements take too much time to run. We all know the ideal is that all group leads go through your RMS for evaluation. Can you honestly say that your hotels are doing this? A general manager (GM) could email a report request and the system could respond by delivering that report back to his/ her email. This takes a burden off the director of revenue management (DRM), gets the GM the answer more quickly, and engages the GM in the use of the RMS. Win, win, win! ENGAGE! OVER RECENT YEARS the revenue management system (RMS) providers in the hotel industry have been feverishly working to improve their systems by focusing on the fore-casting and optimization of those systems. We’ve seen advances in price elasticity models, forecast performance and optimization at the room class level. When you run these advancements through sophisticated simulations they show significant revenue growth versus previous models because quite honestly, the algorithms have gotten better. What hasn’t gotten better at the same pace is the user engagement with these systems, and therein lies the biggest oversight in these latest enhancements. The RMS user base has grown accustomed to advancements in other software systems that have left the RMS providers in the dust. Here’s a list of some ideas that would increase the user engagement with revenue management systems, thus increasing hotel revenue: BLOW-UP OF THUMBNAILS You’ve been to many websites that have this now, like how Amazon will zoom into photos when you hover over the product thumbnail. There are also browser extensions, like Hover Zoom for Chrome, that will do this for you. HOW COULD IT BE USED IN A RMS? Think about reports, and how frustrating it is to try and remember what is included in a report when you are running through the list and descriptions in the RMS. Now imagine being able to hover over a link to a report and seeing an example output of that report without needing to click through, enter fields of data, and then run it to find out it wasn’t what you were looking for. Not only would this be a time saver, but think about the underutilized reports that have great insights, but staff don’t use them because they forgot about their value from their initial training. 3 . SEARCHABLE NOTE DATA WITH PHOTO-TO-TEXT ABILITY Evernote is the biggest player here and it has been in wide use since 2011. You can take notes as well as take photographs of text and handwriting that gets converted to text. All of this is then searchable so you can remember key items from the past. HOW COULD IT BE USED IN A RMS? It can be used to keep track of revenue meeting minutes and decisions. Many hotels use whiteboards to keep track of tactics and could take photos of these in the meeting room to save time on converting them to notes. Integrating this within the RMS, instead of using a third party like Evernote, would allow the users to keep track of their notes and RMS forecasts and decisions in a single place, making a search for answers much quicker and more efficient. This would also help with employee turnover as the DRM’s notes from Evernote are not likely to be accessible from the incoming DRM. HOSPITALITY UPGRADE www.hospitalityupgrade.com