For some hotels, summer is high season, and no manager would dream of taking a vacation at the height of, well, vacation season. For other hotel markets, though, summer is slow season, and there’s plenty of personnel taking personal days and a few weeks’ holiday while the weather’s warm (as it’s often the only time that they can get off!).
Whenever key managers take a vacation- in the winter, summer, or scattered throughout the year- the temporary abandonment of certain positions can tax a hotel. There is perhaps no position for which this is more true than that of revenue manager. As we’ve mentioned before in this space, the revenue manager’s job is never done. Maximizing revenue per available room is a 24 hour, 365 day a year task, and requires an almost superhuman vigilance. Monitoring competitor’s rates, making the proper adjustments, managing multiple sales channels, and distributing inventory effectively are high-touch, time consuming processes, and for many hotels require a hands-on approach.
So when the revenue manager is on vacation (or out sick, or in a day of meetings, or away at seminars or conferences), what’s an owner or GM to do?
Of course, this is something that virtually all hotels already have figured out. There are assistant revenue managers and other trained staff ready and entirely capable of stepping in; no hotel would be caught without some contingency for an event as predictable as a revenue manager’s vacation.
But with summertime here and vacations on everyone’s mind, it’s a good time to look at just how indispensible a good revenue manager is, and how their job would be augmented by the appropriate revenue management system. The idea of a hotel owner or GM being left helpless by the absence of a single manager may be ridiculous, but the reality is that the various tasks facing revenue managers in an effort to optimize room rates and RevPAR can indeed be daunting. In fact, to achieve the best possible results in terms of RevPAR, revenue managers need cutting edge technological help- and that’s when they aren’t on vacation.
Today, because conditions of room sales fluctuate more wildly and more often than ever before, revenue managers must perform more ‘maintenance’ tasks than in previous generations. In order to maintain a high occupancy rate and a healthy ADR, a revenue manager must monitor hundreds of online sales channels, determine which rate is attracting the most demand, reconcile that with in-house and GDS-generated reservations, adjust that rate, allocate inventory to the channel, and communicate this information across the various operating departments within the hotel. This would be a lot to do on any summer day, and yet these tasks, to get the best results, must be performed continuously.
In fact, to maximize RevPAR, this process must be repeated as often as possible, down to the minute. This is beyond the capacity of even the most talented revenue managers, who, though capable and competent, still must sleep, eat, and take the occasional vacation. The pursuit of rate optimization, really only attainable through a comprehensive revenue management system, takes the revenue manager or revenue management team away from the more productive initiatives they might otherwise undertake. The physical and time-consuming actions of consulting a rate generator (or worse, historical tables), manually manipulating rates in any or all of the online travel agency websites where the hotel might have room inventory available, and updating the property management system rob a revenue management team of the opportunity to work with sales and marketing to develop new guest pipelines, or consult work across hotel departments on new sales-boosting initiatives.
These strategic and business development duties are as important as obtaining the right rate on each and every online transaction. Strategic planning isn’t something that can be automated or outsourced; only revenue managers can do it. Releasing revenue managers from the tedium of pricing minutia and allowing them not to just take a vacation, but to focus their energies where they can make the most impact is and should be a high priority for all hotels. The best way for hotels to meet this priority is to embrace automation, and bring in a comprehensive revenue management system to augment and assist the revenue management staff.
A good RMS system keeps an unblinking, unsleeping eye on reservation limits, OTA allotments, rates-to-bookings ratios, and even subtler changes in the intricate, 24-hour supply and demand cycle. It is integral to maintaining the level of vigilance necessary to achieve maximum RevPAR, and can create a positive multiplier effect by freeing revenue management personnel to develop more revenue-generating ideas and initiatives.
No one would suggest that a single system would enable a hotel owner or general manager to send their revenue management departments on a permanent vacation. But having a system in place that can handle the day-to-day aspects of revenue management- the time-consuming minutia that revenue managers ought not be saddled with to begin with, can help a hotel maintain its revenue stream even when key personnel are vacationing, or performing more constructive, forward-planning tasks.
By setting up the system in advance, your vacationing revenue manager can set up all of the parameters for the pricing adjustments during his/her vacation. Advanced systems can also send updates to the RM to their PDA or smartphone as often as they want to check the numbers. A high-tech system like that will make a revenue manager’s vacation much more relaxing, knowing that their RMS is still hard at work while they are enjoying some much needed time off.
By Jean Francois Mourier, CEO of REVPAR GURU