Intelligent Hotel Revenue Management – 3 Reasons Why Automation is Your Friend

The world is speeding up, with technology setting the pace for entire industries. This is true of the hotels space, with an emphasis on building long term relationships with guests by implementing relevant offerings that take personalization to the next level. As an integral pillar to strategy, revenue management helps create clarity to to maximize resources that contribute to profitability. That means accounting for incoming data in volumes greater than those in any other era of the industry.

Modern revenue management incorporates automated functionality to help industry leaders better account for the expansion of collected data, with recommendations on how to act on it. In this, intelligent hotel revenue management and human leadership are not mutually exclusive. Technology does not replace management expertise. In fact, they are complementary factors that help hotel groups gain insight, clarity, and competitive traction. To support that, here are 3 reasons that automation is a hotel revenue manager’s friend.

Reason 1: Automation helps you better account for huge data volumes

With an explosion of available information that it is now possible for organizations to track, the sheer volume of that data is unprecedented. The global upward spike of collected data in all sectors with 1.145 trillion MB of data created every day indicates that efficient data collection and analysis is essential to gaining competitive insight and traction in any industry. The data we’re talking about in the hotel industry is both internal and external, with various dynamic factors connected to historical guest information, competitive set profiles, transactional information that touches on time of day, seasonality, geography, world events, and so many others.

These streams are coming in all at once in real time 24/7/365. To expect human beings to track it all and then create actionable and relevant forecasting around it would be unrealistic. Luckily, it’s also unnecessary thanks to automation. With intelligent hotel revenue management software solutions, algorithms keep track of multiple data points simultaneously as they are collected. They adjust as needed to capture granular details that help to sharpen forecasting.

Reason 2: Automation enables a faster pace

Along with greater volumes of data, the pace to get a strategy to market has also increased. As much as it’s unreasonable to expect human beings to keep track of the myriad of factors and volumes that affect a competitive outcome, the same is true for the speed at which strategies must be implemented to win business. In this, automated functionality in hotel revenue management software is like a car on the highway rather than running on the sidewalk.

Because automation works while you sleep and adjusts according to up to the minute data collection, revenue managers and strategists are able to act faster. It also means that forecasting and reporting are more relevant in the moment for teams. It’s easier to determine long-term strategies for new sources of revenue and find ways to account for the return of once-dormant business segments, too. The faster you can get there, the better. Intelligent hotel revenue management is the vehicle for doing it.

Reason 3: Automation lets you focus on strategy and execution

With everything said so far, the misconception that automated technology somehow makes hotel RM specialists and their teams redundant becomes a fallacy. But as we’ve explored here, the relationship between human expertise and dynamic technology is complementary, not exclusionary. In addition to how much easier it is to account for an expanded spectrum of data points and the increased speed needed to turn it into action, your strategic view and the ability to make decisions appropriate to the newest information is enabled and accelerated by automation.

This means that making the right decision is less about finding the right path, and more about acting in a faster and more gainful manner as the software reveals that path for you. Having the technology do the work of collecting data and creating recommendations helps determine repeatable trends on that granular level. It gives you visibility on the best performing aspects of your business, which means that you can focus and act on the result of the analysis instead of spending too much time unravelling the data that produced it.

An emphasis on action

Today’s hotel industry is driven by data, available in greater volumes than ever before. Automation and intelligent hotel revenue management is a primary engine to empower specialists and their teams to make sense of it. It helps to enable data-led decision-making so RM teams can implement measurable strategies much faster – competitive pricing, upsell tactics, guest engagement via special offers, and others – that materially add to the bottom line.

Intelligent revenue management functionality is not designed to replace human expertise. It is developed to help experts focus their insights without the busywork of trying to find the right thread in the massive amount of data that affects the quality of a forecast. With that, the mission to create great guest experiences and to encourage greater long-term relationships and value between hotel group and guest becomes even clearer.

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Interested in learning more about how a modern and intelligent hotel revenue management software solution can lead to more competitive strategy?

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