Airlines, hotels, and car rental agencies use revenue management to vary prices and other terms of sale in response to changing customer demand. It’s a critical business practice that can lead to big profits.

A good revenue management system automatically calculates and suggests rate pricing automatically using data, assumptions, and forecasts. Here are some key features to look for in an RMS:

Optimal Pricing

A revenue management system can help you determine the best price to charge for your products. This is done by forecasting, optimizing, and leveraging data from other sources.

For example, the Survey is a valuable tool that helps you understand your customers’ reactions to price changes. It also lets you identify the price points critical to your target market. This way, you can set prices that are higher than the cost of production and lower than competitors’ prices without losing customers.

An RMS combines historical and futuristic data to make automated forecasts about your budget and revenue. It will use data from various sources, including your booking engine and website, to make predictions. It can also provide insights and recommendations for each channel, segment, and room type. This lets you quickly respond to changing demand and market conditions, leading to higher profits and a competitive edge.

Most RMS tools are cloud-based, ensuring your team gets the latest and most accurate information. This will reduce the likelihood of incorrect calculations and improve your period-end close processes. This will free up your revenue team’s time to focus on strategic operations. A good RMS tool will also have intelligent reporting capabilities, making building, sharing, and exporting critical reports easy.

Identifying Upsell Opportunities

A hotel revenue management system does more than help you determine the right price. It also enables you to identify opportunities to increase your revenue with products or services that improve your customer experience or add value for your customers. This is especially important for businesses with inelastic supply and high fixed costs, such as airlines, hotels, golf courses, and car rental agencies.

Revenue management tools are built to help you make these decisions by predicting demand, analyzing data, and automating the process. They consider dozens of different factors to make predictions that can be used to make pricing and forecasting decisions.

This allows you to capture more room nights and higher RevPAR while reducing expenses. Additionally, many top tools are now cloud-based, allowing you to access and update your data anytime from anywhere across devices.

The most effective RMS tools are designed to empower your team with intuitive and powerful features that are easy to use. They should allow you to create, share, and export critical reports that save your team time and effort while delivering valuable insights. These tools should also include a user-friendly interface so everyone in your business can easily understand the data they’re looking at. They should be accessible on any device and compatible with other hotel technology systems.

Optimizing Inventory Management

An important aspect of revenue management is optimizing inventory to ensure that the right products are in stock at the right time. This helps prevent overstocking and understocking, which can reduce profits and lead to bad customer experience, a significant barrier to long-term growth.

An inventory manager can use an intelligent software solution to analyze historical and futuristic data to provide insights on demand across all channels and room types. This allows them to anticipate the future better and make more effective planning decisions.

For example, a hotel can leverage revenue management techniques like ABC analysis to determine the most popular and least popular items for each location and channel. By doing this, hotels can minimize their inventory and optimize their purchasing and production processes.

This also enables them to maximize profit margins and improve overall business performance by only carrying inventory that sells. In addition, it prevents stockouts, which can cause customers to walk away and may negatively affect customer loyalty.

In addition, a revenue management system can help to identify upsell opportunities that can generate additional revenue. For example, a hotel can offer guests the ability to upgrade their rooms or purchase amenities they will use during their stay. This boosts guest satisfaction, increases loyalty, and leads to more referrals.

Identifying Key Performance Indicators

Whether your business is in professional services, software, or physical goods, it’s crucial to find KPIs and metrics that work for you. Sophisticated analytics is excellent, but bells and whistles can be distracting if they don’t fit your goals and capabilities. The same is true for a revenue management system (RMS). While the principles are similar, an RMS is designed to help businesses in different industries, and choosing one that aligns with your industry’s specific needs is essential.

It’s easy to focus on short-term considerations when developing and executing revenue management strategies. After all, hard metrics that must be responded to quickly are coming in daily. However, it’s also important to consider long-term concerns that may override the urge to maximize revenue in a particular week. For example, if your business sells a luxury product, you might worry that pricing too low could damage the brand’s reputation in the future.

In this case, an RMS can help you identify and understand your performance through several measures. Most RMS platforms provide data visualization tools that allow you to track and analyze key performance indicators over different periods. In addition, many platforms will allow you to view competitors’ rates easily and use them as guideposts for pricing decisions.