Revenue Management & Channel Opt

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.

20 months after the world first shut down due to COVID-19, the hospitality industry is looking for ways to continue their path to recovery. Traveler behavior has been unpredictable and hotel occupancy rates have fluctuated: emerging variants, changing government regulations, and inconsistent vaccine availability have all had their impact. But there is hope on the horizon. While we’ve yet to see 2019 levels, Expedia Group’s first-party data suggests that travelers are willing and eager to travel – whether it’s to see loved ones, business colleagues, or to simply satisfy their wanderlust.

What is the bedrock of great service? This is a question that any service provider should be well equipped to answer, but there is, perhaps, no industry more deeply rooted in the art of service than hospitality. Hotel and travel brands are, after all, in the business of experience; specifically, experience as a service, and today’s guest expects best-in-class service at every turn. So, let me ask you again, hoteliers: what is the bedrock of great guest service? The answer, if you ask me, is quite simple: technology.

During the height of the pandemic in 2020, casino hotels scrambled to adopt mobile check-in to protect their guests and staff, and adhere to social distancing guidelines. This big push towards mobile also led hoteliers to seek better tech solutions to improve other areas of the guest experience and hotel operations. Today, in the midst of a labor shortage and the pandemic’s uncertain end, casinos are doubling down on their tech initiatives, focusing investments in new technologies that will provide a more modern experience for guests, help improve operational efficiency and generate more revenue.

Are hotels making the most out of the technology they have? This is becoming a crucial question for leaders to ask as technology takes on a greater share of daily operations. Hotel property-management systems provide a vast array of capabilities, but it’s up to the technology provider to keep operators informed of what those capabilities are. Otherwise, operators could spend unnecessary time and money moving from one perfectly capable system to an unfamiliar and less effective one, costing them valuable time, capital, and resources for implementation and training, only to find they are no better off and in fact, regret making a change at all.

Perhaps you’ve heard about hotel benchmarking but are not quite sure where to start. How do you define a compset? What kind of metrics can you compare? How should you go about interpreting the results? We’re going to dig a little deeper into all of these points but first, let’s think about why benchmarking your hotel’s performance makes a lot of sense.

In March of 2020, as news of the COVID-19 pandemic swept across communities around the world, fear, and uncertainty spread at an equally alarming pace. Wherever we turned, we were inundated with the mention of “unprecedented times” and the “new normal.” We understood, even then, that the normawhich many of us owas no longer guaranteed. The light at the end of the tunnel was not yet visible, and, for many of us, this uncertainty was nearly paralyzing.

A dollar is a dollar; a euro is a euro; a quid is a quid; a yuan is a yuan; and, for the crypto crowd, a bitcoin is a bitcoin—right?

Expedia Group Media Solutions recently published the Travel Recovery Trend Report for Q3, which details many of the latest insights on the industry’s continued rebound from the pandemic, as identified in Expedia Group’s exclusive first-party data. Here, Richard Kocher, who leads Media Solutions’s data insights and planning team, gives his expert take on these latest findings and looks ahead into Q4 and beyond.

Guest expectations have evolved in recent years especially during the pandemic. The right technology – specifically, a Central Data Management (CDM) system built around a centralized guest profile – can enable hotels to meet these.