Finance

Obviously a blessing. In hospitality, we are with one foot in legacy and one foot into the future. We need more exponential technology development to liberate team members from mundane, repetitive, and 0 value add tasks. We should have been further away already.

Its a double edged sword. Community driven can lead to building everything for noone. My viewpoint, and having my own technology company, is that you need to solve an issue at hand. Sort the issue and then you can gather user feedback to make it more efficient - ie less clicks to get to the result, different colors, visualisations, etc.

Technology, such as attribute based selling (upselling) has been talked about for many years, software companies have tried and optimized it for real release for a considerable amount of time, minimizing the user "optimization" afterwards.

Making Attribute-based Selling (ABS) and upselling a reality! Is mine and ROOMDEX's 2023 resolution! Attribute-based Selling (ABS) re-imagines hotel inventory merchandising in order to improve guest satisfaction and generate greater hotel revenue.

Challenging to predict given the current VUCA environment, but since "we've come to play" typing here, I would say 2023 will show a more thoughtful European customer, looking more into the rates and offers, and not as splendid as they were in 2022, when they blew the savings of two years of no travelling.

I believe that if we don't figure out how to utilize ChatGPT AI in our workflows for revenue and profit optimization in 2023 - we will have wasted a year.

I am of the opinion that guests (and groups) should be able to book the hotel on their preferred channel. As it is mentioned in the intro, apparently OTAs already enable group bookings in some way, of course one can blame the OTA for this, but the fact that it is happening clearly shows there is demand from guests and groups to book via an OTA, most likely because it is easier.

This does not surprise me to see this trend. It could be an indication of one of two things. One, they percieve that the best deal to be had is through the OTA site. Secondly, the convenience factor of booking and managing without having to speak to anyone and deal with deposits, cut-offs, etc.

The answer is simple: only if it generates incremental revenues. What's not simple is differentiating between incremental and displaced. The Revenue Management discipline in our industry hasn't yet evolved to the point that would allow to find reliable ways to calculate those.

How do you avoid the fine line between data-driven decision making and analysis paralysis? Don't ask humans to make that decision. Rely on ML algorithms that have developed to the point that allows us to answer this question intelligently and objectively.

The purpose of gathering and analyzing information is to produce a strategic course of action which changes or improves our desired outcome. Our goal is to reduce the time between data gathering and formulating and implementing actionable outcomes, or what I refer to as analytics efficiency.

There is no fine line. There is just misconception. We have been drilled as an industry to see data analytics as this art that we are too "dumb" to understand as a user. Therefore the industry was driven by BI and Revenue vendors with even bigger dashboards, even more details "because without it you cannot live".

A positive Guest experience is driving and maximizing revenue. Without it you are punching above your weight and possibly get knocked out faster than you can imagine. We will only know if our price is right once the customer sits back at home reflecting on the experience they had.

Today's typical online travel consumer - your past, current and future hotel guest - is exposed to more than 250,000 digital micro-moments a year: from social media interactions to messaging and quick read of the headlines on their smartphones (Google Research).

The evolution of Revenue Strategy as science more than art has certainly created further division between the needs of our owners and the needs of our customers. However, at the heart of each hotel strategy is the Long Term Value (LTV) of a customer which we now need to protect and defend at all costs.