Technological Breakdown Drives Evolution in Hotel Revenue Management
Automated Systems Weren't Prepared for the Pandemic, So Hoteliers Adapted
The modern hotel industry had never coped with a demand shock to the level of the COVID-19 pandemic, and similarly the automated revenue-management systems increasingly deployed across the industry had no frame of reference.
That's why, according to experts speaking at the 2022 International Hospitality Investment Forum, revenue managers had to go back to basics and evolve their thinking through the course of the pandemic.
Speaking during the "Evolution of Revenue Management" session, Konstantinos Santikos, managing director for the Santikos Collection, said those automated systems became "completely irrelevant early in the pandemic."
"We had to go back to using Excel, basically, which is sad," he said.
Joe Pettigrew, chief commercial officer for hotel asset management at Starwood Capital, said revenue-management systems are "built with a steady-state environment in mind."
"The system needs to look at the past to predict the future. That's the whole purpose of their existence," he said.
When past patterns become completely decoupled from future demand, revenue managers had to relearn how to be entrepreneurial, he added.