"don't compare me to your ex." revenue management has the same problem.

Ever been in a relationship where you suddenly get accused of doing something wrong, even though you haven't actually done anything wrong?

Perhaps you forgot to reply to a message. Perhaps you went out with friends. Perhaps you said something completely innocent and suddenly found yourself defending your entire personality. And then comes the explanation: "Well, my ex used to do exactly that." Ah, fantastic. So apparently I'm now being held accountable for the actions of some idiot I've never met.

The interesting thing is that your partner isn't necessarily reacting to what you've done. They're reacting to what happened the last time somebody did something similar. Their brain has recognized a familiar pattern, opened the historical database and decided it already knows how this story ends.

Welcome to human behaviour. And, rather conveniently, revenue management.

same action, different person, different outcome

Imagine your previous partner regularly disappeared for hours without responding to messages, and eventually you discovered they were cheating. Fast-forward to your next relationship. Your new partner doesn't reply for three hours because they're in meetings.

Same observable behaviour. Completely different underlying reason. Yet our brains love shortcuts. We recognize something familiar and assume the outcome will be familiar too. It's an efficient way to make decisions, but it can also make us spectacularly wrong.

Revenue managers do this constantly. Last year we dropped rates and occupancy increased. Therefore, dropping rates this year should increase occupancy again. Last time we closed an OTA promotion, production declined. Therefore, we should never close that promotion. Last time a competitor undercut us, we lost market share. Therefore, whenever they reduce rates, we should follow.

We take historical relationships between actions and outcomes and quietly turn them into universal rules. Except last year's customer isn't necessarily this year's customer. Demand might be different. Your distribution might have changed. Competitors might have changed. Even the same customer might behave differently because their circumstances have changed.

History gives us evidence. It doesn't give us permission to stop thinking.

then comes the chameleon

There's another equally entertaining relationship problem. Somebody has been hurt before, so in their next relationship they become a completely different person. They start adapting to everything their partner says or does because they're terrified of repeating the previous experience.

Don't like that restaurant? Neither do I. Prefer staying home? Me too. Want to go out? Absolutely. Changed your mind? Funny enough, so have I. Eventually, nobody knows what this person actually wants anymore. They've become so busy avoiding rejection that they've forgotten their own personality.

And that's exactly what some hotels do with their commercial strategy: Competitor drops rates? We drop. Pickup slows? We discount. Owner gets nervous? We launch a promotion. Competitor increases rates? Brilliant, let's increase ours. Forecast changes? Time to rethink everything.

We're constantly adapting, which sounds wonderfully sophisticated until you realize we no longer have a strategy of our own.

We're just a commercial chameleon, changing colours depending on whoever happens to be standing next to us.

context isn't the same as baggage

Now, don't get me wrong. Previous experiences matter enormously. If somebody has repeatedly demonstrated a certain behaviour, ignoring that history would be rather stupid. The same applies to revenue management. We absolutely should understand what happened before, which decisions worked, which failed and what we learned.

But there's a difference between using history as context and allowing history to dictate every future decision.

A strong revenue manager should be able to say: "Last time we tried this, the outcome was poor. Here's why we believe it happened, here's what's different today, and here's why the same action might produce a different result." Or equally: "Last time this worked brilliantly, but the conditions that made it work no longer exist."

That's a much more valuable conversation than blindly repeating something because it worked once or refusing to try it because it failed once.

stop dating your historical data

I think this becomes particularly important as AI takes a bigger role in revenue management. AI is brilliant at recognizing patterns. Give it years of booking behaviour, pricing decisions, competitor movements and outcomes, and it can identify relationships that humans might never notice.

But historical patterns aren't guarantees of future behaviour. If we train systems to repeat what previously worked without understanding the circumstances, we risk turning yesterday's assumptions into tomorrow's automated mistakes. And if we respond by constantly adjusting to every new signal, we simply create a much faster version of the commercial chameleon.

The skill is knowing which historical lessons remain relevant, which assumptions deserve challenging and which parts of your strategy should remain stable despite short-term discomfort.

give the new relationship a chance

Perhaps the most important lesson from relationships is that the next person deserves to be judged on who they are, rather than who hurt you before. Revenue management deserves the same courtesy.

A new demand period deserves its own assessment. A new customer segment deserves its own understanding. A new pricing strategy deserves a fair opportunity to work before we panic because something vaguely resembles a previous failure.

We should absolutely bring our experience into every decision. But experience should make us better at asking questions, not more confident that we already know the answers. Because if you spend your entire relationship comparing your partner to your ex, eventually you might destroy something good while trying to protect yourself from something that happened years ago.

And if you spend your entire revenue management career reacting to what happened last year, you might never discover what could have worked this year.

Learn from your ex. Just stop making everyone else pay for their mistakes.

Love, Fabi