Recently the question has been asked at events, in social media posts and industry articles if revenue management is stuck in a rut. The authors assert that revenue management has not really advanced in the last 10 years and revenue managers are not doing anything differently than in the past. What is your opinion of the state of revenue management in 2020?

Laura Calin
Laura Calin
VP, Strategy and Solutions Management at Oracle Hospitality

The desire to innovate, increase collaboration across departments, and create new revenue streams that maximize profits beyond just traditional room rates has always existed. However, the volume of data to manage and track additional attributes has increased exponentially, and with it, the need to process it even faster to present the right products to the right customer across all distribution points. Although technologies such as AI are becoming more available for the task, the struggle facing hoteliers is that revenue management processes and talent are lagging behind. They need to seriously invest in recruitment, training, and retention of key talent in this area, helping to focus on the big picture vs. just tactical execution.

To address this need, we are seeing professors around the world – at the most renowned universities for revenue management – pivot from teaching traditional revenue management disciplines of manual data analysis and decision making to teaching students how to become “revenue strategists.” Rather than concentrating solely on data entry and calculations, a revenue strategist's job will be to evaluate the overall, revenue-optimization opportunities as an interdisciplinary role. 

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