The global hospitality industry has been through every perceivable calamity over the past decades: earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, major floods, terrorist attracts like 9/11, SARS, global recessions, epidemics and pandemics like SARS, MERSA, ZIKA, swine flu and now COVID-19.
After each crisis the industry came roaring back and I believe it will recover very quickly after the current COVID-19 crisis and prosper like never before.
Naturally, each region and destination has had and will have its own decline and rebound curves as far as hotel occupancy, ADRs and RevPARs are concerned. Recovery post COVID-19 will also be unique to each region, destination and property and will greatly depend on a) the underlying economic conditions in each region and destination, b) the preparedness of each property for the post-crisis period, and c) the lingering impact of short term tactics employed in each market during the crisis.
This down time of low hotel occupancies or property closures is the perfect time for POST-CRISIS planning, revenue optimization action plan development, product and marketing campaign ideations.
The question to the Revenue Management community is, which specific action-items SHOULD be included in a hotelier's Post-Crisis Top Three Revenue Management Action Plan? In addition, please suggest one creative, OUTSIDE-THE BOX idea... something we may not have seen yet in revenue management. Just an idea... big or small.
Linda Gulrajani VP of Revenue Strategy at Marcus Hotels and Resorts
As we know, every day has changed the way we think about tomorrow so my top 3 will probably change multiple times as we continue to evolve and start to come out of this., but today here are my top three action items for myself and my team.
First, we need data. We need to start tracking new bookings by channel and segment compared to last year so we can determine when to start opening up hotels and when to start spend marketing dollars again.
Second, we need to use that data to determine what channels we invest our marketing dollars in to get our message in front of the people who are traveling. We need to throw away our old marketing plans and focus on the segments and channels that are actually traveling. We may find that this is a totally new segment of traveler for our hotels.
Third, we need to maintain rate integrity and capture direct bookings vs. being reliant on the OTAs. It's OK to come up with some creative, fenced discounted offers, but let's market them to the right audience and only allow them to book direct.
I'm not sure I'm ready to talk about outside-the-box ideas yet, but what i do know is that things will not be the same and we need to start thinking differently.
It is no longer news that the hotel industry has suffered the worst decline in history. The resulting business failures are starting to make the news and most industry experts agree that it will be several years until the industry returns to anywhere near the health it had in 2019.
By the end of 2019, many of the thought leaders in revenue management had begun echoing a common theme, basically that the Revenue Management discipline was stuck in a rut. Industry-wide, Total Hotel Revenue Management was starting the become a joke.
The global hospitality industry has been through every perceivable calamity over the past decades: earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, major floods, terrorist attracts like 9/11, SARS, global recessions, epidemics and pandemics like SARS, MERSA, ZIKA, swine flu and now COVID-19.
Robert Cross, the de facto Godfather of Revenue Management, stated "…everything starts with a day by day, segment by segment forecast", yet many hoteliers no longer produce one as part of their strategic process.
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.
