COVID has hit the global hotel industry hard. But as with every crisis, new opportunities surface. During the financial crisis of 2008/09, we saw Airbnb and Uber emerge.

Many revenue-generating ideas were born over the past year. From staycation and workation to renting out equipment and even offering outsourced services like housekeeping. Hoteliers have been creative in finding ways to keeping their business afloat.

What was born out of a need for survival might lead to a more permanent shift in a hotel's business model.

The idea of non-room revenue is nothing new and even pre-pandemic was something more and more hotels embraced. F&B or MICE revenue management is still in its infancy for the overall industry but terms like Total RevPAR have evolved from buzzword to serious KPI.

Is now the time to look at non-room, ancillary revenue? Where are the opportunities?

Annemarie Gubanski
Annemarie Gubanski
Founder and CEO at Taktikon Consultancy

It will be leisure guests that will be the main revenue drivers, are willing to spend more On Site, this means that we have an excellent opportunity to increase revenue from non-room departments such as restaurant, spa, activities, etc. There are a few challenges to tackle, though.

1. Knowledge - Applying Revenue Management differs from department to department. Revenue Managers need to learn to apply different types of Revenue Management and will have to be aware that they will be communicating their strategies with departments that never have worked with Revenue Management before. 

2. Statistics - No Revenue Management without statistics, and we need to have clean data to understand our full potential. This means again a bit of education towards the staff as they will need to understand the importance of how they insert the data in the systems. And that brings us automatically to the third point:

Systems - As most of the hotel systems only track ancillary revenue when this comes in relation with room revenue, all non-room revenue that is not posted on a room cannot be tracked. For properties with many external guests, this means that they will never be able to properly benchmark their result towards the competitors

View all 23 views in this viewpoint