The topic of hotel-revenue management has been around for more than 30 years, yet most hotels today are not using technology and data consistently to make revenue-management decisions. Missing valuable access to intelligence on competitors, market demand and changes that occur on a daily basis can put hotels at a competitive disadvantage. Alternatively, in mature markets, hotels are inundated with an overwhelming amount of data from multiple sources and yet, very little actionable insights exist.
A hotel without a revenue-management technology has a laborious task at hand. Consider the number of room types in any hotel, across different days in the future, from various channels — let alone its pricing to various demographics and origins. It’s a time-consuming challenge to manage pricing manually. Furthermore, today’s hoteliers are overly-dependent on static data sets. In addition, many of the methods and technologies used today also make it difficult for hotels to establish a true competitive set. This is why, on average, hoteliers spend between one to three hours per day on price-setting activities.[1]
Lodging partners have often shared their challenges in adopting revenue management — essentially, hoteliers want more market insights and access to intelligence to help them make smart pricing decisions. Expedia Group, the world’s travel platform, aims to democratize revenue management and level the playing field for the global hospitality industry. Rev+ is the result of bringing together the power of Expedia Group’s real-time demand and pricing data, international reach and proven technology to help hotel partners save time, be competitive and optimize revenue.
Available as a free revenue-management solution, Expedia Group’s hotel partners can access Rev+ via its Partner Central. Users can access, aggregate and analyze the most robust global hotel market data set available in travel. Hotels that use Rev+ can benefit from greater efficiency through the ability to make more informed decisions, ultimately driving increased revenue performance for the entire hotel. Currently, more than 27,000 hotels use Rev+ and data reveals that hotels who engaged with Rev+ grew revenue, on average, 10 per-cent faster than the hotels in their competitive set.
One of the unique distinctions of Rev+ is its connection to Expedia Group’s live and global travel marketplace. This means access to its portfolio of 20-plus travel brands across 200-plus travel booking sites in 75 countries, which delivers real-time pricing information for hotel partners and their competitive set for the next 365 days. It’s imperative to have access to real-time data when it comes to managing revenue when there are close to 2.3 billion price and availability changes per day,[2] almost 20,000 changes every second. That’s 60,000 servers with more than 50-million GB of data used for our data-science features — providing rich revenue-management insights, such as market-occupancy forecasts and price optimization alerts among others.
With a host of useful features, the top-three most frequently used features within Rev+ are:
- Price Calendar: View real-time competitive rate-shopping data up to 365 days for the property’s competitive set.
- Daily Snapshot: View forecasted demand, actual production and known events for a specific day.
- Alerts: Receive notifications with the most recent and relevant changes about the market and property in the tool or via email.
Rev+ is easy and accessible, removing the hurdles around cost and complexity. Here are some tips on how you can start optimizing your revenue today:
Plan ahead: You can look at the 365-day view as the opposite of your seven-day view, giving you a more holistic view of your rates for the next year and compare it at a glance with your competitive set in real time. Additional metrics and visualizations have been added for increased insights.
Collaborate actively with your team: Effective revenue management requires teams across the hotel to collaborate actively around strategy and tactics. Leverage your Expedia Group Market Manager to keep up-to-date with market trends, learn new features and consult regularly to receive suggestions on using Rev+.
[1] Source: Based on Expedia Group Hotel Partner Survey, 2016
[2] Source: Based on Expedia Group Partner Conference 2017
