It's that time of year again, the holidays are upon us and travellers around the world are hopping on planes and booking hotels as part of their ever-anticipated holiday plans.

Published: 24 Dec 2010

It's that time of year again, the holidays are upon us and travellers around the world are hopping on planes and booking hotels as part of their ever-anticipated holiday plans.

Whenever key managers take time off- whether it be for vacation, because if illness or they are out attending other work-related functions- the temporary abandonment of certain positions can tax a hotel. And there is quite possibly no other position this hold more truth for than that of revenue manager. As we've mentioned before in this space, the revenue manager's job is never done. Maximising revenue per available room is a 24 hour, 365 day a year task, and requires an almost superhuman vigilance. Monitoring competitor's rates, making the proper adjustments, managing multiple sales channels, and distributing inventory effectively are high-touch, time consuming processes, and for many hotels require a hands-on approach.

So what's a hotelier or GM to do when the revenue manager does decide to take some precious days of vacation (or even worse, is out sick)?

Of course, this is something that virtually all hotels already have figured out. There are assistant revenue managers and other trained staff ready and entirely capable of stepping in and taking over daily operations. Indeed, no hotel would risk being caught without some contingency for an event as predictable as a revenue manager's vacation.

But with the holidays here and vacations on everyone's mind, it's a good time to look at just how indispensable a good revenue manager is, and how their job would be augmented by the appropriate revenue management system. The idea of a hotelier or GM being left helpless by the absence of a single manager may seem far-fetched, but the reality is that the various tasks facing revenue managers in an effort to optimise room rates and RevPAR can indeed be daunting. In fact, to achieve the best possible results in terms of RevPAR, revenue managers need cutting edge technological help- and that's when they aren't on vacation.

Today, because conditions of room sales fluctuate more rapidly than and more wildly than ever before, revenue managers must perform more 'maintenance' tasks than in previous generations. In order to maintain a high occupancy rate and a healthy ADR, not to mention keep up with the most accurate information, a revenue manager must monitor hundreds of online sales channels, determine which rate is attracting the most demand, reconcile that with in-house and GDS-generated reservations, adjust that rate, allocate inventory to the channel, and communicate this information across the various operating departments within the hotel. This would be a lot to do on any winter day, and yet these tasks, to get the best results, must be performed continuously.

In fact, to maximise RevPAR, this process must be repeated as often as possible, down to the minute. This is beyond the capacity of even the most talented revenue managers, who, though capable and competent, still must sleep, eat, and take the occasional vacation. The pursuit of rate optimisation, really only attainable through a comprehensive revenue management system, takes the revenue manager or revenue management team away from the more productive initiatives they might otherwise undertake. The physical and time-consuming actions of consulting a rate generator (or worse, historical tables), manually adjusting rates across various online travel agency websites and updating the property management system rob a revenue management team of the opportunity to work with sales and marketing to develop new guest pipelines, or consult work across hotel departments on new sales-boosting initiatives.

These strategic and business development duties are as important as obtaining the right rate on each and every online transaction. Moreover, strategic planning is not something that can be automated or outsourced; only revenue managers can complete these tasks. Releasing revenue managers from the tedium of pricing minutia and allowing them not to just take a vacation, but to focus their energies where they can make the most impact is and should be a high priority for all hotels. The best way for hotels to meet this priority is to embrace automation, and bring in a comprehensive revenue management system to augment and assist the revenue management staff.

A good RMS system keeps an unblinking, unsleeping eye on reservation limits, OTA allotments, rates-to-bookings ratios, and even subtler changes in the intricate, 24-hour supply and demand cycle. It is integral to maintaining the level of vigilance necessary to achieve maximum RevPAR, and can create a positive multiplier effect by freeing revenue management personnel to develop more revenue-generating ideas and initiatives.

No one would suggest that a single system would enable a hotelier or general manager to send their revenue management departments on a permanent vacation. However, implementing a system that can manage daily aspects of revenue management- the time-consuming minutia that revenue managers should not be constrained to in the first place, can help a hotel maintain its revenue stream even when key personnel are vacationing, or performing more constructive, forward-planning tasks.

By setting up the system in advance, your vacationing revenue manager can set up all of the parameters for the pricing adjustments during his/her vacation. Advanced systems can also send updates to the RM to their PDA or smartphone as often as they want to check the numbers. A high-tech system like that will make a revenue manager's vacation much more relaxing, knowing that their RMS is still hard at work while they are enjoying some much needed time off. Additionally, this type of system can greatly help assistant revenue managers or other hotel personal who would take over these tasks in the event the revenue manager is not in the office.

(This article has been contributed by Jean Francois Mourier, CEO of RevPar Guru).