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Whilst total RM is becoming increasingly popular, little information really exists on how hoteliers can revenue manage their hotel amenities. Yet non-bedroom revenues can add a significant amount to a hotel’s bottom line.
Event space in particular, can be different to manage. Often the systems don’t exist to manage leads effectively. Those selling the space don’t communicate with the revenue management team to ensure they are pricing the contract optimally.
Ahead of EyeforTravel’s free webinar on this theme, we caught up Jeffrey Emenecker, GM of Decision Street, Cvent.
When asked how hoteliers currently manage group business leads, he shared that from their experiences, most hoteliers today manage leads through their inbox and their sales and catering system, processing them on a first-in, first-out basis, using experience and instinct to help prioritize efforts.
He identified some of the key issues faced by hotels –
a) Pressure to respond to all leads quickly within defined time frames
b) Difficulty in qualifying which leads are worth researching in detail
c) Not enough time to create a quality, custom response to important leads for the hotel
d) A lack of visibility into profit, not revenue, for a particular lead
So what can hotels do?
“Hoteliers should ensure that they have a process, and ideally systems, to view all revenues and associated margins related to each lead. We see many instances of hotels not hitting monthly profit targets because decisions made that impacted revenue and margins in non-room revenue related areas” said Emenecker.
Emenecker shared that in cases where a lead is too early in the cycle to get estimates on all non-room revenue items, properties can also create guidelines of expectations for non-room revenue items to apply when evaluating a lead.
Interested in finding out more? We’ll be exploring how hoteliers can better analyze and respond to incoming group business leads to ensure that they are maximising the entire revenues of the property, including those from amenities in a free webinar taking place next Wednesday 29th at 2pm EST in partnership with Cvent.
Sign up to the complimentary webinar here
NB. If you can’t make the date of the webinar, sign up anyway as we will be sending all registrants the full webinar recording to watch at your leisure.
Source: eyefortravelblog.blogspot.com