The Future of Revenue Managers in the Age of AI Co-pilots: Evolution, Revolution or Goodbye Revenue Managers? hospitalitynet.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from hospitalitynet.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Almost everyone would agree that the pace of technological advances in hospitality has accelerated since the pandemic, when many technology providers were forced to redesign their offerings in response to one of the largest catalysts for change that the world has ever seen. Revenue management tools were quickly re-worked to be forward-looking versus relying on historical trends, and now machine learning is being applied to everything from creating the ideal travel itinerary to cleaning up the coding that night auditors have been screwing up for decades.
The OTAs have been trying to enter the leisure group booking market for decades now. Traditionally, hoteliers have been reluctant to allow the OTAs to enter the lucrative group market, limiting their OTA exposure to the transient leisure and unmanaged business market.
Though there has been continual evolution over the last two decades in the way hoteliers monetize the power of data to make pricing and strategy decisions, one constant remained: The dependence on historical data. Then along came COVID-19 and its impact on travel created historical comparisons that were so distorted that they were meaningless in the old decision-making process.
Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern believes that 2023 will be the year that we stop predicting a travel recovery and actually start enjoying it. In an interview with Bloomberg, he said further: Summer 2022 will be the busiest travel season ever. But after two years of little to no demand, many hoteliers have started to look beyond traditional room revenue and warmed up to the opportunity which lies in non-room revenue. With a possible record summer ahead, will the idea of total revenue (and total revenue management) remain a focus for the industry or will we revert back to business as (pre-pandemic) usual? So the question is: Should hotels look to diversify their income streams and when is this the right time to do so? What should hoteliers be looking out for in the process and where is the opportunity?