Revenue management has a measurement problem.
Most teams are still judged on RevPAR — a metric that tells you how your rooms performed, but nothing about whether your business actually made money. Meanwhile, booking costs are rising, labour costs are climbing, and OTA commissions keep creeping higher. Hotels are doing more business than ever before and keeping less of it.
Something has to change. The question is what, and how fast.
To dig into that, we partnered with Dragonfly Strategists for a webinar: Profit beyond rooms: Next-gen revenue strategies and personalization.
The conversation brought together Alise Deeb, Chief Revenue Officer at Dragonfly Strategists, Marlene Cazares, Director of Customer Success for North America at Duetto, and Mylene Young, Product Marketing Strategy Consultant at Duetto.
They looked at where revenue management is heading — covering profitability KPIs, personalization, total revenue optimization, dynamic segmentation, and channel strategy.
Here's what came out of it.
RevPAR isn't the enemy. It's just the wrong scorecard.
RevPAR still has a role. But the revenue leaders who are winning right now are talking about total revenue per guest, total profit per guest, and GOPAR — not just how many rooms sold at what rate.
The shift sounds obvious. In practice, it requires a different kind of commercial team. One where revenue is engaged with finance well before the monthly P&L review. One where channel acquisition costs and cost to service each guest are part of the conversation — not afterthoughts.
"The challenge to the revenue leader really should be around making money, not just counting money." — Alise Deeb, Chief Revenue Officer, Dragonfly Strategists
Revenue managers have traditionally lived in a relatively confined space: pricing rooms, managing occupancy, watching RevPAR. What's changing is the expectation that they understand the downstream impact of every decision — on GOP, on NOI, on what the owner or asset manager actually cares about.
That's a skills and mindset shift, and most teams are still mid-journey.
Personalization at scale: we're closer than we think. But we're not there yet.
Personalization is one of those topics that gets talked about constantly and executed inconsistently.
The honest picture right now? Most operators are strongest at segment-level personalization. True individual-level pricing at scale is still an ambition more than a reality.
That doesn't mean the opportunity isn't real. Personalization isn't just about changing the rate for every guest — it's about removing friction and making the right offer, at the right moment, across the guest journey.
A pre-arrival offer that matches intent signals. A bundled package that aligns with how a guest has booked before. A post-stay offer that reflects what they actually spent on property.
"Sometimes I'll look at somebody's offer page and they could have 20 offers — and that's not personalization. That's just a lot of offers." — Alise Deeb
Casino operators are the reference point here. Their CRM capability, loyalty file depth, and ability to act on individual spend patterns are years ahead of most traditional hotel operators.
The technology to close that gap exists. The challenge is ingesting and acting on data in a way that's targeted rather than overwhelming.
Total profit optimization: ancillary revenue has to be in the strategy, not a footnote.
F&B, spa, parking, experiences, upgrades — these aren't add-ons to the room strategy. For the operators doing this well, they're treated as strategic revenue streams with their own forecasts, their own intent signals, and their own contribution margin analysis.
The practical shift this requires is tight cross-functional alignment. Revenue, operations, and marketing need to be working from the same commercial picture. When conditions change — a weather event cancels outdoor programming, a group booking skews the guest mix — the ability to pivot ancillary strategy in real time is what separates the best performers from the rest.
Intent-based offers are a big part of the answer. Rather than blanket upsells pushed to everyone, the most effective approach uses guest behaviour and booking signals to serve offers that are genuinely relevant — better for the guest experience, and better for conversion.
"Customers are really getting into the weeds on segmentation and ancillary behaviour. An OTA customer spends differently on property than a corporate customer — and operators are starting to break that down properly. One segment that used to be one bucket five years ago is now four segments. They're definitely getting better at understanding those different behaviours." — Marlene Cazares, Director of Customer Success, North America, Duetto
Segmentation: just because you can have 25 segments doesn't mean you should.
Segmentation is changing. The old static model — a handful of market segments inherited from the PMS, some of which were created for marketing campaigns that no longer exist — doesn't reflect how demand actually behaves today.
Dynamic segmentation means using behavioural signals, booking windows, search patterns, and propensity to spend to respond to demand as it emerges, rather than trying to fit guests into predetermined boxes. Booking windows are shorter. Stay patterns are shifting. Guests don't think in market segments.
But there's a counterweight worth taking seriously.
The more segments you have, the harder forecasting becomes. Revenue teams with 20 or 25 segments often find that a significant number of them have almost no production — which makes them noise, not signal.
The goal isn't complexity. It's agility. Fewer, cleaner, better-defined segments that you can actually yield against are worth more than a sprawling taxonomy built to match someone's P&L layout.
"The market segmentation you've inherited from your PMS isn't necessarily correct. Some of those segments were created for marketing purposes that no longer exist — a newspaper campaign, a channel that's long gone. Make sure the segments in your RMS make sense for how your business actually works today. Not all PMS segments are good segments." — Mylene Young, Product Marketing Director, Duetto
Before adding a segment, the most useful question is: does this group have a meaningfully different behaviour that I'm going to manage differently? If the answer is no, it probably doesn't need to exist.
Distribution and channel strategy: stop being defensive about OTAs.
The direct vs. OTA debate has been running for years. The panel's view: it's the wrong frame.
The right question is profitability by channel — which booking, from which source, at what acquisition cost, with what downstream spend and cost to service, actually delivers the best return?
OTAs drive demand generation and visibility in markets you'd struggle to reach directly. That's genuinely valuable. The risk is treating them defensively — as a channel to minimise — rather than strategically, as a channel to deploy with purpose.
Parity matters too, and not just rate parity. Value and experience parity across channels is increasingly important as guests shop across multiple surfaces before booking.
And then there's generative engine optimization. AI-driven search is changing how guests find hotels — and most revenue leaders haven't fully engaged with it yet. Natural language is now how people describe what they want. If your hotel is listed as a "rooftop oasis" but guests are searching for "rooftop bar hotels," you're invisible. Testing your property's visibility across different AI search tools and making sure your content is structured for natural language discovery is increasingly part of the commercial job.
"You want to capture guests in whatever channel they prefer. The focus shouldn't be on moving them from one platform to another — it's about understanding the value they bring and making sure you're present where they choose to book." — Marlene Cazares
Future-proofing: the mindset matters as much as the tools.
The closing theme was resilience — building a commercial operation that can adapt quickly when the environment shifts. A few things stood out.
- Cross-functional collaboration is non-negotiable. Revenue decisions affect every part of the business. Teams that operate in silos will always be a step behind.
- A test-and-learn culture beats a forecast-and-defend culture. The data is there. The willingness to act on it — and to change course when it points somewhere new — is the differentiator.
- Technology is there to augment, not replace. The best revenue leaders aren't afraid of AI. They're curious about it, and they're building teams that know how to work alongside it.
- Training matters more than most operators invest in it. The commercial landscape is changing faster than most training programmes keep up with. That gap is worth closing deliberately.
"Don't be afraid of technology. Technology is there to stay — it's there to augment what you're doing, so you'll still be needed. Use it wisely. Stay curious. Stay abreast of the trends. And train your team. The more knowledge your team has — whether it's your revenue team, your operating team, your executive leadership — the better." — Mylene Young
Watch the full webinar
The conversation went much deeper — covering specific tactics, live examples, and the kind of honest back-and-forth you rarely get in a pre-packaged content piece.
Be sure to watch the live recording here.
