When it comes to hotel revenue management, the quality of your data is vital to producing accurate forecasts and an optimised pricing strategy.
Here at Duetto, the deployment team has spent the last six months working on improving the quality of the data collected and the analytics that go with that. The results:
- Overall improved quality of data
- 100% revenue accuracy
- Implementation time reduced by 50%
Add to this the onboarding support provided by experienced hotel revenue directors, our collaborative approach and consultative efforts, and you have a revenue management proposition that is the best in the market.
Aiming for 100% Accuracy
The hotel industry has been striving for 100% revenue and occupancy accuracy for decades, instead settling on typical variances of between 5% and 10%.
[bctt tweet="Are your different systems showing you varied data? We’re aiming to fix that. #datavalidation" username="OptimizeDemand"]
The impact of these variances on large hotels is minimum. It can be absorbed. But for smaller, luxury hotels, where one room can be a large contributor to ADR, variances of this nature do have an impact.
No matter what property management system is used, there always seems to be different constraints around the data. Furthermore, the data inherently loses value the further it gets from the central system. It’s a challenge many hotel revenue managers face on a daily basis, and one we wanted to resolve.
At Duetto, we only go direct to the source of the data; we don’t connect to intermediary systems. This keeps our data accurate and unpolluted.
For years, hotel revenue managers have been pulling data from static reports. Reports that in essence condense the data and average it all out. One of the big problems we found with PMS systems is that the data is averaged out per day. So if a guest is staying for several days on different daily rates, the rate is averaged. This leads to a difference in what the hotel sees as the revenue and what the revenue management system records.
The same often occurs with ancillary spend. It all ends up in the same revenue bucket. For example, a guest spends £100 on their room rate and another £50 in ancillary spend, this is often seen as £150 in room revenue.
The problem is that when everything is averaged, you lose the finer details of the data.
Getting to the True Data
To get at the true figures, we identified specific data points in the PMS and created a bespoke tool that enables us to extract data at a much more granular level. This enables ancillary spend to be seen as separate from room rate, for example. This allows our revenue management system to have 100% parity with what the PMS is reporting, which allows us to accurately forecast revenue for the hotel and provide optimised pricing recommendations.
This has enabled us to reach 100% revenue accuracy.
A 4-step Implementation Plan
Reducing data variances from 5% to zero has been a huge achievement. However, we understand that the hotels we work with want to see the benefits as soon as possible, so we have also worked on reducing our implementation time too.
Our four-stage implementation includes:
- Data capture and data quality evaluation. We extract historical data from the hotel PMS and then build real time interfaces for future data.
- Onboarding of the property. We look in detail at how the hotel has built its rates, who the competitor set is, how the hotel takes advantage of different events around its geographic area, and lots more.
- Training. The Duetto team is made up of many experienced on-property revenue managers, and these are the people that conduct all of our training as they understand the pain points of revenue management.
- Production ready stage. This is the moment where the hotel revenue team are ready to push rate recommendations to the PMS in real time. This can be done automatically or with a manual review before being published.
You’re now in charge of your destiny, but we don’t let go just yet.
We continue to monitor how the team is using the system and how the hotel is performing.
We are the pit stop team supporting a Formula 1 car – we have the overview of how the car is performing and can provide input to the driver to help them reach their end goal – the chequered flag.
We’re Not Stopping There
Six months of hard work has improved our data quality. We’ve eliminated data variances and reduced implementation time. However, we are not stopping there. Our aim is to provide 100% accurate data and forecasting for hotels large or small. So we will keep working on refining the quality of our data and constantly monitor the revenue and occupancy figures we are receiving against the hotel’s source of truth. No other revenue management system does this.