Two industry leaders, Erik Tengen, Founder of Oaky, and Chris Crowley, Chief Revenue Officer at Duetto, recently came together to identify the best practices for optimizing profitability for your revenue management strategy.
Here, we summarize their 5 key pointers to optimize your hotel revenue management strategy for profitability:
1. Ensure a wide reach and improve brand exposure
Erik Tengen, Oaky: Being listed on the main OTAs, which attract significant website traffic, is vital. That said, it shouldn’t replace your direct channels, especially your hotel website. Moving forward, it will still be important for hotels to optimize websites for search engines. This includes making sure that the user experience is seamless. In other words, potential guests should be able to find the information that they need easily and quickly.
This is the foundation for a greater number of direct bookings: Optimized website + good UX = More traffic and increased brand awareness = More direct bookings.
2. Let data guide your pricing decisions
Chris Crowley, Duetto: Insight into forward booking trends allows the hotel to directly link personalized offers to customer profiles and booking behavior.
Hoteliers need to move from a system of record to a system of revenue to harness every revenue opportunity. However, the data must be clean and correct in the first place. Then you must know how to use it to identify revenue opportunities. From there, you can maximize repeatedly, driving total revenue.
We need to understand the customer profiles and behavior, and then link strategies to them to drive revenue. By combining data with market-leading analytics you have a data approach that works to drive revenue.
3. Apply dynamic pricing
Chris Crowley, Duetto: A human can no longer monitor and react to the numerous data signals coming from the market to price accurately, in line with market demand, and in real time. This is where a revenue management system (RMS) is vital, as it ingests numerous data feeds and calculates accurate rates continually. For example, Duetto’s GameChanger pricing software provides hoteliers with advanced pricing analytics and segmentation tools to help them maximize booking revenues.
Central to this is our Open Pricing methodology, which enables hoteliers to price all room types, distribution channels, customer segments, and stay dates independently of each other, allowing them to maximize revenue without closing any opportunity for a booking.
4. Unlock the benefits of automated upselling
Erik Tengen, Oaky: Implementing automated upselling can be a game-changer for the profitability of your hotel. It allows guests to get familiar with the room upgrades and ancillary services of the hotel while enabling hotels to capitalize on room upgrades and services in a more streamlined way.
Hotel upsell software like Oaky presents guests with upselling opportunities throughout the entire customer journey.
Dynamic pricing can also be applied to room upgrades and early check-in and late check-out deals (which are among the all-time best sellers). By using an RMS and upsell software together, you can achieve better profitability. For example, Oaky and Duetto joined forces in 2022 to supercharge upselling precision. Thanks to our powerful integration, hotels can price room upgrades dynamically and adjust the room rates to meet current demand automatically. By implementing this level of flexibility, upsell revenue can increase by as much as a third.
5. Improve your guest segmentation
Erik Tengen, Oaky: Guest segmentation offers numerous benefits. By knowing your guest segments, you can, for example:
- Provide the right offerings to the right guest
- Tailor pricing to each guest segment
- Meet the needs of each guest better
- Improve loyalty and customer retention
By making it a habit to segment your guests, you’ll deliver a better customer experience and optimize revenue. The best part is that you can automate grouping your guests into segments and offer them the right experiences and upgrades. This is how it works in Oaky.
After you have identified your segments, you can set them up in the system and match them with the deals targeted to specific guest segments so they will get the most relevant room upgrades and supplement suggestions.
Get in touch today and discover more about how Duetto and Oaky work together to drive total profitability: https://www.duettocloud.com/contact