Many of us are today honing our working from home skills. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, those who can work from home are being encouraged to do so, that is certainly the case here at Duetto.
How have you adapted to your new working environment?
Of all the roles in hospitality, revenue management is the one most perfect for working from home because you really do just need access to the right technology.
And this is where a cloud-based technology infrastructure really helps.
Having to connect via a VPN or connect your laptop to a server back in the hotel, is not conducive to home working. You need to be able to pull up data in real time and be able to work in the same reports as your other team members.
You need to be able to pivot on rate changes very quickly, you don't have time to verify if the data is correct. You need all your systems working together and all of them available at all times.
Using a cloud-based system also means that anywhere can be your office. For now, that’s home, but hopefully one day soon that could also be the local coffee shop, on the train, or even while watching your children play soccer after school.
In fact, being on property may suddenly feel like a drawback. I can remember from my time working on property as a director of revenue management, I would constantly be pulled into meetings that were not directly relevant to me or distracted by other people in the office.
Revenue management is perfect for working from home because you really just need space to think and analyze. Hospitality is very much an action-based profession – you’re judged on how frequently you walk down the hallway, engage with guests or how many meetings you attend – there’s not many roles in hotels where you just have to sit and think.
But for the revenue manager it’s more about how much data you can ingest into your brain and then calculate, and that requires peace and quiet – being able to work from home helps tremendously with this process.
I’ve been with Duetto for four years now, and most of that time has been spent working from a home office. Before that I was very much based on property, so I’ve seen both sides of the coin. Here are my four top tips for revenue management at home: