There is more data available today than ever before to help revenue and sales managers make smart decisions when quoting group business. While we’re seeing more collaboration between the two departments, unfortunately complications around compiling and analyzing the data remain.
Group business should be an area where hotels can drive significant profit. It should be used to build an occupancy base and as a way to identify need periods, which hotels can then fill in with transient room-nights.
Perhaps most key to making profit-driven group decisions is a reliable displacement analysis available each time the revenue team sets a group rate. Unfortunately, most DORMs don't have enough time or data to create an informed analysis for each incoming group. Even when a DORM has time to complete the analysis, it usually doesn’t align to the sales manager’s timeline for getting a quote back to the customer. This puts every hotel at risk of making a poor pricing decision or losing customers when it comes to group business.
This is yet another area where technology is poised to assist. Systems are analyzing the information available in real time and serving the right group forecasts, rates and displacement insight, meaning RMs and sales managers no longer need to open Excel to do things like validate a group’s effect on transient. Now RMs have more time to focus on more important things and sales teams can close deals faster at room rates that everyone is happy with.
Starting January 30th with Duetto’s Winter Release, hotels and casinos will now have a profit focused lens on their group business. BlockBuster, Duetto’s group optimization app, will now display a detailed profit displacement analysis focusing on transient rooms and ancillary spend, as well as gaming revenue and profit displacement for casinos. With this type of data, Duetto can provide rate recommendations that are relative to the displaced business and guarantee an overall higher profit for the property.