Weekly Insights. May 11, 2024

The Future of revenue managers in the age of AI Co-pilots: Evolution, revolution or goodbye revenue managers?

In the rapidly evolving landscape of hospitality revenue management, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged not just as a tool, but as a potential co-pilot. Where it started out as handling complex data analysis, forecasting, and giving recommendations for the decision-making process, it soon moved to automation and finally contextualization.

As AI technology advances, the hospitality industry must consider how to best integrate these tools with human expertise to enhance both operational efficiency and guest satisfaction. To become a collaborator or a displacer.

This shift prompts an essential question: Will AI soon take the steering wheel in revenue management, signalling the end for human revenue managers?

Creating memorable guest experiences: Personalization with storytelling

This article helps hoteliers to understand how brands can create meaningful connections with guests and enhance the guest experience through personalization and the use of storytelling that creates a positive lasting impression.

How to boost your hotel revenue with better online reputation management

In this article, we are putting intuition aside, as we delve into recent research exploring the powerful influence of online social proof on hotel reservations.

We'll examine the relationship between a hotel's online reputation and its Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR), and provide strategic insights on enhancing yours.

Pricing strategies: leveraging bias and psychological tricks for success

In the competitive landscape of today’s markets, effective pricing strategies are crucial for capturing consumer attention and driving sales. Leveraging psychological biases and tricks can profoundly influence consumer perception and behavior.

Here, I explore several proven pricing strategies that smartly use human psychology to enhance business success and give them a rating of 1 (bad) to 10 (good) as being successful in revenue management.

Management company compensation slows in 2023

As U.S. lodging industry performance decelerated in 2023, so did the amount of fees paid by owners to their management companies. Preliminary results from CBRE’s annual Trends® in the Hotel Industry survey find that total hotel revenue growth slowed to 6.9% in 2023, while GOP inched up by 3.5%. As a result, total management fee payments rose by just 1.2% during the year, well below the double- and triple-digit growth rates seen in the previous two years.

To gain a better understanding of how and why management fee payments decelerated in 2023, CBRE analyzed the performance of 1,445 U.S. hotels that reported management fee payments in both 2022 and 2023. In 2023, this preliminary sample averaged 162 rooms in size and achieved an occupancy level of 70.2%, along with an average daily rate (ADR) of $195.65.

Cornell Research: Successful service branding: Lessons for hospitality managers

Hospitality brands today face a brutally competitive environment characterized by a “sea of sameness” that threatens to drive all brands in a race to the bottom. However, little empirical information exists on how to best manage service brands in general and hospitality brands in particular. We have long understood successful goods branding, but we have not studied how successful services branding differs from that of goods branding. This article attempts to fill that void by analyzing 11 years of data in an empirical study of goods and service brands to determine how service brands succeed. Analyzing three factors—namely, service quality, service personalization, and service relationships—we found that service brand success can be achieved through relationship-based personalization accompanied by a level of quality that is consistent and meets customer expectations. Consistency in quality is a key to successful brand and firm outcomes. We conclude that either falling short of or exceeding customer quality expectations can have deleterious consequences for brands and firms. Moreover, we found that quality improvements should be achieved gradually.

The 10 best ways to ask for reviews

Your guests’ opinions are crucial—not just for your reputation, but also for your improvement. You want to give each and every one of your guests the best possible service. To do that, you simply must know how they are receiving your services. One sure way to gauge their feelings is by asking them to leave reviews.

Are they enjoying how observant your waiting staff is by stopping by and asking them if they’d like anything else? Or do they find it frustrating that they’re not being left alone to enjoy their Negroni? It’s hard to know! But what you do know is the importance of learning the answers to these questions.

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