Selling rooms in hotels at the best price is considered to be one of the unique challenges, thus making the role of hotel revenue manager even more demanding.. As a revenue manager, you will always have to juggle ADR and occupancy for solving an ever-changing puzzle. So you can only imagine the amount of hard work you have to put in to become a successful hotel revenue manager. Being a bright and fast learner is not going to be enough. You will have to work your way up one step at a time.
The core objective of a hotel revenue manager is maximizing the amount of money generated by the hotel through room bookings, and other services and products it offers. A successful revenue manager is expected to make the right decisions in terms of pricing, marketing and the distribution channels used.
Before answering your question, “How to become a successful revenue manager?” or “How do I start my career in hotel revenue management?, let's learn more about the roles and responsibilities of a hotel revenue manager.
Responsibilities of a Hotel Revenue Manager
Over the years, the role of role revenue manager has evolved from what was earlier called yield manager. If you are serious about pursuing your career as a revenue manager in hotel industry, here are some of the responsibilities you will need to fulfill:
- You need to be always detail-oriented
- Identify new revenue opportunities
- Analyze and access pricing across the hotel
- Manage and maintain group and transient inventory controls
- Conduct demand and competition analyses
- Identify cost-effective delivery services alternatives to reduce the distribution cost
- Attend all Weekly Sales marketing for maintaining communication strategies
- Develop and maintain strong relationships with every level of hotel staff
- Making sure the online booking process is always up-to-date and functional
- Review business performance and provide recommendations for enhancing financial performance
- Deliver day-to-day and promotional strategies to support key hotel revenue management metrics like revPAr, PAR, channel mix and occupancy
- Handle budget and goal setting of departments, including negotiations with third parties on commissions
How to be a Successful Hotel Revenue Manager in the Ever-Changing Market?
1. Earn your degree
You are expected to pick a speciality within the field. Ideally, you should possess a hotel management bachelor’s degree in quantitative disciplines like operations research, computer science, economics or statistics. Make sure to undertake internships to get in-hand experience that complements your academic studies.
2. Gain experiences
After completing your degree in the relevant field, you must have 2-4 years of experience in revenue management departments at a multi-property level. Always look for opportunities. The more experience you gain, the more you will be able to learn about the hotel industry. Along that you will also be developing your professional skills as well as expanding your network. You must possess excellent analytical skills and should be able to clearly comprehend the travel industry distribution landscape which includes third-party channels central reservation, GDS, and property management systems.
3. Be more inquisitive and curious
If you want to become a successful revenue manager, you must possess a hunger for knowledge. Meaning, you always need to be updated of the latest industry trends and should be constantly monitoring the competition to understand how the structure is performing. Make sure to stay up-to-date with industry events and newsletters. This will help you stay innovative and be present at the top of the market. You will be seen making crucial decisions that immediately impact profitability positively.
4. Work on your skills
A revenue manager plays a crucial role in getting guests through the doors during periods of high and low demand. Some of the key traits or hotel revenue management skills you must possess as a hotel revenue manager are mentioned below:
- Develop analytical skills
This is a crucial skill to be able to quickly detect trends, spot anomalies and spot opportunities on the basis of the data that is present in front of them. While understanding data is something, making a quick and decisive action is a whole other game. A good revenue manager is supposed to do both - adjust pricing and availability.
Analytics skills can help hotels make more informed decisions when it comes down to distributing their process and the price of which rooms are distributed.
- Tech-savvy
As a revenue manager, you should be comfortable with all the systems. You should be quick to adapt to new technologies and embrace the opportunities it offers. New technologies include automation and reporting tools. Online revenue management software is currently a useful technology for revenue managers who want to become more effective and efficient at their job.
- Leadership skills
Possessing the right data and strategy are the fundamentals of being able to influence a team with a clearly thought-out plan that engages and convinces people. As a revenue manager, you cannot be just a thinkers. You also will have to be doers and lead their strategies from the front.
- Competitive nature
It’s in the nature of revenue managers to be enjoying targets and even exceeding them most of the time. Mostly, they are driven by revenue budgets and making sure they are achieving them. They are also aware of the competitor’s set results and make sure that they are number one. Such competitive nature motivates the whole team and it is something that should be encouraged from time to time.
- Relationship management
This is a key skill for revenue managers for both internal and external stakeholders. They have got many internal contacts that should be maintained by all hotel departments. The Revenue Manager must understand the difference between the partnership between the Booking engine provider and Online Travel Agents (OTAs).
5. Gain expertise
Your success rate as a hotel revenue manager is going to depend on the knowledge and expertise you gain in OTAs (Booking engines), solving rate disparity, policies, inventory management, and discrepancy. You must possess strong knowledge in all these areas to improve your chances to be a hotel revenue manager.
How is a Hotel Revenue System an Ultimate Future Solution?
Revenue management systems are currently getting a lot of traction. It has become a go-to software for hotel revenue managers as it helps with analyzing various data like internal data, customer demand, and market supply for optimizing inventory and pricing. This directly is going to help all hoteliers with calculating the ideal rates for rooms and maximizing the bottom line.
Revenue management software has evolved tremendously. Artificial intelligence is creating a major impact by automating most mundane tasks.
Some of its tops benefits include:
- When RMS integrates with PMS, it can gather historical information on hotel rooms, revenue and rates
- It saves a lot of time, thus making more time for you to enhance the guest experience.
- It helps you with calculating the profit of your hotel business so you may try different strategies and estimate profit margin
- It helps in market segmentation. It allows hoteliers to spend more time in personalizing marketing campaigns and thus attract more guests
- Provides recommendations on rates.
- It helps you identify your competitors and evaluate their products and services to strategize business growth
- It helps you with making predictions on future demand over a definite period
PARTING THOUGHTS,
A hotel revenue manager holds the power to push hotel sales through the roof. Hence, this has become a highly acclaimed and demanding career option in the hospital industry. Make sure to invest in a good hotel management degree to upskill yourself and gain relevant knowledge, expertise and experience for managing a hotel business’s revenue successfully. You will get opportunities to do hands-on training, thus allowing you to put everything that you learn into practice in the real world. Hotel revenue management software will help you get into the top spot by helping you increase revenue, optimize inventory levels and improve guest satisfaction.
