One of the newest entrants to Hotel Revenue Management Systems is a start-up out of Miami. Launching its product at the most inauspicious time of November 2019 during the middle of a pandemic when industry demand for hotel rooms were at an all-time low, the company has achieved remarkable sales and showing promising growth because of their attractive product and aggressive partnering strategy. It recently integrated its product into Skyware Hospitality Solutions Property Management System enabling an offering of a turn-key Property Management System (PMS) with a totally integrated Revenue Management solution to any hotelier seeking it.

REVENUE MANAGEMENT HISTORY

Hotel Revenue Management Systems (RMS) evolved over time from “Yield Management” and have been assisting hotels in maximizing revenue opportunities shortly after Robert Crandall, former chairman and CEO of American Airlines, invented the term “Yield Management” in the 1980’s and called it, **“The most important technical development in transportation management since airline deregulation.” ** Since then, all sectors of the hospitality industry including airlines, hotels, car rental companies, and others have adopted the concepts and used them to increase performance of their companies.

REVENUE MANAGEMENT BENEFITS

The main benefit of a Revenue Management System (RMS) for hotels is increased revenues and higher occupancy rates through the utilization of better pricing decisions. Better pricing decisions are based upon the collection of real-time data of competitor pricing, local industry demand, and the hotel’s existing inventory. The result of this data collection is the calculation of specific, data-driven, room pricing recommendations calculated using industry-specific artificial intelligence algorithms developed by Hotelitix. According to Roman Wunderlich, co-founder of Hotelitix, **Although revenue increases are always difficult to measure, some of our clients are estimating 15% to 19% increases in same-period revenue comparisons.” **

Apurva Patel is the Operating Manager of the Butterfly Grove Inn and a Hotelitix customer in Pacific Grove California, The Butterfly Grove Inn is located adjacent to the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary in Pacific Grove, California. Patel stated, “Demand in our market is continuously changing and we find that our competitors change rates multiple times throughout the day. We want to stay competitive if demand drops but we also don’t want to miss opportunities when demand increases.”

In addition to the opportunity of increased revenue and higher occupancy, another significant benefit in using a Hotel RMS is the increased productivity hotel managers gain by NOT having to collect all the data to make informed pricing decisions manually. Without Revenue Management Systems, hoteliers are still required to make informed pricing decisions on their existing inventory. And, there is just not enough time in the day for a hotelier to manually monitor all the competitive changes occurring in the local market – let alone react to them by changing inventory pricing on a daily, if not more frequent, basis with all of their other responsibilities.

Patel further explains, “We used to spend at least 2 to 3 hours a day pulling reports from various sources to produce one report that could then help us make pricing decisions. By the time we got around to adjusting rates, some of our competitors had already changed their prices or our occupancy number was different so we were working with outdated data. Hotelitix consolidates these various reports so any statistic we need is right on the screen or just a click away. We are looking at data in real-time so we are able to make faster decisions. The time spent has been cut down to maybe 20 – 30 minutes a day tracking our strategy, tweaking and monitoring a much wider booking window.”

SYSTEM OPERATION

Data collection is one of the key elements of success in every RMS. With the integration of Hotelitix into the Skyware Systems Hospitality Solution, data collection appears almost invisible to the hotelier. With Skyware’s integrated online booking engine, real-time room inventory, and room rate pricing flexibility, all hotel PMS data is available on a minute-by-minute basis. Combining the Hotel’s data with Hoteitix’s real-time competitor rate acquisition every 10 to 15 minutes, the savvy hotelier has instant access to market information. Comparing Hotelitix and the Skyware PMS interface solution to many other RMS products who only update their data once or twice a day, it is clear the leader setting the stage for future performance is the Hotelitix and Skyware combination.

Features like 365 days of rate decisions, an innovative dashboard, an event manager, market segmentation, rate rules, two-way distribution and smart pricing make Hotelitix one of the few RMS with high-end functionality at an affordable price for small or medium sized hotels. And, with its auto-pilot feature, hotels can simply allow the system to automatically operate and free up the hotelier’s time to spend on all the other matters that need attention.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

If you are interested in learning more about how a RMS can help your hotel, please call Skyware‘s sales department at (877) 759-9329 and select option 2.