The laundry room with a view. Conquered in 831 Erice, a hilltop town (731m/2398 ft in elevation) was an Elymian city (the Elymians were around before the Greeks ever set foot in Sicily), originally named Eryx. It was ruled by Arabs for 300 years, then taken by the Normans in 1167. The town maintains a medieval look and feel with narrow cobblestoned streets lined with stone buildings. The contrasting and conflicting elements of modern day laundry hanging on a line to dry with a vista of the western coastline of Sicily in a historical town was hilarious to me. It was a partly cloudy, windy and cold day with scattered rain showers when I photographed this image with my Panasonic DMC-GF1 camera. Erice, Sicily, Italia. January 27, 2013. - Laurel Pfund

Services

Assessments

Evaluate revenue management practices and assess pricing strategies. Recommend changes to systems and procedures to maximize potential and set up performance measurements.

Process involved:

This requires a minimum of one week on-site to work with team members to understand their perspective and participation levels. A major part of this visit is spent with the Revenue Manager/Director to listen to concerns and questions, and observe daily work routine and processes.

Areas included:

  1. a. Internal daily, weekly and monthly revenue management reports.
  2. b. Hotel content and room and rate display in distribution channels.
  3. c. Revenue management practices regarding rate and inventory management.
  4. d. PMS, CRS and distribution systems' functionalities and whether they are being utilized fully to market and sell the hotel.
  5. e. Processes are streamlined to create maximum selling potential and capabilities for both internal and external customers.
  6. f. Reviewing current pricing structure and rate strategies.
  7. g. Evaluating competitive sets.

Mentoring, Oversight and Follow Through

Provide ongoing and one-on-one training and guidance to Revenue Managers/Directors and their teams. Assist with recommendations, policy and procedures, monitoring distribution channels to ensure rate parity and inventories are in balance.

Process involved:

After completion of your revenue management assessment, this is step two: create a custom program designed based on your priorities and time line. One-on-one interaction is necessary in the first stages with remote support provided to reach stated goals.

Since all departments interact with Reservations at some level, a review and modification of interdepartmental procedures and policies may be required. Every department may bring in revenue in some form. It is a team effort.

Chain code and/or Central Reservations Systems (CRS) transitions

Act as project coordinator for a single property or hotel group: completing CRS hotel content, room and rate loading forms, reviewing hotel rates and information for accuracy.

Proper display of hotel content in different channels is crucial to the success of any transition.

Process involved:

Oversight of the CRS vendor for a seamless switchover. As the key contact, we are involved in all areas of the transition; this includes: managing time lines, assisting with property builds and switchover letters, editing chain pages, gathering rate loading information, and training staff.

Revenue Management software implementation (RMS)

Analyze RMS recommendations; work with vendors to fine-tune logarithms. Customize software to provide the best rate strategies to meet long and short term forecasting goals. Training and monitoring systems are essential to the success of the RMS.

RMS recommendations and forecasts need to make sense, be trustworthy and deployable. The goal is to have limited reasons to override the RMS's recommendations. This allows the system to maximize the Yield of rooms and rates by day of arrival and length of stay. Once the RMS is working the second phase is to activate RMS's interface between the PMS or CRS to send the recommendations directly to the selling channels.

Process involved:

Configuration is a key component that will make or break the RMS's recommendations. Because of this, time is spent understanding how the hotel sells its rooms, the seasonal demands and market segmentation. All this information is translated and configured into the RMS to formulate useful and feasible rate and stay restriction suggestions. Monitoring and calibrating the RMS provides accurate forecast data which is crucial to the program's success.