Revenue managers are constantly adapting their pricing strategies, and the global COVID-19 pandemic has provided plenty of reasons to revisit and retune those strategies.

During "The Evolving Role of Revenue Management" panel as part of the Hotel Data Conference: Global Edition, Suzie Thompson, vice president commercial at London-based Red Carnation Hotels, said the pandemic has given her company time to reassess its operations, including revenue management.

"We haven't made any changes to our team in terms of headcount, but we have definitely changed the way we work together, the way that departments work together and collaborate," she said. "We've centralized some functions and we've decentralized some functions."

One of the biggest changes her company made was to bring the sales and marketing and the revenue teams together to help navigate the current situation and streamline where possible, she said.

"We've taken a big opportunity to learn and to share the knowledge that we have within our team," she said.

Thompson added that integrating revenue managers with the sales team has improved the revenue-strategy decisions during the pandemic.

"It's important for the revenue-management team to understand the sales pipeline, the sales process, [and it's] equally important to understand digital search intent," she said. "I think we've definitely moved forward in terms of anticipating demand, rather than managing demand."

Jen Yakimicki Guimond, vice president of revenue at North Central Group, said her company has also encouraged collaboration between revenue managers and the sales and marketing teams, and the revenue-management discipline continues to evolve.

"Revenue management has both an art and a science component," Yakimicki Guimond said. "And as a discipline, I feel like we've had the science part down for many, many years. The art portion I feel is a skill set, those soft skills that we'd be looking at more closely."

Communication skills, sales skills and being able to sell their strategies and the revenue story are essential to master for data analytics, she said. Being able to chart, graph and paint the picture tells the story rather than just reporting out, she added.

"I really feel like in our organization, our revenue managers have become more conductors of revenue than managers of revenue and numbers," she said. "They really are at the front of the train, conducting the entire thing."

The pandemic has somewhat shifted the hierarchy of the data that revenue managers study to set a pricing strategy. Yakimicki Guimond said the comparisons to 2020's early pandemic months make year-over-year data sets not as helpful as they normally are.

"Historical data still has a place, but we certainly are not looking at year-over-year performance as closely to be indicative of what's coming next," she said. "Obviously, a lot of that data has become irrelevant with the enormous decrease in demand over the past 12 months industrywide.

She added it's been more useful to look for week-to-week performance trends for patterns that can lead to successful pricing decisions.

"I think we're looking week to week a lot more closely than we ever have before," she said. "... We're working a lot more closely between revenue management and digital marketing with analyzing our return on spend every week. That wasn't something we did weekly before; that was something that was more of a monthly meeting."

Michael Feldman, vice president of revenue management and distribution for Atrium Hospitality, said guests are booking weekend stays within the same week, just days earlier. That was an adjustment for the revenue-management team at first.

"When 20% to 25% of the bookings are same-day, and when 60% of them are three days out at some of the hotels, it's scary the first few weekends you see it [and ask] will this continue," he said.

It's also much more difficult for revenue managers to make forecasts for their owners or asset managers, Feldman said.

"From a forecasting perspective, we're gun-shy; we're nervous about something not holding," he said. "Having disappointed plenty of bosses in the past with a forecast that doesn't come to fruition, you just don't want to do that."

Beyond just the booking trends and using what's most recent, Feldman said they're looking at the specific market segments generating business.

"We're looking for any wonderful indication that group will come back, because that of course will help the entire industry," he said.

It's become much tougher for revenue managers to rely on medium- to long-term business on the books since the pandemic began.

During another HDC Global session titled "Window of Opportunity: Analyzing Shifts in Booking Windows and Their Impact on RM Strategy," Steven Cote, product manager of ForwardSTAR at STR, shared some forward-looking data across several European markets to illustrate that point. Specifically, in markets such as Amsterdam, Madrid, Dublin and the United Kingdom, across a 90-day period, consumers made more bookings with a shorter lead period before the actual stay, on average 14 days or less.

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However, more immediate bookings haven't led to increased revenue, Cote said.

"Now, as obvious as it might seem, I do think it's important to highlight here that these booking window trends don't directly translate to improved performance," he said. "Proportionally, the dynamics have shifted, but the absolute number of bookings coming in is still down across the board and sometimes even negative when cancellations are outweighing new bookings."

Stuart Yeates, head of revenue, distribution and pricing for Ireland-based Jurys Inn Hotel Group and Leonardo Hotels, said it's difficult to predict booking trends across the segments and whether summer 2021 will be a repeat of 2020. However, customers are likely to hold onto short-term bookings for the immediate future.

"Customers have now got a guarantee that they'll get a room somewhere at a competitive rate close to, if not on, the day of arrival," he said. "We have to look at creating flexible short-, medium- and long-term approaches, and that in turn then allows us to take a structured approach."

It's important that guests see hoteliers as being flexible, not rigid, he said.

Revenue managers have lost some of their comforts in setting pricing due to stark decreases in demand caused by the pandemic, Yeates said.

Historically, hotels had a minimum level of demand that they could expect, and that gave them confidence they could place their best available rate price point to X and then have varying levels of discount to each of their segments underneath, he said.

"You have that comfort that you had enough minimal demand to do that," he said. "I think that the lower levels of demand now mean that your BAR price points are obviously going to come under quite a lot of pressure, which is going to make it very difficult to offer the staggered levels of discount that's historically been been the case."

That means average daily rate is therefore going to come under significant pressure moving forward, he said.

Yeates said that while the pandemic has rewritten some recent thinking on revenue strategy, the fundamentals of the discipline still apply.

"The reality is no one really knows the true long-term impact of this," Yeates said. "For me, it's going to be critical for hotels and revenue-management teams in particular to establish what a new norm looks like. The principles of revenue management ultimately remained the same as they were pre-COVID, but we're all going to be operating in an environment that remains alien to us all frankly."