NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Technology is what helped the hotel revenue management discipline get to where it's at today, and it's technology that will forge the space's path forward, experts in the field say.
Speaking during a revenue-management roundtable hosted by HNN at the recent Hotel Data Conference, Chris Cheney, senior vice president of commercial services at Stonebridge Companies, said leaders in the revenue management space will need to be adept at using technology and sourcing the right technology to bring multiple disciplines together.
In the coming years, Cheney said he sees the industry leaning into technology even more to give revenue managers more time to focus on tasks beyond crunching numbers and to "stop spending time spinning their wheels on things that technology can solve for us."
"We'll always be a people business. Our goal is to have technology free up our people to spend more time with strategy and people," he said. "It's having actual business case discussions, it's having strategy discussions, it's communicating more timely with owners on what's happening in their hotels."
Jenna Fishel, senior vice president of commercial strategy at First Hospitality, said revenue management and commercial strategy teams should have a bigger say in the technology decisions made by hotel companies.
"Someone could pick up a property-management system where you can't map the detail that you need to make the revenue decisions that you need," she said. "Revenue, commercial needs a bigger seat at the table when it comes to some of the technology decisions."
In the short term, hotel companies will still feel pressure on their bottom lines, said Melissa Arana, vice president of revenue strategy at Hospitality Ventures Management Group. Technology could be the solution.
"We have to leverage technology more than ever before to get into the profitability of what we do," she said. "A year from now, I don't see us very much differently to where we are right now in terms of feeling those pressures."
Business and artificial intelligence has already existed within the revenue-management space — usually referred to as machine learning — but the interest in this technology is only growing.
There will always be a need for a human revenue manager to read the tea leaves provided by AI systems, said Tina Meredith, vice president of revenue management at PM Hotel Group.
"Yes, I think AI will make things a lot easier and quicker for us, but there's still so many things that it can never know. Every hotel is different," she said. "How it functions in a comp set or a market is different, and that's dependent on the teams you have at the hotel, what their strengths and weaknesses are. I just don't know that there'll ever be a replacement for that piece of it."
Arana said she views the use of AI as a chance for the hotel industry to grow as long as revenue managers help shape what it looks like.
"I see this as an opportunity, not something that's going to hold us back, as long as we're able to evolve with it, as long as our jobs continue to evolve," she said.
Preparing for the future
The roundtable panelists were asked to do what they do best: prepare and predict for the future.
Cheney said the chief commercial officer role will be a standard in hospitality in 10 years' time, but it'll be a "missed opportunity" if individual silos remain underneath it. Instead, there should be regional vice presidents of commercial strategy, which would be an all-encompassing role of the three disciplines: revenue management, sales and marketing.
Selecting someone for that role would be dependent on the type of property and the type of demand it attracts.
"If you have a portfolio of big-box, full-service, group and convention hotels, that will be great for a regional VP of commercial strategy from a heavy sales background. And if you have heavy transient hotels and an airport market without much group mix, that's probably somebody from a revenue-management background that's overseeing that commercial strategy," he said.
Fishel agreed that the chief commercial officer role will be the standard. She wants to see the discipline have an equal seat at the table with operations instead of having to report to them.
Along those lines, Meredith said it will be important for operations and front desk to become more ingrained in the philosophies of revenue management.
"Those people are our front line. Yes, they're there to have a warm smile and help solve people's problems, but they are also our sales and revenue folks, too," she said. "You talk about sellouts and upsells and all those things that they carry out ... it's going to become crucial that we continue to elevate their knowledge of revenue management, because it's going to continue to be a force."
In order to prepare these disciplines, how new hires are trained will need to be evaluated, Fishel said. As time moves on, the training methods that once worked might not connect.
"It's not going to be the same way necessarily that we learned," she said. "Is it virtual? Is it in-person? Is it something that hasn't even been created yet? Different generations, you're going to learn different, so how do we continue to evolve the talent?"