5 key trends of distribution and revenue management for 2018

Dec 31, 2017OTAs, Revenue Management, Revenue Strategy

The Distribution And Revenue Management Trends Report 2018 was created to show what digital distribution currently means for hotel business and its development trends in 2018.

We asked hotel businesses around the world to fill out a short survey on how hoteliers analyse their information. We wanted to know what tools they use and which channel they exploit.

Work with the rates on OTA portals becomes a big part of the hoteliers daily work.

Distribution strategy is one of the most important elements in planning and organization of the hotel work. The majority of hoteliers being interviewed have implemented an online distribution strategy and they are well aware, that despite the daily tasks it needs regular optimization. Based on this rule ¼ of respondents optimize the distribution strategy every day. Far fewer hotels treat the distribution as a tedious duty, but recognize the benefits of price optimization in the channels. In addition, 41% of the hotel establishments plan to increase the pool of distribution channels in 2018.

Technology in distribution becomes essential and popular.

Less than half of the hotels use channel managers or other programs to facilitate the distribution of prices. However, more and more often they note the importance of time saved due to the use of a channel manager.

Simple programs which are not supposed to be used for special tasks, such as making revenue management decisions, analyzing data or planning, do not allow to optimize the daily work of hotel establishments and save the time of hotel team. Respondents who do not use a proper program for revenue management spend from 5 to 8, sometimes even to 12 hours weekly working on revenue management tasks.

Understanding the importance of reputation on the Internet and its impact on revenue.

The vast majority of hoteliers understands the importance of customer opinions and hotel image on the internet in 2018. For this reason most of hotel establishments take advantage of the processing and using this data for building positive hotel reputation through the OTA and other portals. Each time growing number of hotels, use the reviews and their position among competitive set, uses the reviews when planning and implementing a revenue management strategy.

RevPAR is still a “classic” KPI in the hospitality industry.

For a large part of the hotel traditional and well known to all the most important performance indicator is RevPAR, but growing group of supporters of the other indicators, such as netRevPAR or T-RevPAR.

A priority order of marketing mix for hotel establishment.

The pricing strategy is a key instrument and a fundamental basis in a hotel business. It helps to control the cash flow and competitive market, coordinate and contribute the positive development of own commercial activities. Since the price determination in the hospitality industry depends on a lot of factors such as competition, market share, brand, identification of a product and operational costs, it is extremely important for the planning online distribution strategy.

More likely, therefore the half of the answerers give primacy to the Price element from year to year.