Essential Daily Tasks of a Revenue Manager

In order to be effective as a revenue manager, you need to be multi-tasking. It might seem overwhelming in the beginning but once you get used to these activities, it should be smooth sailing. The overall impact of doing these will ultimately contribute to your revenue optimization strategies, and a proper implementation of a revenue management culture.

Being a revenue manager or effectively applying a revenue management culture is never easy. There are quite a number of tasks. For me, the ones below are the most essential daily tasks a revenue manager should always have on a checklist:

Forecast Review

How did you finish last night? What was the variance between your forecast and your actual? Are you within an acceptable variance range, say 5%? If not, what went wrong? A revenue manager needs to make sure that the correct data is used when forecasting.

Market Segment Analysis

Check which segment was the best producer. How was the performance compared to the same day last week? Are you seeing a trend? Are you meeting the budget for your segments? Continuous analysis of your different segments can help you find out whether your efforts are effective in terms of increasing production. This can also aid you in recognizing whether you do have the correct market segmentation.

Channel Analysis

What was the best producing channel? What was your cost of acquisition? Are you optimizing your most cost effective channel? Revenue managers do not only focus on revenue, but also on being cost efficient. Strategies should be concentrated on channels that would yield the highest revenue with least amount of cost. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should always choose the option with the lowest monetary cost. Cost here can be many things, including missing the chance for a bigger opportunity in the future.

Competition Review

Did they change their advance purchase rate offer? Before touching your setup, analyze your production of best available rate first. Are they introducing a new promotion? Before introducing something similar, ask yourself if you really need it. Observing your competitors can give you ideas on what promotion or strategies you can implement that can yield you better revenues, but take what they are doing with a grain of salt.

Pick-Up

How much actual reservations did you achieve last night? Are you spotting a trend when you consider the last few days, or the last few weeks? Analyzing your pick-up can support your decisions on how to effectively optimize overbooking opportunities.

Displacement Analysis

Displacement is rejecting a piece of business to accept another one. A revenue manager should make sure to compute how much business was displaced, if any. Especially during peak seasons, this will help in analyzing if you are accepting the right kind of business into your hotel.

Demand Calendar

How did you perform compared to same day last year? It will be very helpful for a revenue manager to have a demand calendar as this gives an overall look of how you performed last year. This will also show you how you might perform in the future. Your demand calendar should be updated every time an event impacting your demand can be identified. It will be a very useful tool to guide you in your pricing strategies.

Pricing Analysis

Based on your pick-up, what rates were booked? Were they high? You might want to review your pricing if you see that you are not getting as much pick-up as expected. Maybe you made a wrong assumption on your demand, and priced high too early into the season. This can also result in reverse, wherein rates being booked are too low and you are getting much more pick-up than expected.

Reservations Overview

It would be good to get an overall feel of your entire reservations. Check on the booking pace, lead days, and day of week booking. See if you can spot a trend.

Hotel Dashboard

How is the dashboard looking today? Are there any highlights for today’s briefing? Create a report that can be distributed to all department heads. Use this as your reference for your morning briefing. Make sure that it is easy to understand.

In addition to the above essential daily tasks, I would also recommend that you do a review of below reports either weekly, monthly, quarterly or even before budget creation, for a much better understanding of your hotel performance:

• Group Trend Reports
• Price Matrix
• Unconstrained Demand Statistics
• Booking Pace
• Room Type Yield Report
• 14-Day Outlook
• 3-Month Outlook
• Website Analytics
• Month End Summary Report
• Annual Budget Template