During COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 1 Billion rooms have gone unsold every week in the US only. With so much unsold space, hotels had to become creative with their offers and packages. Out-of-the-box thinking is the only way to survive this "Black Swan," but how can hotels get the best out of their spaces? What new ways of selling rooms and ancillary products should the industry implement to be successful in 2021-22?

Here are the five key findings from the 7th episode of "The Revenuemanager," Creative Revenue Management, organized by Hospitality Net and FunnelTV. The show is a live event, where the best revenue managers and hospitality personalities of the world discuss the famous Hospitality Net World Panels.

The event starred Ally Northfield, Managing Director at Revenue by Design Ltd, Lennert de Jong, CCO at CitizenM, Sergio Zertuche Valdés, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer at Palladium Hotel Group, Thibault Catala, Founder & MD at CatalaConsulting, Michael Schaeffner, VP Sales EMEA at Duetto, Michael Heflin, Chief Revenue Officer at StayNTouch, Andrew Broderick, Senior Account Executive at Infor.

This episode has been sponsored by Duetto, Stayntouch, and Infor, and moderated by Scott Dahl, Program Director, Master's in Hospitality Strategy and Digital Transformation at Les Roches Crans-Montana Global Hospitality, and Board Member at HSMAI Revenue Optimization Advisory Board.

  1. During the pandemic, ancillary revenue became crucial for any RM strategy, and technology helped hotels with up and cross-selling. Not only, technology has the ability to make the guest experience frictionless and improve the operation inside the hotel;
  2. Opinionated management can be an obstacle to real innovation. Revenue management should always be hypothesis-driven, not opinion-driven;
  3. The majority of revenue management KPIs are built around transactions, but the way people travel post-pandemic is far from the hugely transactional marketplace we used to know up until 2019. Revenue managers should be more focused on customers' lifetime value than single transactions, at least in the near future;
  4. Collecting customers data will be crucial. Investing in a good CRM is one of the best investments one can make in the long term, as it may help to confirm or to debunk your hypothesis and assumptions;
  5. Pricing needs to be the architecture of where you want your product to go, either now or in the future. Hotels should focus more on weekly and monthly stays, as -at the moment- LoS tend to be much longer, and price strategy should be able to "talk" to the needs of the guests.

You can watch the full episode here:

Do not miss the next and last episode of The Revenuemanager, titled "What's new in the toolbox. The best emerging technology solutions for optimizing revenue in today's mid-COVID" world." on July the 22nd https://www.linkedin.com/events/6797919949596745728/.

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