“Big Data” Revenue Management

Back in October, Kelly rather succinctly stated that “Revenue management has always been a “big data” problem.”  This is very true.  This week, as we continue our exploration of big data in hospitality, I’m going to delve deeper into the data needs for revenue management.  I’ll be exploring the important [...]

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Pricing as a strategic tool: A conversation with Maarten Oosten

Along our 2013 theme of building a strategic analytics culture within a Hospitality and Travel organization, I had a conversation this week with Maarten Oosten.  Maarten is a senior manager in our Operations Research Center of Excellence at SAS.  He is a cross-industry pricing and revenue management specialist, and has [...]

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Revenue management and price optimization in review

Over the last 10 weeks at the Analytic Hospitality Executive, we have explored the topic of Revenue Management and Price Optimization for the hospitality and travel industries.  We’ve looked at how changes in the market, the changing needs of revenue managers and advances in technologies have put pressure on traditional [...]

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The future of hotel revenue management: A conversation with Dr. Ravi Mehrotra

This week I finally had a chance to catch up with Dr. Ravi Mehrotra, President & Founder of IDeaS – A SAS Company.   As most of you remember, SAS acquired IDeaS, a leading provider of pricing and revenue management Software, Services, and Consulting to the hospitality industry, in 2008.  Since [...]

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Accounting for competition in revenue management

In my last post, I explored the importance of factoring price elasticity into a revenue management approach.  This week, we’re going to explore the importance of accounting for competitor pricing. In today’s market, consumers have an unprecedented ability to shop around, with the internet now comprising approximately 35% of all [...]

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The importance of price elasticity

In my post in September on Why revenue management analytics are becoming outdated, I made note of several important limitations in the traditional revenue management approach.  Today, I’m going to focus on just one of these issues: price elasticity. Why Price Elasticity is So Important As I noted back in [...]

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Why Revenue Management needs “big analytics”

Revenue management has always been a “big data” problem.  The level of detail needed to make pricing recommendations means even a small chain’s revenue management system runs hundreds of thousands of forecasts every night.  These forecasts then are used as inputs for a massive optimization problem. Originally the problem was [...]

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Announcing, “The Solution”: SAS Revenue Management Price Optimization Analytics

Those of you who have been loyally following “The Analytic Hospitality Executive” know that we haven’t typically talked about problems without presenting solutions.  You may have been surprised to see us discussing all of these issues with “today’s” revenue management systems, painting such a dire picture of the state of [...]

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The changing role of the revenue manager

Over the last several weeks, The Analytic Hospitality Executive has been exploring why we feel that today’s revenue management systems aren’t working anymore.  Two weeks ago, Kelly wrote about how the market has changed.  Last week, I wrote about why revenue management analytics are becoming outdated.  Today, I’m going to [...]

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Why revenue management analytics are becoming outdated

Over the last several weeks, The Analytic Hospitality Executive has been exploring why we feel that today’s revenue management systems aren’t working anymore.  Today, I’m going to delve into the limitations prevalent in today’s revenue management solutions.  Before we review the common limitations in revenue management systems, it’s important to [...]

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