3 ways to leverage your hotel’s PMS data for Revenue Management success

And when it comes to data, there's no source more important than your Property Management System (PMS).

Your PMS is the beating heart of your hotel operations, tracking everything from reservations and check-ins to hotel room rates and billing. But it's also a treasure trove of data that can be used to optimize your revenue and distribution strategies, and your hotel’s performance overall. The question is, are you tapping into its full potential?

To ensure you are maximizing your PMS data, in this blog post, we explore some of the important discoveries you can make buried away in your PMS data - data that, when used effectively, will ensure that you are delivering on your KPIs and growing your bottom line.

Identify your business drivers: Key factors impacting your hotel's revenue

The first secret to unlocking the full potential of your PMS data is to identify your business drivers.

Business drivers are the key factors that impact your hotel's revenue and profitability. This on-the-books data will make up the foundation for a large number of strategic business decisions you need to make.

Here are some of the key drivers you should be able to record and find in your PMS:

• Market segment - The category of the market, grouping of rate codes, to which the reservation belongs, such as transient, group, etc.

• Rate code - The PMS rate code assigned to the reservation, such as BARBB, CORP1, etc.

• Room type - The rooms being consumed and their associated rate

• Channel - The distribution channel used to make the reservation

• Country - The country from which the guest is traveling

• Day of week stays - The days of the week for which the reservation is made

• Length of stay (LOS) - The number of room nights booked as part of the reservation

• Lead time - The amount of time in advance the reservation is made

• Company - Whether the reservation is linked to a company, potentially one you have already prospected for a negotiated rate

• Agency - The travel agent who made the reservation, such as CWT, Booking.com, etc.

Once you have identified your business drivers, you can use this information to optimize your pricing, availability, LOS, and room type strategies.

For instance, if you know that your hotel's retail BAR-driven occupancy is higher on weekends, that's a great opportunity to adjust your pricing strategy and bump up your rates on weekends to capture more revenue.

By pinpointing these drivers, you can also get a better sense of which guest segments are most profitable for your hotel. Maybe you discover that your corporate guests are bringing in more revenue than your leisure guests.

Armed with that knowledge, you can focus your sales and marketing efforts on attracting more corporate guests or find ways to enhance your leisure offering.

In addition, understanding your business drivers can help you optimize your distribution strategies. If you find that direct bookings generate more revenue than bookings through online travel agencies (OTAs), it makes sense to prioritize direct bookings.

When you take a closer look at your guest data, you can start to see patterns and trends that reveal which guests are most likely to be interested in additional services or amenities.

You can then target upsell opportunities that are priced appropriately, boosting your revenue and giving your guests an even better experience.

To guarantee you're analyzing your data accurately, it's important to establish clear naming conventions for things like rate codes, channel codes, and other data points. When your data is organized and labeled consistently, you can be confident that any insights you gain from your analysis are based on accurate information

It's crucial that all of this data is captured at the front desk. Keeping a record of a guest's country of origin or using the correct rate code for guests will help to ensure the next steps in your decision-making are founded on accurate data.

Maintaining clean record keeping and capturing accurate information will allow the necessary visibility to develop accurate commercial strategies.

Ultimately, driving commercial growth is not only about filling your hotel as much as possible but also strategically leveraging the highest-rated business to develop an optimized mix of business. This will allow you to maximize your revenue on a daily basis to find incremental gains for growth over the weeks, months, and years.

Measure your pickup and pace to adjust your Revenue Management strategy

How many rooms have we added since yesterday? How is this performance better than the same time last year? These are key questions that you will likely have to regularly answer; answers that are all found in your PMS data.

Before you can make any strategy decisions, you need some context. What business did you pickup yesterday and how does it affect your current business mix? How is it pacing against your forecast or against the same time last year? Perhaps you only had pickup in your static rate segments and if you were to raise your rates in dynamic segments, you would end up depressing the pick-up on your higher-yielding rates.

Alternatively, you might spot that your pick-up is filling up too quickly from lower-paying segments or rate codes. If so, you could consider setting up inventory or LOS restrictions to ensure that you're not selling too many rooms at lower rates.

Your pick-up is something you should look at daily, and when looking at it, it's also important to assess and understand the type of business you have picked up. Analyzing your pickup and pace can help you make informed decisions about pricing and inventory management.

For example, if you notice that pick-up is slow for a particular date, you can adjust your commercial strategy to incentivize bookings. Similarly, if you notice that pace is slower than the same period in the previous year, you can adjust your marketing efforts to attract more bookings.

With this information you can then begin to be more strategic in how you approach certain dates, whether it’s through inventory and pricing decisions, promotional and distribution strategies, or sales and marketing campaigns.

Optimizing strategies for long-term success in hotel Revenue Management

To ensure that you are meeting your revenue goals, it's important to establish clear KPIs and track them regularly.

By monitoring metrics like Revenue Per Available Room(RevPAR), Average Daily Rate (ADR), and occupancy rates, you can quickly identify areas where you need to adjust your strategies to achieve your revenue targets.

With detailed visibility of PMS data, that you can leverage effectively, you can drive commercial success through optimizing pricing, distribution, forecasting, room type consumption, management of booking windows, unique special event strategies, or cancellation policies.

Pricing optimization involves analyzing historical data to identify trends and patterns in market segments, rate codes, and room types that drive the most revenue. With this information, and by using dynamic pricing, you can adjust your room pricing to meet market demand and yield the most from your highest-rated segments.

Similarly, distribution optimization involves analyzing historical data to identify the channels that drive the most revenue, such as OTA channels, direct booking channels, and metasearch channels.

By focusing on these channels and reducing reliance on less profitable ones, you can then adjust your distribution strategies to ensure you are not losing out and maximizing those that bring you the most revenue.

Effective Revenue Management involves categorizing revenue streams into a hierarchy from the most granular level of individual reservations into rate codes and then into segments. From here you can project expected revenue based on past performance and market trends.

By allocating resources to different areas of the business based on strategic priorities and expected ROI, you can optimize efficiency of the inventory you have available and maximize revenue for your hotel.

To develop strategies for lasting success, it is essential you get your forecasting right.

If you forecast accurately, you can anticipate future performance meaning you will be able to adjust your inventory and pricing strategies accordingly. To create accurate forecasts, it's vital you understand the factors that can impact demand, such as events in the area, seasonality, and economic conditions.

Your PMS hosts all types of historical data and trends you can use to inform your forecasting, ensuring your forecasts are up-to-date and relevant. You can then adjust pricing and distribution strategies to maximize revenue during periods of high demand and minimize revenue loss during periods of low demand, while still factoring in variable market conditions to ensure your strategy meets market demand effectively.

To ensure that your forecasts remain accurate and relevant, it's best to review and adjust them regularly. By doing so, you can make the necessary adjustments and ensure that your property is always operating at peak efficiency, optimizing revenue opportunities and maximizing profitability in line with your KPIs.

Unlocking your PMS data with Business Intelligence

While having PMS data is one thing, leveraging your PMS data effectively is the real key to maximizing revenue and profitability in today's fast-paced hospitality industry.

To truly drive revenue, you need the right information in front of the right people, enabling your entire team to make data-driven decisions on the fly. That's where Lighthouse Business Intelligence comes in.

Lighthouse Business Intelligence brings your PMS data to life by putting the right information front and center with a few clicks, saving hours of time on data collection and analysis.

This fully automated, brand-neutral hotel software enables your entire team to make more informed, data-driven decisions with confidence. With real-time insights into the beating heart of your business, you can streamline your decision-making and focus on the areas that are business-critical, while identifying new opportunities to grow your revenue.

Business Intelligence gives you both a high-level consolidated perspective and granular visibility into the trends and performance of each component of your business so that you can see exactly which market segment, rate plan, or other key business driver is working - or not.

Whether you’re preparing for an RFP or just a weekly revenue call, Business Intelligence streamlines all your PMS data into one easy-to-use dashboard with endless drill-down options, to serve the whole commercial team.

Summary

Your hotel's PMS data is a gold mine of valuable information that can help you fine-tune your revenue and distribution strategies.

By identifying your business drivers, measuring your pickup and pace, and reviewing and adjusting your strategies, you can make educated decisions that set your property up for success.

So, take the time to analyze your PMS data and identify key insights that can help you optimize your revenue and distribution strategies. Set clear KPIs and track them regularly, and don't be afraid to make adjustments along the way to hit your revenue targets.

With the right information and tools at your disposal, you can unlock the full potential of your PMS data and drive sustained business success for your property.

Leveraging a Business Intelligence tool gives you a competitive edge, as it provides nearly instantaneous insights extracted from the wealth of data within your PMS, that everyone on your team has access to, to make smart commercial decisions.