Total Revenue Management is a much-discussed concept in hospitality, but in reality it has produced a great deal of confusion. Put simply, it is the revenue management of all revenue sources in a hotel. From your RevPAR and GOPPAR to the hotel restaurant, and from the bar, spa and gym to activities and excursions, it encompasses every single hotel income stream.

Let's dive in and see how this can be done ...

The rooms of your hotel are one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal as a revenue manager. It allows you to segment and position the hotel product, differentiating yourself from the competition. If segmented correctly it also allows you to build a revenue management strategy based on a comprehensive demand based yield or rate grid. 

Following the global outpoor on International Women’s day last March 8 (2019), hoteliers around the world should take some time to look into a very important market segment, the solo female traveler. Tapping into and capitalizing on new and growing niches such as solo and experience-focused travel has become a major asset for hotel manager, but also to open up new revenue streams. “Female-friendly” is one such niche, which is now experiencing considerable growth in the hospitality industry.

Adapt and evolve: forget about practice

In his book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell popularized what became known as the 10,000-hour rule, by documenting the lives of successful people such as Bill Gates, Mozart and the Beatles. "Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness", he wrote, inspired by the work of Daniel Levitin, the neurologist who scientifically proved that "10,000 hours of practice are required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert in anything".

The theory is fascinating, though, not always reliable, especially in our field of hotel revenue management and distribution, where adjectives such as disruptive are frequently (over)used and success is measured more on innovation rather than consolidation. A defining factor here is the ability to adapt and evolve!

Some of you might have noticed that the topics of our blog posts have been gradually changing over the last few years. From a pure revenue management focus we have strayed into areas of operations and finance. And even a few on concept and design. You might think we have fallen of course. But all to the contrary, we are exactly on the path we set-out when we launched Xotels back in 2006 ...

Over the last few years there has been much discussion in the the world of hotel revenue management on managing GOPPAR and NREVPAR over only REVPAR. Understanding the cost of distribution is vital to the financial success of every hotel. For this we would need our systems to support us in registering and calculating such costs. Unfortunately many hotel Property Management Systems (PMS) have not yet evolved sufficiently in this area.