Hotel Revenue Quotes

Your USP is never what you think it is. It is what your customer think it is.

ahead of ICAO audit By Tarun Shukla | 527 words New Delhi: India's civil aviation regulator has decided to restructure its safety board and hire airline safety professionals ahead of an audit by the UN's aviation watchdog ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced its intent, and advertised the positions on its website. ICAO told the Indian regulator recently that it would come down to India to conduct an audit, its third in just over a decade, Mint reported on 12 February. Previous ICAO audits had highlighted the paucity of safety inspectors in DGCA. After its 2006 and 2012 audits, ICAO had placed the country in its list of 13 worst-performing nations. US regulator Federal Aviation Authority followed ICAO's 2012 audit with its own and downgraded India, effectively barring new flights to the US by Indian airlines. FAA is expected to visit India in the summer to review its downgrade. The result of the ICAO and FAA audits will have a bearing on the ability of existing Indian airlines to operate more flights to the US and some international destinations and on new airlines' ability to start flights to these destinations. The regulator plans to hire three directors of safety on short-term contracts to be part of the accident investigation board, according to the information on DGCA's website. This is first time the DGCA is hiring external staff for this board, which is critical to ascertain the reasoning for any crashes, misses or other safety related events in the country. These officers, the DGCA said on its website, must have at least 12 years of experience in aviation, specifically on the technical aspects, and have a degree in aeronautical engineering. DGCA has been asked by international regulators to hire at least 75 flight inspectors. It has only 51. India's private airlines offer better pay and perks to inspectors compared with DGCA. The aviation ministry told DGCA in January to speed up the recruitment and do whatever was necessary to get more inspectors on board, a government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. DGCA has also announced it will hire flight operations inspectors as consultants on a short-term basis for a period of one year with a fixed remuneration of `1.25 lakh per month. "There will be a review after six months and subsequent continuation will be decided on the basis of outcome of the review," DGCA said in its advertisement. The remuneration of `1.25 lakh is higher than the salary of many existing DGCA officers. In its 2006 audit, ICAO said it found that "a number of final reports of accident and serious incident investigations carried out by the DGCA were not sent to the (member) states concerned or to ICAO when it was applicable". DGCA had also "not established a voluntary incident reporting system to facilitate the collection of safety information that may not otherwise be captured by the state's mandatory incident reporting system". In response, DGCA "submitted a corrective action plan which was never implemented", said Mohan Ranganthan, an aviation safety analyst and former member of government appointed safety council, said of DGCA. He added that the regulator will be caught out this time. Restructuring DGCA is the key to better air safety, said former director general of civil aviation M.R. Sivaraman. Hotel industry growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16: Icra By P.R. Sanjai | 304 words Mumbai: Rating agency Icra Ltd on Monday said Indian hotel industry revenue growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16, driven by a modest increase in occupancy and small increase in rates. "Industry wide revenues are expected to grow by 5-8% in 2014-15. Over the next 12 months, Icra expects RevPAR (revenue per available room) to improve by 7-8% driven by up to 5% pickup in occupancies and 2-3% growth in average room rates (ARR)," Icra said. Further, margins are expected to remain largely flat for 2014-15 while

Tough times brought on by the Gulf War were testing such assumptions, forcing us to consider our response. We needed to come up with new ideas, do more with less, make short-term gains through greater efficiency, and prepare for long-term gains. That meant cutting every dollar possible in overhead and procedures while maintaining or boosting spending in three vital competitive areas. Number one was product quality. World leadership demanded that we maintain world-class quality, and recession is generally a period when material and labor prices are lowest and room occupancies are down. So we renovated and refurbished at such normally busy properties as the Inn on the Park in London and The Pierre in New York at a time when revenue would be little affected and customers least inconvenienced. That meant we were spending when others were retrenching. We had followed that strategy in 1981-82, and the rebound from that recession had given us nine years of steady growth. I thought the odds were in our favor to score the same way again. The second area was marketing. It’s tempting during recession to cut back on consumer advertising. At the start of each of the last three recessions, the growth of spending on such advertising had slowed by an average of 27 percent. But consumer studies of those recessions had showed that companies that didn’t cut their ads had, in the recovery, captured the most market share. So we didn’t cut our ad budget. In fact, we raised it modestly to gain brand recognition, which continued advertising sustains. As studies show, it’s much easier to sustain momentum than restart it. Third, we eased the workload and reduced costs by simplifying reporting methods. We set up a new system that allowed each hotel to recalculate its forecast, with minimal input, to year’s end, then send it in electronically along with a brief monthly commentary.

time. A new interdisciplinary community of scientists, environmentalists, health researchers, therapists, and artists is coalescing around an idea: neuroconservation. Embracing the notion that we treasure what we love, those concerned with water and the future of the planet now suggest that, as we understand our emotional well-being and its relationship to water, we are more motivated to repair, restore, and renew waterways and watersheds. Indeed, even as water is threatened, or perhaps because of the threat, public interest in water is very high. We treasure it—or, perhaps more accurately, we spend our treasure to access water for pleasure, recreation, and healing. Wealthy people pay a premium for houses on water, and the not so wealthy pay extra for rentals and hotel rooms sited at the oceanfront, on rivers, or at lakes. Those into outdoor sports, especially fishers and hunters, are fiercely protective of it and have founded numerous environmental organizations designed to protect water habitats for fish, birds, and animals. Over the last two decades, spas have become a sort of modern equivalent to ancient healing wells. As an industry, spas are a global business worth about $60 billion, and they generate another $200 billion in tourism. In 2013, there were 20,000 (up from 4,000 in 1999) spas in the United States producing an annual revenue of over $14 billion (a figure that has grown every year for fifteen years, including those of the recession), and tallying 164 million spa visits by clients.12 Ecotourism provides water adventures and guided trips, often in kayaks, rafts, or canoes. Ocean and river cruises are big business. Cities are creating urban architectures focused on waterscapes, happiness, and sustainability. Museums and public memorials of all sorts often feature water to foster reflection and meditation. And many communities are working to transform industrialized and polluted waterfronts into spaces that are pleasant, environmentally sound, and livable.

Michael’s biggest stroke of genius, though, might have been his recognition that Disney was sitting on tremendously valuable assets that they hadn’t yet leveraged. One was the popularity of the parks. If they raised ticket prices even slightly, they would raise revenue significantly, without any noticeable impact on the number of visitors. Building new hotels at Walt Disney World was another untapped opportunity,

Doctors must spend large amounts of time making the business end of their practice work, giving priority to the procedures that generate the most revenue. Hospitals are run like hotels, aiming to fill their beds and leave little spare capacity.

Creating the pop-ups—doing something that was a pure reflection of my passions—changed my life. The core idea and drive to execute what I envisioned enabled me to realize my potential for the first time. That shift in how I approached the world supercharged all other areas of my existence. I went from being a struggling entrepre- neur to heading up a food and beverage business with $150 million in annual revenue to chief marketing officer of a publicly-traded hotel company to head of brand and experience at a billion-dollar startup in less than five years. And not only did the pop-up restaurant expe- rience provide me with the opportunity to share my creativity on a large scale while supporting my family, it also gave me the gift of fulfillment and the confidence to trust my instincts and enjoy the journey as much as, if not more than, the result.

Eventually, the current airline industry strategy of shameless fee charging is going to collapse under its own weight. It’s the depressing result of a product mindset that prioritizes add-ons and revenue extraction and devalues customers. What could a flying experience look like in the future? Well, to start with, it might also include cars and trains. Maybe United sends you a cobranded Uber car with a monitor that includes all your hotel and flight details, a drop-down menu to preselect all your entertainment and dining options, and light rail information for your destination city. Maybe that car’s arrival time at your house is synchronized to your flight’s actual departure time. Maybe you can start binge-watching Narcos in the car and pick it up on the plane where you left off. Maybe when you arrive at the airport, a service like Clear can speed you through security lines with a swipe of your boarding pass and a thumb scan, because all your standard ID information has already been paired with your biometric details. Maybe all these services could be wrapped up in a flat annual frequent-flier membership plan.

What’s the first thing you do now before you visit a new restaurant for the first time or book a hotel room online? You probably ask a friend for a recommendation or you check out the reviews online. Now more than ever, the story your customers tell about you is a big part of your story. Word of mouth is accelerated and amplified. Trust is built digitally beyond the village. Reputations are built and lost in a moment. Opinions are no longer only shared one to one; they are broadcasted one to many, through digital channels. Those opinions live on as clues to your story. The cleanliness of your hotel bathrooms is no longer a secret. Guests’ unedited photos are displayed alongside a hotel brochure’s digital glossies. TripAdvisor ratings are proudly displayed by hotels and often say more about the standards guests can expect than do other, more established star ratings systems, such as the Forbes Travel Guide‘s ratings. Once-invisible brands and family-run hotels have had their businesses turned around by the stories their customers tell about them. “With 50 million reviews and counting, [TripAdvisor] is shaking the travel industry to its core.” —Nathan Labenz It turns out that people are more likely to trust the stories other people tell about you than to trust the well-lit Photoshopped images in your brochure. Reputation is how your idea and brand story are spread. A survey conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey found that six in ten cruise customers said “they were less likely to book a cruise that received only one star.” There is no marketing more powerful than what one person says to another to recommend your brand. “Don’t waste money on expensive razors.” “Nice hotel; shame about the customer service.” In a world where online reputation can increase a hotel’s occupancy and revenue, trust has become a marketing metric. “[R]eputation has a real-world value.” —Rachel Botsman When we were looking to book a quiet, off-the-beaten-track hotel in Bali, the first place we looked wasn’t with the travel agents or booking.com. I jumped online and found that one of the area’s best-rated hotels on tripadvisor.com wasn’t a five-star resort but a modest family-run, three-star hotel that was punching well above its weight. This little fifteen-room hotel had more than 400 very positive reviews and had won a TripAdvisor Travellers Choice award. The reviews from the previous guests sealed the deal. The little hotel in Ubud was perfect. The reviews didn’t lie, and of course the place was fully booked with a steady stream of guests who knew where to look before taking a chance on a hotel room. Just a few years before, this $50-a-night hotel would have been buried amongst a slew of well-marketed five-star resorts. Today, thanks to a currency of trust, even tiny brands can thrive by doing the right thing and giving their customers a great story to tell.

The bureaucracy of a big company like Citi often led to bad policies. Such a large firm is basically forced to make decisions for a whole organization that don’t necessarily apply well to the individual business units. Is it better, one wonders, to have uniformity of authority in decision making at the expense of flexibility? It was a demonstration of the challenges of size, the difficulty of managing a large business with hundreds of disparate units. In the mid-2000s, for example, the firm developed new rules for air travel, insisting that employees reach their destinations on the cheapest fares available, even if that meant multiple connections to get to smaller cities. Saving money was not a bad inclination in an industry notorious for profligacy, but there was no flexibility in the rule, and so my assistant, Angela Murray, was engaged in frequent battles to make sure I could arrive at out-of-town meetings on time. If I had a ten o’clock morning meeting in Omaha to discuss a deal with a potential $6 million fee, Citi still insisted on saving a few hundred bucks by booking me on a flight that arrived in the afternoon, which meant I would miss the meeting unless I traveled the day before. And because those cheaper flights often required an overnight stay, more work hours were wasted as well as any potential savings, since the firm would have to pay for a hotel and meals. I knew for a fact that the policy was revenue-negative.

Il problema centrale, con la quasi totalità delle strategie di revenue management, è che il prezzo finale non è quasi mai la somma scientifica del valore intrinseco degli attributi unici della camera, ma – nella migliore delle ipotesi – un’approssimazione arbitraria influenzata da metriche volatili, se non addirittura da pregiudizi, stati emotivi e bias cognitivi.

Mentre i principali RMS AI-based sul mercato oggi possono prendere milioni di decisioni al giorno,16 il nostro cervello supera a fatica le 35.000.Ciò significa che, per avere la stessa accuratezza di un RMS, un singolo albergo dovrebbe assumere una squadra di 3.000 revenue manager, per un costo di oltre 200 milioni di euro l’anno.

Un RMS, si badi bene, non fa niente di più rispetto a un revenue manager umano: semplicemente lo fa in maniera più accurata, più veloce e a fronte di un “salario” molto più modesto.

Il modello di vendita ad attributi potrebbe rendere completamente obsoleto il concetto stesso di “room type” e, di conseguenza, riscrivere le regole del revenue management del futuro.

Negli anni Novanta, il lavoro dei revenue manager era principalmente quello di data crunching: dovevano dedicare molto tempo non solo ad aggregare i dati, ma anche a correggerli e normalizzarli, poiché provenivano da molte piattaforme diverse e non armonizzate. Tuttavia questo è un lavoro che può e deve essere svolto dalle macchine, non dagli esseri umani, lasciando più spazio al processo decisionale e alla strategia.

Du Pont had acquired only the rights to the hotel; in 1925 he bought the property from the Astors and promptly replaced some non-revenue-producing spaces with seventeen shops configured so that their entrances fronted on Fifth Avenue or Thirty-fourth Street, their back entrances on Peacock Alley.

But the Bellagio’s fountain, often mocked as a symbol of water excess in the arid Southwest, may in fact represent some of the highest-value water around. The 12 million gallons a year needed to keep it topped up starts as water too salty to drink, drawn from an old well that once irrigated the Dunes Hotel golf course. Twelve million gallons sounds like a lot, but it’s really just enough to irrigate eight acres of alfalfa in the Imperial Valley.3 Total revenue at the seven giant casino–resort hotels contiguous to the fountain, at the corner of Flamingo Road and South Las Vegas Boulevard—the heart of the famed Las Vegas Strip—is an estimated $3.6 billion.4 Include all of the hotel/casino operations in the greater Las Vegas metro area, and the total rises to $21 billion.5 That compares with total agricultural revenue of $1.9 billion in all of Imperial County.6 Imperial County’s farmers get ten times the water Las Vegas gets. Las Vegas makes ten times the money Imperial County farming does. Given the crowds lining the sidewalks for each one of the fountain’s dancing-water shows, the fountains must represent one of the most economically productive uses of water you’ll find in the West.

El aspecto clave del revenue management es la gestión de los precios, factor que, en principio, permite discriminar la demanda. Para poder determinar el éxito de la gestión de precios se puede utilizar el ratio de ingresos por habitación disponible (en inglés, RevPar, revenue per available room),

When uploading a photo of your hotel online, you are the eyes (and the wallet) of your future guests, so don’t take it lightly

In any modern hotel, having a centralized system is critical in order to increase efficiency, avoid time waste and reduce human error, therefore PMS must eventually connect to nearly all the software the hotel is using.

The extreme competitiveness in travel is slowly bringing search engines, OTAs and metasearch engines to converge towards an increasingly homogeneous model. The reason is simple, almost Darwinian: the model that will prove to be the most efficient in terms of scalability and efficiency for the end user is going to prevail.

A new dot.com bubble for AI? I doubt it. Companies do not invest in AI because it's hot, but because it is efficient

Let computers do what computers do best and let humans do what humans do best

AI is already mainstream. It's just not very visible

Between getting a fax room confirmation and being asked for passport by an animatronic velociraptor, there must be a healthy sweet spot in the use of technology in our industry

What we are likely to see is AI working together with humans, not AI replacing humans

We are the last generation with scraped knees. Next one will make no difference between on and off-line reality

If we want a real frictionless hotel experience, we need to have frictionless hotel infrastructures

Technology evolution is far from linear. It is very, very bumpy

Hyper-personalization" is the new "Direct Booking

When it comes to hotels, photography should be able to sell a specific product: your rooms

If everything is important, then nothing is important

Learn. Work. Create.

Technology made the life of professional photographers easier, but it also opened the doors for a generation of amateurs that do not know the industry. And, when it comes to commercial photography, this is the perfect recipe for disaster.