Let’s face it—handling finances probably isn’t why you got into the business of running a small or independent hotel. For top-notch small hotel owners and operators, their focus is on hospitality and delivering an exceptional guest experience. While ensuring guests have an amazing stay is crucial in the hospitality industry, nailing revenue management for hotels is just as vital for your success.
If the prospect of sitting down to review your finances fills you with dread—nevermind building a revenue management strategy—you’re not alone, especially if numbers aren’t your strong suit. Revenue management for hotels is no easy task, but with the right revenue management tools, you can easily understand what opportunities are available to you, see your soft spots, and unlock even more success (and profit).
That’s where hotel revenue management software comes in.
Hotel revenue management software automates and streamlines a number of key revenue management tasks, making it easy for even the busiest hotel owners to keep track of their finances, spot opportunities, and pull in more income.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at five powerful revenue management tools to look for in your hotel revenue management software, including:
- Goal setting and forecasting tools
- Reports to monitor your progress
- Smart suggestions for how to earn more revenue
- Surge alerts to notify you when booking activity increases
- Automated rate changes so you can take advantage of surges in booking activity
Let’s get started.
1. Goal setting and forecasting tools
If you ask any business owner what their goals are, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll say “make more money”. Informal goals like this are a great starting point, but if you’re serious about “making more money”, taking the extra time to formalize your goals is a crucial step you can’t skip.
With an all-in-one property management system (PMS) for small hotels, you can create and formalize goals for all your key performance metrics in just a few clicks, including:
- ADR
- Occupancy
- Revenue, and more.
Knowing what you want to achieve is a critical first step, but it’s just as important to determine a timeline for achieving them, as well as what timelines you can expect under different sets of circumstances. That’s why hotel revenue management software should do more than just help you set goals—it should also be able to:
- Clearly break down each goal by month, week, and day, or even by weekend and weekday for maximum visibility
- Predict results with real-time revenue forecasts tailored to each goal.
With an all-in-one PMS that includes revenue management tools for hotels, you can set goals and forecast results in minutes.
2. Reports to monitor your progress
Once your goals are set and you have a timeline in place, it’s time to take action and watch your progress. But how do you know if you’re actually on your way to achieving your goals?
To know if your revenue management strategy is working, you need to consistently monitor your progress, review important financial metrics, and analyze the results—a task that often just isn’t feasible for busy small hotel operators.
An all-in-one PMS is the key to painlessly monitoring your progress. Instead of spending valuable time digging up numbers and creating reports, your hotel revenue management software will compile them for you and deliver them straight to your inbox daily, weekly, or monthly.
With innRoad’s revenue management tools, you can quickly access a number of helpful revenue reports, including:
- A quick overview at your current performance and key operational data in our Daily Flash
- Get automatic daily, weekly, or monthly Performance Digest sent right to your inbox
- Want to dive in deeper? Compare your properties performance from your current year to a prior year based on rooms sold, occupancy, revenue, ADR, and revPAR, and see what changes you need to make to reach your goals in our Pace Report
- Performance comparisons with comprehensive year-over-year evaluations
- Your property’s daily occupancy percentage, ADR, revenue, RevPAR, cancellations, and total available room nights so you can unearth new opportunities to earn more revenue
3. Suggestions for how to earn more revenue
Goals set? Check. Progress monitoring in place? Check. Now you can start making changes that will help you reach your goals on your timeline.
The best hotel revenue management software does more than just create a framework for you to succeed—it offers smart suggestions to help you get there. For example:
- If you set goal and performance alerts, innRoad’s PMS will monitor your property, alert you when certain conditions are met, and suggest opportunities to adjust your rates so you can generate more revenue.
- Our demand management tools will highlight days when you could make adjustments to increase occupancy and revenue so critical opportunities don’t fall through the cracks.
4. Surge alerts to notify you when booking activity increases
Generating demand for travel may be difficult, but taking advantage of demand that already exists shouldn’t be.
When you have your finger on the pulse of your real-time booking activity, you can adjust rates quickly in order to maximize your revenue. Surge alerts are a powerful revenue management tool that make it easy to jump on unexpected surges in booking demand. Instead of constantly monitoring booking activity, you can get notifications sent to your phone whenever your property receives multiple bookings for the same date in a short period of time.
With innRoad’s hotel revenue management software, you’ll get instant notifications when booking activity increases, and you can adjust your rates in just a few clicks. You can even automate your rate changes if you’re looking for a totally hands-off approach.
5. Automated rate changes so you can take advantage of surges in booking activity
Busy hotel owners can’t always be sitting behind their computer watching bookings roll in. Whether you’re helping guests, cleaning a room, or at a meeting offsite, you can still take advantage of opportunities to earn more money with revenue management tools like automatic rate changes.
Automatic rate changes are one of the most powerful features to look for in hotel revenue management software. With an all-in-one PMS like innRoad, you can automatically adjust room rates in real-time in response to booking activity, such as when you receive a surge alert or reach a specific occupancy target, without even picking up your phone or clicking a mouse. All you have to do is set up the triggers and your PMS software will handle the rest.
BONUS: Revenue Generating Ideas for Hotels
Independent hotel owners are always searching for new and creative ways to maximize their revenue-generating opportunities. Here are two suggestions to set you on the path to profits:
Develop an up-sell strategy
Making the most out of your existing revenue streams is often the fastest way to new profits, and developing an effective upselling strategy can help unlock value that already exists in your hotel’s most valuable assets.
Both online and in-person, small hotels should present guests with upgrades and add-ons that will enhance their stay, such as booking a room with a superior window view, greater square footage, a different bed type, in-room amenities, early check-in, specialized services, and more.
With the right PMS, guests can book upsells and add-ons either during booking or during online check-in. Not only does this give them even more control over their stay, but reserving (and paying for) these add-ons in advance will mean less admin work for your front desk staff once they arrive.
Create partnerships and special packages
Establishing strategic partnerships with local community organizations, such as tourism boards, restaurants, attractions, and large festivals, can provide small hotels with the power and marketing muscle to capture greater annual profits by helping them reach more potential guests.
For example, partnering with a local food and wine festival as their official lodging sponsor and offering special rates for attendees can help secure guaranteed room nights and revenue.
By establishing the right partnerships and special packages, hotels can thrive with the increased exposure to new travelers and create new revenue streams that lead to record profits.
Checking Out
We get it—managing your small hotel’s revenue and finances is a hassle. But with the right revenue management tools, revenue management for hotels doesn’t have to be a total drag. Hotel revenue management software like innRoad’s all-in-one PMS can make every aspect of managing your money easier, from booking to checkout.
If you’re ready to upgrade your revenue management strategy, look for hotel revenue management software with these key revenue management tools:
- Goal setting and forecasting tools
- Reports to monitor your progress
- Smart suggestions for how to earn more revenue
- Surge alerts to notify you when booking activity increases
- Automated rate changes so you can take advantage of surges in booking activity
