The client:

A luxury boutique hotel in a prime location in London.

A range of best of breed hotel systems was in place. Senior management felt that too much effort was required to manage these systems leaving little time for strategy and commercial planning. Furthermore a new revenue manager had just started who was new to the luxury market.

 

The Challenge:

• Review the existing systems set-up
• Recommend improvements to facilitate more effective revenue management processes
• Improve Revenue Performance & Positioning
• Train a new revenue manager.

 

Approach:

A systems audit was completed to review the main hotel systems:

• Property Management System
• Revenue Management System
• Central Reservations System
• Online Booking Engine
• Channel Manager
• Rate Shopping Tool

A series of interviews was held with key team members followed by recommendation write up and on site presentation of the findings.

 

Some of the Findings:

Moore Hotel Consulting identified the following challenges:

Systems: A number of systems were not interfaced thus leading to the same tasks being performed on multiple systems, costing precious time & effort

Pricing: Inconsistent Rate Strategy with too few rates loaded and ongoing rate parity issues

Inventory: too many room categories with low inventory resulting in inventory gridlocks and lack of availability

Web Customer Journey: inconsistent and confusing offering with duplicate products being offered resulting in poor web-booking conversion

Forecasting: Done only by total monthly numbers not by day and segment, therefore not representing true demand.

Segmentation: Inconsistent use and set-up of market segmentation

Competitors: Invalid competitor set selection

 

Recommendations:

The recommendations were split into a number of phases over a 5 months period, with the option for the hotel to implement these independently or with the help of Moore Hotel Consulting. Our services were retained intensively over a 3 months period and strategically for a further 2 months.

 

Immediate Corrections:

• Configuration update and sequencing of room types in the PMS to improve conversion and customer journey on the web
• Sequencing of room types and rates to facilitate effective selling and easier operational management.
• Configuration update of the Revenue Management System with full calibration and training.
• Set up of Daily, Weekly, Monthly Tasks
• Update of the Channel manager
• Market Segmentation Alignment
• Commission processing set-up
• Training of Revenue Manager on luxury segment and induction to all relevant systems and benchmarking tools.

 

Within 2 months

• Implementation of Decision Upload from RMS to PMS, CRS, GDS & Channel Manager
• Forecast by Day and Market Segment
• Competitor Set re-alignment

 

After 2 months

• 2 Way Interface between CRS & PMS
• Change of Online booking engine

 

Results within 3 months:

11 % Occupancy increase year on year

9 % Average rate increase year on year