Recovery Connections: Winning With Multi-Property Revenue Management

During a Recovery Connections session on Nov. 11 — part of HSMAI’s Road to Recovery 2020 program — IHG’s Sharon Paine, Aimbridge Hospitality’s Angela Englett, and Hilton’s Ivan Calil joined Red House Strategy’s David Warman to discuss how to implement revenue management for multiple properties, how to manage time, and much more.

TAKEAWAYS

Multi-property revenue management can work for all hotels. “From my experience, this works well for everyone,” said Paine, IHG’s vice president of revenue management. “Hotels get access to the best revenue managers and the cost is much lower than it would be if they have to have someone full-time. They only have to pay for what they use. And for the revenue managers, it’s a great experience. It is a great learning environment where they get to deal with a lot of different types of hotels to hone their skills. Then they can move to more complex hotels as they grow their skills. I haven’t found a hotel that it doesn’t work well for.”

But some hotels are more challenging than others: “Our most challenging are the larger hotels,” said Calil, senior director of Hilton’s revenue management consolidated center for the Americas. “One hotel in New York that we support has more than 2,000 rooms. There are multiple layers there. We’re not doing everything from Dallas, but we support and have a place in the equation. A hotel that size needs more than one person. We figured out a way to make that work. The common thread between all our hotels is that there’s a high degree of trust. The communication element of not being on property is immensely important. We try to get to the hotels quarterly and build the relationship. You have to have that relationship, and it’s hard to do that if you’re never there.”

Time management is key to managing multiple properties: “I don’t think the revenue mangers always understand the importance of this,” said Englett, Aimbridge’s corporate director of revenue management. “Our team manages multiple brands in multiple cities and people are usually only experts in one or two. The ability to know you need input from your hotel team or peers’ brand knowledge is critical. One of the biggest time wasters, especially for a remote person, is trying to find all the answers on your own. You should seek out answers as you start, on your own, but only for a reasonable amount of time. It’s not a good use of your time to spend two hours looking for an answer when you could quickly ask someone with more knowledge on the topic and allow time in your day to work on other strategies.”

Recovery Connections is a weekly program with sales, marketing, and revenue optimization tracks that mix best-practices presentations with interactive small-group discussions. Sign up to watch a recording of this session, access an on-demand library — and register for the next session, Maximizing and Measuring Your Marketing Efforts,” at 2 p.m. EST on Nov. 18.


Categories: Revenue Management
Insight Type: Presentations