Are you one of the many revenue management teams that have shifted to an above-property approach? Above-property revenue management describes teams that work from a centralized office (or perhaps remotely) and support multiple properties, rather than working from and supporting one designated hotel. If you answered yes – this is for you.
At Revenue Analytics, we pride ourselves on having created the first revenue management system built specifically for above-property revenue management: N2Pricing RMS. Instead of a legacy system designed to support a single property and retrofitted to manage a portfolio of properties, it was built top-to-bottom with the unique needs of above-property revenue managers in mind.
You may be thinking: that’s easy to say, but what does it really mean in practice? How would it tangibly impact your team’s day-to-day, or your company’s bottom line?
Our ultimate goal – beyond boosting profit and efficiency for your business – is to take your day from:
Less time spent working pricing for each hotel in your portfolio every day, and more time spent focusing on strategic activities – the fun, important stuff where you can really make an impact. But don’t just take our word for it – let us walk you through a day in the life with N2Pricing.
A Day in the Life
Take it from the top (literally)
Picture this: it’s a Monday morning. You sit down at your desk with a freshly brewed cup of coffee (or maybe a hot tea, or a Red Bull – pick your poison), and you log on to your computer. After doing a cursory check through your emails and sending those “Good morning!” messages on Teams, you fire up your RMS.
And… then what?
As a revenue manager tasked with overseeing a portfolio of properties, knowing where to start can be a daunting task. Do you select one hotel from your portfolio of properties, and start working pricing changes sequentially? When you’ve made it through a certain stretch of days there, do you move on to the next hotel?
If you’re working with a legacy RMS built to support on-property Directors of Revenue Management (DORMs), that’s likely exactly what you’re doing. And if you only had one hotel to manage – like those on-property DORMs – that would be just fine. But in today’s environment, the average revenue manager has 11 properties in their portfolio, and this way of working is both unscalable and unsustainable.
So, let’s try this again.
You sit down at your desk. You take a fortifying sip of coffee. You open up N2Pricing.
And then, quite simply, you take it from the top.
N2Pricing’s core workspace is a prioritized list of revenue opportunities that encompasses every hotel in your portfolio for the next 365 days. This list is both location and date-agnostic and is instead sorted by the size of the revenue opportunity. You guessed it: the biggest ones are at the top, so that’s where you should start, working your way down.
What exactly do we mean by “revenue opportunity?” A revenue opportunity is the gap between how much money you would make if you did what the system is suggesting versus if you kept the price where it’s currently set. It’s a monetary value attached to the optimal recommendation provided by the system, and, in short, is where you can have the biggest revenue impact.
So, you’ll start at the top of the list, reviewing the recommendations N2 has put forth, knowing that these are a valuable place for you to spend your time because they will directly impact your bottom line. You can review each recommended change as well as the context around it, and then choose whether or not to accept it.
This dashboard is designed to show you exactly where to spend your energy – on intuitive, quick, and impactful work – so you can move on with your day.
Managing by Exception
N2Pricing allows each user to set automation thresholds at levels they are comfortable with – plus or minus 10%, for example. This means that if you set a price for a given property and day, and then N2 works its magic and realizes that you’d capture more revenue if you increased that price, that update will run automatically if it is within the 10% increase threshold. You will only be asked to review a suggested price change if it falls outside the bounds of the threshold you’ve set. If N2 is suggesting a price increase of 13%, it will show up in the dashboard shown above for your review.
This is exceptions management: where manually reviewing a price change becomes the exception, not the rule, thanks to automation.
While N2 relies heavily on automation, it’s automation that is built to enhance the user’s abilities, not replace them. Users are fully in control of their own automation levels, and they can change them over time as they become more comfortable – no all-or-nothing automation here. N2’s goal is to free the user up from certain manual, repetitive tasks so that they are free to use their expertise to focus on more strategic activities.
Not to be dramatic, but we want to change your life
Revenue managers are an absolutely critical part of any successful hospitality organization. But in order to perform to the best of their ability, they need the right tools – including technology that is built to support the way their business and team is structured.
Our goal is to empower above-property revenue managers to efficiently and confidently manage their portfolio of properties with ease. But beyond that, we want to make their day-to-day better. We want to free them up from manual, repetitive tasks, give them a seat at the commercial strategy table, and enable them to have improved work/life balance.
Ready to take N2Pricing for a spin and see how it could work for your unique portfolio of properties? We’d love to walk you through it, and to share the success that other above-property teams have found using this one-of-a-kind tool. Set up a 1:1 with an N2Pricing expert today.
We covered the day-to-day here, but we know a revenue team’s job is even bigger than that. To see how N2 supports revenue managers in bigger-picture activities beyond the daily to-do’s, check out part 2 in this series – N2Pricing™ RMS: Beyond the Day-to-Day.
Or, for a better understanding of our driving principles – and what’s really in it for you and your team – skip to part 3: N2Pricing RMS: Behind the “Why”
