Is anyone successfully using yield management/revenue management

[Lee2014]

I use ResNexus's yield management function, and have so since I switched to it.
I have it programmed to raise my rates $10 a night when I'm 60% full, and another $10 when I get down to 2 rooms, and $10 more when I'm down to one.
Two-thirds of my rooms are pet-friendly, and it also bumps those rates $10 when my pet-friendly rooms are 70% full
on the flip side of the coin, it's also programmed to drop my rates $10 when it's less than a week out and I'm less than 20% occupied.
Ive occasionally set it to bump my rate for day-of reservations, but I've turned that off for now.
One nice thing about ResNexus's reports package is that it can tell me each month how much extra money I made due to yield management. It averages $90-140 a month depending on the season.
its worth noting that I still get into the system and manually adjust rates based on reservations. I should let the system do it, but habits die hard..

Phineas,
When you indicate that your report tells you how much extra money you made and the average is $90-140 a month is this just the extra income coming from price increases? I am wondering if it is accounting for additional booking you may be getting when you lower your rate?
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Phineas,
When you indicate that your report tells you how much extra money you made and the average is $90-140 a month is this just the extra income coming from price increases? I am wondering if it is accounting for additional booking you may be getting when you lower your rate?

No, it has no way of knowing whether a booking came through because of the lowered rate of it they would have booked anyway. It simply shows me that I generated an extra $150 of revenue through YM rates by displaying those bookings that were at a higher (or lower) rate than the initial rate because of YM.
And to answer another question, yes, I push it through to OTAs. Although right now ResNexus has a known bug that doesn't allow it to push the higher rates to MyAllocator. I've lost a few bucks to this bug and considering how much I'm bitching about it, I expect they'll have it fixed next week just to shut me up.
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Thanks. We are in an area with a lot of hotels and while we are not exactly comparable to a hotel, for about 60% of our business we are drawing from the same pool of customers. While I'm not trying to be the least expensive option, I also don't want to be overpriced, particularly if we are seeing soft demand. It makes me wonder that if during softer prices get lowered if we would not pick up some extra bookings.
In your scenario, if demand goes up and you rent a few more rooms at $10 or $20 more and your room rate is $150 you're making and extra $30 to $60. If another week the demand is a little lower and you lower the rates $10 or $20 and get just one booking you would not have gotten otherwise then you've made another $130-$140. This is the way it's been explained to me, so I'm probing in here to see if there is any reality to this or if anyone even has a way to measure it directly or indirectly.
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What I think works is the guest seeing a discounted rate online. Thus the ability to show a price with an X thru it and a lower price in its place.
I'm not sure having the lowest price in a series of prices works for the best.
It's a combination of things:

• Showing up at the top of a search
• Having the correct price for the guest
• Having good reviews
• Having a website that makes that guest want to stay

Just having the lowest price tends to bring in guests who are only booking on price. They may not care in the least what you are offering and so may treat you and your property as the way station they think you are.
I guess the best example is to use a hotel - the place I stayed in VT at $80/night treated me like a criminal. $80 is a cheap rate for that area. Spent $80/night in NY and was treated like an honored guest. $80 in that area is pricey. I'm not sure I made a point there. ;-)
I'm the first case we booked on price and location. Cheap price, good location. The second place we like the owners - not so cheap for the area, good location.
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Someone here once said, "You get what you charge." a spin off of the phase, "You get what you pay."
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Great points. In all of this I am not suggesting to charge the lowest price, but I'm also not suggesting to charge the highest price unless it is somehow warranted because you have some kind of special amenity which has perceived value to the potential customers which they are willing to pay a little more for. In my case if I am surrounded by a bunch of hotels, ranging from basic level economy motels, up through 5 star resorts, we will severely limit our potential customers if we do not monitor the price points of these various properties and try to keep our rates in the average of the mid level to upper level (3 -4 star) properties. Probably about 50% of our customer base will stay with us without even looking around much. These are regular and repeat customers who we give some preferential pricing to just out of loyalty. The other 50% are shopping around and those are the ones I'm trying to attract. They are the ones who may not know the difference between a B&B and a hotel or may not really care. Using yield management and pricing strategies I guess is what I'm trying to do or think about in order to better capture new customers in this space. Sure I wish 100% of my customer base fell into the first category, but for where I am that's not realistic so there is a degree of constant competition with the surrounding hotels.
To Duff's point even when the surrounding hotels lower their prices we will not go below a certain level because we do not want to "get what we charge for" at the lower end of the spectrum.
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Our pricing is mid range with the other inns. In the winter we can't compete on price with hotels that charge $69. In the summer, guests will pay the Hilton $299 and argue with me over $179. It's perception. They're a real business; we're just renting spare rooms.
I'm happy to let those folks go because they won't be happy here.
Oddly, I just had a call for a room for this weekend. Guests were OK with a b&b or they wouldn't have called. When they found out the Hilton is 15 feet from the railroad tracks they said that sounded good to them! No accounting for what makes people happy.
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Oddly, I just had a call for a room for this weekend. Guests were OK with a b&b or they wouldn't have called. When they found out the Hilton is 15 feet from the railroad tracks they said that sounded good to them! No accounting for what makes people happy.

Either they have a train track in their backyard or they never slept near one! My parents place is half a mile from the train track and I can still here it as it goes by. On a cloudy night it sounds like its going through the room.

 

[nicolwilliams31]

I haven't used any revenue management software yet, but one of my friends used Room Price Genie revenue management software and found it very helpful in setting the most effective pricing strategy. The software helps him fill more rooms and stay competitive.

 

[mollywalker02]

I haven't used any revenue management software yet, but one of my friends is using the Room Price Genie revenue management software successfully. It is very helpful in setting the most effective pricing strategy. The software helps him fill more rooms and stay competitive.
You can review their revenue management software at: https://roompricegenie.com/