The Revenue Journey Part #2 – Navigating the Journey
After having taken the plunge into revenue management – see The Revenue Journey Part #1 – Taking the Plunge – you will need to start navigating the revenue management journey. Only very few people are gifted or talented in a certain area, and most of us will need to learn and practice to become good at something. The fortunate thing is that in revenue management, we want to make things easy and logical. So, learning how to navigate the revenue journey can be done with a step-by-step approach.
Your situation
So you’re the CEO, VP of Operations or run a cluster of hotels. You need to find out where you are in your revenue management journey and where you want to take it.
Whether you operate theme parks, attraction parks, movie theatres, cruise ships, campsites, or of course, hotels, you have realised that driving revenue by applying revenue management principles is something that should work for you.
But what are the steps involved in getting the revenue management journey started and going in the right direction?
Mapping the Journey
As with every journey, there are 3 key questions:
(1) Where am I today?
(2) Where do I want to go?
(3) How do I want to get there?
To find out where you are today, you need to ask yourself some questions:
Is revenue thinking ingrained in all parts of the organisation? As the first solution to profitability issues, do you think about driving revenue? Or do you normally think about cutting costs first?
Do I have tools in place that help me understand where I am at all times? Do I have a dashboard of critical revenue management information? Do I know the speed I am travelling at? And what distance do I need to go?
Do I have the right people in place that can drive the car? Am I letting an 18-year-old drive my Ferrari? Do I need to get a better driver?
There is a lot more involved here, but when you look at these questions, and you have said ‘hmmm’ to one or more of them, then you need to do a deep dive into your organisation to find out how ‘revenue‘ focused it really is.
Being revenue-focused is one of any organisation’s most critical success factors.
To find out where you want to go can be a challenge at any time:
Do you want to beat your competitors? By how much?
And beat your budget?
And be a preferred employer?
These three questions are not random. In every organisation, customers, owners and associates are the key stakeholder groups. And during the revenue management journey, they are all three sitting in the back seat and need to be kept happy. So, for each of them, you will need to embed their objectives into your revenue management goals.
