Invitation for a Yield Management and Spa Survey...

In conjunction with a leading wellness spa website in Dubai, Spagenie and RSVP Worldwide decided to join efforts in making the survey to measure the impact of Yield Management in Wellness Industries.

Spagenie.ae is the Region Biggest and Most Popular Spa and Wellness Resource in the Gulf Countries.

RSVP Worldwide is a leading revenue management firm in the UAE for independent structures.

By wellness industries we compile the following business units:
- Hotel Spa,
- Standalone Spa (Independent),
- Standalone Organic Spa (Independent),
- Hotel Medical Spa,
- Standalone Medical Spa (Independent),
- Beauty Salon Brand,
- Standalone Beauty Salon (Independent),
- Hair Salon Brand,
- Standalone Hair Salon (Independent),
- Nail Spa Brand,
- Nail Spa Standalone (Independent),
- Yoga Classes,

Visit the link below:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GLVYTSK

We thank you for your answers. Results will be published.

For Spa business solutions

Revenue Team @ RSVP

The value of Outsourcing Your Revenue Management process

Choosing to outsource part of your business unit's revenue management and/or analytics requirements can provide benefits that go far beyond mere cost - cutting. RSVP Hospitality outsourcing allows the hospitality independent business to identify the areas where specialized support is more needed, in order to complement the skills of their internal reservation, revenue and marketing teams.

We see the most successful outsourcing arrangements, is a partnership where existing capabilities are enhanced to provide better revenues results with the client.

So what kind of advantages can revenue management outsourcing offer to an organization?

1) A larger skills set
In many independent hotels, too many activities are operated between too few people. The Revenue / Yield / Business analyst position are far more using the associate time into a report extraction function and less impact is driving pertinent analysis that will translate in a decision that impact the property (pricing, inventory restrictions, competitive set performance, market segmentation, distribution channels cost analysis, system configuration...). When Travelclick solutions came on the markets, with their innovative reports, the choice was given to the hotel to either continue performing competitors rate check manually, or outsource to Travelclick Intelligence and collect automated reports with multiple functionalities.

By outsourcing non core areas, of your revenue management, you can extend your analytical performance with specialist skills when you need them.

2) Ability to focus on what you do best
Even the most capable revenue manager and sales & marketing teams or business owner will be stronger in some areas than others. For example, I see many hotels hiring a "chain/hotel group" revenue manager into an independent one (Standalone brand), and the fellow revenue manager is struggling because he/she does not have all resources that its previous company used to offer. If you are struggling to deliver on projects/k.p.i and tasks that contribute to a competitive advantage, the outsourcing of external activities could be the answer.

3) A fresh approach
For internal analysts or data input people, it can often be difficult to "step out of the comfort zone", to look past the familiar and try something different. An advantage of outsourcing is the introduction of fresh ideas and new ways of thinking, resulting in exciting, creative exchange that make the company gaining revenue and market share.

4) More experience on what works (and what doesn't)
Even the most experienced revenue managers, directors of sales and marketing or general managers can't know everything. The changing ways that clients book your services, their booking methods, their payment methods, their feedback methods, their satisfaction and the difficulties across service industries and job functions makes it hard to keep it up. Incorporating the experience of revenue professionals results in a broader collective experience of which tactics, approaches and strategies are most likely to be successful.

5) Reduce overheads
There is little doubts that selective outsourcing has a financial impacts. If the focus is solely on hourly/daily rates, then outsourcing may be viewed as expensive. But if you review the project target and cost, the deliverables required and the efficiency that expertise and the luxury of being one step removed the day-to-day has for the outsource provider - it becomes clear that there is money to be saved. Add to that a lack of training costs, equipments or tools to work efficiently, and the savings become all the more apparent.

Do you selectively outsource part of your revenue and distribution tasks to an external supplier? let us know your experience of outsourcing and how you ensure you're getting the most out of your outsourcing arrangements. Leave your comments below:

If you are interested by outsourcing some/all functions of your revenue management at info@rsvp-hospitality.com, and we will schedule a meeting accordingly.

Summer is over - Time to get back to work at your hotel?

With the Ramadan season behind you, now it's a great time to take 60 minutes and check your on the books for 2013. Here are my 5 recommendations that should be in your radar as you will soon enter a new year:

1) Best Available Rates - Price & Availability: when we analyzed booking pickup during peak periods in Hotels, we realized that lots of reservation came from a Contracted Tour Operators or a Group, and sometimes much more than their allocation. The reason might be that since you don't extend your next year rates in advance, the business traveller that aims at booking long time in advance, does not see availability at your hotel, resulting that he will book your hotel using an alternative distribution channels.
Recommendation: In fact every month, you should load rates for 365 days in advance.

2) Rates Upload for online bookings: if you have a fair idea of your seasonality and your demand curve (high/low) for 2013, do upload your rates as per your online strategy.
Recommendation: Rates can be changed at any time, but if you don't display availability they will go to the next property.

3) New Competitors supply: named them Rotana, Accor, Hilton, Four Points, Marriott, there will still be new supply nearby your hotel, so start anticipating their opening date. Obviously every new hotel does need business, and comes on the market with an aggressive rate structure.
Recommendation: Explore your business intelligence networking capabilities, and you should be the one that inform your General Manager.

4) Talk to your Sales Team about 2013 rates: there will still be new conferences in town, inflation will still occur, new hotel supply will get released. You need to work your Business Intelligence, but first and foremost you need to build your base for meetings and conference for next year (06 months booking lead).
Recommendation: While your budget may not be started, prepare your group rates and allocation mix through the first semester to secure groups.

5) Give some thoughts to your next summer periods: for lots of hotels, this period is mostly a low demand seasonality with occupancy rate varies from 40-65% and low ADR impact. In fact, its quite surprising that for the last 08 years, hoteliers are practicing lower and lower rates offer, while the overall hotel expenses grew by 30% in the last couple of years (Electricity, Water and Gas cost / Employee Costs / Distribution costs...), resulting on a low profit margin.
Recommendation: Ask your Financial controller about the break-even cost, or level of revenues to performed in order to cover the cost, because you may walk into the wrong directions.

For more information, contact us at www.rsvp-hospitality.com

Why spas should be added to the revenue management department of hotels?

Many directors of development/feasibility consultants for business hotels, conference hotels, resorts and upscale boutique are adding a spa to their property/projects:

Why?
because by adding a spa to their hotel/project they will:

* Create a competitive advantage,
* Increase the guest experience,
* Performs better ADR, Revenue and also profitability,
* Generate additional revenues (retail...),
* Stand in a better way within the direct market competitors,
* Raise the value of the property,

But unfortunately, I noticed that most of the time, the spa is underutilized or even empty. Looking at the previous post on that subject, spas in hotels often represent an high cost factor (Spa Receptionist + Spa Therapists x 2 + cleaning costs + retail products + investment), instead of an incremental revenue. Probably the reason why some large hotels outsource the spa, to create a lease revenue, rather than exploring possibilities of managing it effectively.

The spa product needs to be managed more strategically! it does not only require to have 25% occupancy per day or cut deals with Groupon and Cobone, but it's need to be thought as a perishable structure. A AED 199.00 (USD 55.00) for a 90 minutes massage with manicure / pedicure does not always drive return clients, because the experience is not performed by real professionals, and the time allocated is not suitable.

Hotel spas just like the rooms, the restaurants, the banquet rooms, experience periods of high and low demands. At the stage of high demand, you will often see a more profitable treatment has to be turn away to guests, because the treatment room is booked for a low profitable treatment. Lack of profitability planning!

As demand fluctuates by days of the week (Sunday-Saturday), and time of the day (10am-10pm), busy demand can be identified quite fast. Automatically there is large opportunity for hoteliers to generate incremental income and profit by implementing revenue management solutions to their spa product, just as to optimize the revenues of their hotel rooms. If you manage well your weekdays (85% occupancy) vs. your weekend (45% occupancy), you may fluctuate your offers according to demand. If you are full on the weekends, manage your treatment offers in a different way.

Even if majority of hoteliers are using tactical techniques (25% off credit card, spa packages, the entertainment book discount, two for one treatment, group deals...) to try to sell during the low demand periods, very few have developed a strategy that allows grouping these techniques with their market segments to apply revenue management principles.

Most spas sell their treatment rooms on a "first come, first serve" basis. Revenue Management will help spa hotels to attract extra clients during low demand periods by offering attractive treatment deals, growing revenues or yielding during the high season with optimization strategies. It requires an analytical person, because most spa managers do not have the time to do it and do not feel very comfortable of creating excel spreadsheets. The best way to team up is the revenue manager along with the spa manager, because they may end up analyzing lots of information. Both understand the spa profit margin concept, however they will have different functional skills. One will have to go through lots of data, cross with market segments and pricing, and the other one will have to share his operational constraints.

For our spa managers/assistant readers, i know that you may say, this is a great way to increase my revenues, but what shall I start with?

In brainstorming sessions with Spa professionals in Dubai, on the subject of spa revenue management opportunities, we came out with the following points in applying revenue management lies in:

1) Contribution analysis: Where are your income coming from? Which treatments are more profitable for your spa? How did you calculate the duration time of your 30-60-90 spa treatment?

2) Productivity Management: What are the periods where revenues are the highest? Which is the least treatment sold? What day of the week has more demand? What time of the day is the most demanding?

3) Cost Management: How to better control your costs? Do you have a detailed standards of operations for your treatment? Who is managing the availability booking? How effective is my spa menu?

4) Retail Selling: When was the last time you trained your team on selling techniques? What types of product information your team has to sell the retails products? How many brands product do you sell?

5) Guest History: Do you have an email database? How far do you update your guest profile in your spa software? Where are your clients from? Do you use specific market segments?

6) Marketing Strategy: how do I communicate with my clients? Does Social Media help to convert Likes into Effective clients?

Revenue Management will help you manage these six elements and will allow you to increase the income generated by the spa.

So like room revenue management, you will need to start building effective historical data reports analyzing your transaction through your software or manually, to provide you with data to analyze to help you to make better decisions on your spa pricing strategy and packages availability.

Get more revenue management tips and advice from RSVP Hospitality.

Bring back the Revenue Manager

Have you noticed the revenue manager are short in supply these days? these are the executives who run analytical reviews, control the leverage of demand vs. pricing, drive the strategy and perform forecast accuracy within their business units.

But in many independent companies in the Gulf, the only true revenue driver is the General Manager. Everyone else, whether the 65 hours a week executive, the credit manager with his 25 calls a day for cash recovery, the night auditor processing 60 reports or the sales team with its 8 sales calls each, runs a piece of business to support their functions.

As a result, a limited number of people have full, end-to-end accountability for business success and there are few opportunities for revenue managers to learn all aspects of a business. This may be one of the reasons why many organization struggle to perform.

In large hotel chains organization, the revenue manager is at the center of action. He is regularly trained by his regional managers, he can create best practices to be shared with his peers or he attends business management courses (Time management, effective leadership, communication skills, project management). In small independent group of hotels, or independent structure (100-250 rooms), the revenue manager seems to be just noted as a "title position" to remain trendy with the hotel market development; however many of them are an extension from the reservation manager position... so the title does not really reflect the functional role. There are no added value when it comes to developing a new BAR pricing vs. competitors analysis, evaluating a piece of business, displacing calculation, seeing their market within a 90 booking window, changing his benchmark competitive set, analysis of historical data, day-to-day forecast, confronting a director of sales on the strategy, constructive feedback to General Managers...

Starting in 2005-2007, many GCC hotel base companies evolved to "functional" structures to cut costs and reduce duplication. Revenue management being the favorite buzz in the General Managers round tables, the main question remain at who will perform the RevPAR growth. Is it a G.M responsibility? Is it a team responsibility? In my mind, the hotel better have the right structure in place to perform. And this comes from a thorough review of the organization functional aspect.

When will the hotel understand that reservation department is an extension to sales department (clients relationships, selling what is on the Property Management Screen,  entering rooming list, managing extranets distribution channels and many more functions...) and therefore cannot be performing at Reservation and Revenue Management. It can be a short term solution to evolve a reservation / revenue manager, but the organization needs to go deeper in defining the roles and responsibilities of each. The reservation executive answers the phone and sell, while the revenue executive review hundreds of data every day, perform reports, and follow the guidelines of the hotel revenue management policies to extract data that will support the strategy.

I meet dozens of revenue managers in the market, who are great in their roles, however unable to perform great numbers, because their position is a result of a mix functional roles between a reservation role, a extranet/e-commerce role, a yield manager role even in some cases a sales manager role....This become very complex for their understanding and development, they feel there are doing a bit of everything, but not to the expert level; so when an opportunity comes for another position within the market, they switch for it....

As a result of this shift, career paths today are less geared towards filling the few revenue manager position, and instead focus on functional specification.

Obviously we cannot reverse the structural trends of the past 5 years in the region. However, companies can take steps to give their people more management, business skills and accounting/finance experience, which may help them avoid the narrowness of functional specialization.

Given the difficult nature of business today, having people with broader perspective may be critical to developing successful independent hotel establishments. So it just might be time to bring back the Revenue Manager.

To what extent does your independent hotel company have opportunities for true revenue managers?

Romain Saada @ RSVP Hospitality
Visit us at http://www.rsvp-hospitality.com 

Evaluate the Distribution Costs for your Hotel

When it comes to making channel mix decisions for your hotel, it requires much more than choosing between direct channels or third party channels, since each category carry costs.

Since we are in the budget season, it is highly important that this comparison need to be establish.

The cost to deliver a reservation to a hotel has grown dramatically in the last 10 years. Besides reservation transaction costs, it is also necessary to consider the cost to trigger the reservation.

Since many hotels maintain a budget for operational expenses (reservation delivery) separate from a budget for operational expenses (triggering the reservation), it can be problematic to determine actual distribution costs because these fees are often combined when charged to a hotel.

Are Search Engine costs treated as a marketing fee or as one to facilitate the booking of a direct reservations? Does the online travel agency (OTA) commission get charged as a reservation or a marketing expense on the P&L (Profit and Loss Statement)?

There are many factors to consider when evaluating costs and benefits by channel such as direct and indirect reservations and marketing costs. Each hotel would have to conduct those analyses using its own data to determine the best management action that applies to its own situation.

COMMISSION COSTS ON THE P&L (MERCHANT AND OPAQUE MODEL)
In order to conduct a cost comparison by channel, the reservation expense has to be clearly identified. Connectivity fees from reservation vendors (Travelclick - I-Hotelier, Synxis, Travel Tripper, Fast Booking...), switch fees, retail travel agency commissions or marketing fees, are all booked under an expense that apply against the revenue they deliver.

The cost of business delivered through 3rd parties, being merchant model or opaque model, through the OTAs may prove to be difficult to track because it does not appear on the P&L.

When a room is sold through this model, the hotel provides a Net Rate and never pays a commission after the guest checks out. It is a prepaid room with a rate that comes in only as a revenue.

In order to establish a comparison, the cost of all channels should be identified to enable a comparison.

Apply this to a RSVP Hotel:
- 100 Rooms
- 75% Occupancy
- ADR: AED 500.00
Monthly Revenue (31 Days): AED 1,162,500

Let's take an example that a mixture of OTA commission costs of 20% room only, 25% package and 40% opaque, this may give you a 25% blended commission.

The RSVP Hotel Market Share for OTA is 40%. In revenues, this represents AED 465,000.

Since the commission is deducted on the website for (Expedia, Lastminute....), the amount of deducted commission is equivalent to: AED 116,250. This amount is pre deducted so it does not appear on the P&L.

You need to compare the level of the above commission with your other OTA channels such as Booking.com, HRS, Venere...This task should be carry out by your E-Commerce Executive, Online Distribution Executive or Revenue Manager. This also need to be compared with your brand booking meaning www.rsvpxyzhotels.com, because you have to drive your direct booking strategies.

VARIABLE MARKETING AND RESERVATION FEES

A typical cost for a AED 500 rate at a one night length of stay may range from AED 30.00 to AED 130.00. Those fees comes from Voice-Direct, Voice-Third Party, Voice Travel agent, GDS Fees, Transaction fees, Hotel CRS Fees.

The results of your comparison will have a very large impact on your profitability for 2013 strategies. If you need assistance, contact us.

Romain @ RSVP Hospitality

Peak Season vs. Low Season: Two very different experiences in UAE during Ramadan

While meeting business professionals on this first week of Ramadan, in the United Arab Emirates, they all witness extreme low demand with either empty rooms, empty treatment rooms or empty seats (Restaurant, Hair Salon, etc...). Everyone is trying to get additional business even thinking using the magic "demand feeder" grouping sites (Cobone, Groupon, Mox Deals...), but they fail to understand that there are some times in the year where there are low period of business.

So when I see , a vast majority of established 4-star hotel in Deira / Bur Dubai / Al Barsha / WTC, precisely 162 hotels on Booking.com, battling to be below AED 200 (USD 55.00), I am wondering what is left for your hotel profitability when you remove your 20-25% commission per night, cleaning costs, amenities, linens, your reservation staffing and rest of the personnel.

Similarly, Beauty Salon are falling into this gap of low prices for attracting new clients. Groupon advertised this week also a Body Scrub 60mn Treatment for AED 49.00 (USD 13.50). Calculating the 25-30% commission of grouping side, plus usage of linens and beauty products, amenities, I am wondering if it's not better to give it free of charge, as an experience.

I have been 6 years in the UAE, and we know as fact, that the first week of Ramadan, is low in revenue generations. Discounting therefore does not work, it just diminish your Brand product values, and not even generating a good margin, because demand is not there.

WHAT TO DO
Effective Business Planning is happening throughout exercises that are called Budget and Forecast. If you know that every Ramadan period, your business are not flourishing, then you have to create some advance cash flows in the previous months or adjust your inventory to have a successful Eid Weekend.

I met many business clients, that filled up their 2011 Ramadan with low average rate transaction, and then when we look at their profit and loss statement, there were negative, because for whatever business they brought, they still have to pay fix and variable expenses linked to running the place.

If you look at your historical statistics (providing you have accurate data), you will always notice that you had excellent revenue generations during the 4 days post Ramadan, because it is a big celebration, and people comes with their families and friends to celebrate it.

WHAT TO EXPECT FOR EID WEEKENDS: BUSY AIRPORTS, ROAD TRAFFICS + RESIDENTS DEMAND!!!

Same scenarios, look into your past historical revenue generation, and everyone coming from GCC would be celebrating in the UAE (Beach properties first, then city hotels). It's not a surprise why a vast majority of hotels are already selling quadruple digits rates on Sheikh Zayed Road, JBR, Marina, while hotels in Deira / Bur Dubai are more conservative.

Same goes for the Beauty Salon and Spa, where it is actually very busy season.

We all know that on August 26th 2012, when reviewing your figures, everyone would have top up nearly full occupancy of their businesses, and the question would be: "We could have maximize more, we will do better next time", because beside the revenue generation, the market share competition is the clear view on your performance.

Therefore if you have not yet anticipate a surge in demand for Eid Weekend, it still the time to "choose the business" that you would like to get as:
- Establish the correct pricing, knowing that you will have a strong 96 hours booking window too,
- Elaborate and Publish some specific packages (Hotel Room + Breakfast + 1 Value), to sell it at a decent rate,
- For Beauty Salon and Spa, privilege for high turnover of your spaces rather than 90-120 minutes package, because every one will attend function in town; you may want to keep some spaces for your top 10 regular clients too.
- Inform your staff that no day offs will be accepted during that periods,

Eid weekend will be the period that can bring you healthy profits, if you know how to manage the demand and inventory.

Wishing you Ramadan Kareem!

Romain @ http://www.RSVP-Hospitality.com

Marketing Intelligence: Knowledge is Power!

Marketing intelligence and analytics, internet (or web) marketing analytics in particular, allow you to monitor campaign and their respective outcomes, enabling you to spend each Dirhams (AED) as effectively as possible.

The importance of marketing intelligence is obvious: if something costs more that it returns, it's not a good long term business strategy.






Question related to this Article:
How many of owners or general managers invest in offline / online media, without knowing the client profile of the readers / users?

Amongst the many clients I visit, I will resume their marketing intelligence as:
- First, managers don't want to know the answers marketing analytics provides,
- Second, marketing analysis does not offer sufficient insights for managers. It tends to confirm what they know,
- Third, they are not considering the impact marketing analytics can have on the companies, it can change the way manager think.

Beyond the obvious sales and lead generation, marketing analytics can offer profound insight into customer customer preferences and trends. Some SMB (Small and medium enterprises) invest up to 5% of their overall sales revenues, but do not get much out of it in terms of new clients generation.

Marketing Intelligence Exercise:
I invite you to do that exercise with your team, at your work place for nearly 1 hour. Turn off your cell phone, because what is needed is your brain.
- Organize a meeting with 3-4 of your staffs (Marketing / Sales, Operations...),
- Explain the purpose of the meeting is to review our marketing impact and decisions,
- Collect and Print all last 6 months advertising collaterals / actions that you have done,
- Extract from your online marketing sources (Google Analytics, Facebook Page Analytics...) some key reports,
- One set of reports needs to be print for each staff,
- Print a report of new clients generated through those actions,
- Ask your operational staffs about the clients, their behaviors, their loyalty, what do they care for,
- Evaluate the cost of your marketing spending, the results and ask yourself the questions:

WHO DID WE INTEND TO TARGET? 

AM I SATISFIED OR NOT?

WHAT DID I LEARN?

Last week, I met one of my clients, and we had a meeting with a new supplier for a mobile application for the Dubai market. Their application is to list businesses such as hotels, restaurants, beauty salon, health club, spa. Their target clients are tourists and Dubai residents.

With the new era of technology, it feels like converting the thousand Yellow Pages into a friendly savvy mobile application. Although this mobile application seemed to be user friendly, this company is only able to tell me that 50,000 downloads have been performed in Dubai. On the many questions, I raised about marketing intelligence, such as what is the gender, age, location, and trends of your application, none of my questions found valid answers.

How can Owners / General Managers / Marketing specialist invest in a technology that cannot provide valuable data insights? Are the market following what other competitors doing? This related cost of AED 3k, 5k, 10k, 15k, 30k, does it really bring you clients?

Analytics continue to be a big buzzword in the marketing space, so it is important that you involves your key personnel, because you need more than one person to bring the success in a marketing intelligence strategy.

If you would like to share your outputs, use the box below.

Romain @ RSVP Hospitality

Are your 2013 Hotels Target, Budget and Marketing Plan Ready?

The first semester of 2012 is almost gone, it's time to think ahead....generally most hotels in the Gulf areas, have performed quite well in 1st quarter, and should perform well for Q4, to keep their owners happy.

If you are thinking going for a vacation trip prior to Ramadan, well it may be just a short break trip with Fly Dubai or Air Arabia to a nearby destination.

Summer for hoteliers is always a sign for scratching numbers, looking at your segmentation, start collecting Business Intelligence information (trustworthy), read newspapers, select articles, spot the new company to re-locate in your city...

2012 Semester 1 - Evaluation

Where do you stand in terms of Year to Date 2012 Budget? are you ahead of the exercise, or are you running behind your numbers? you must analyze your figures, and understand your performance. 

a) Negative Impact:

If you are in negative growth, then you need to strategically re-think your Q4. Will this be reflecting in a better mix, focus on higher rate contribution? You need to write down what went wrong:

- a wrong strategy (lack of availability, price resistance, turnaways analysis...)

- a new competitor with lower rates (don't only focus on their low rates, try to understand why did they use this strategy, do they have solid market base?),

- an existing competitor with distress inventory, 

- a less performing sales team (=> go segment by segment to understand + and -),

- a sales manager that went to work for a competitor,

b) Positive Impact:

- Is that temporary due to regional situations (Egypte, Levant...?),

- Being ahead from budget is good (you may have build a low budget target), however did you gain position in RGI? (Revenue Generation Index: RGI)

- Was there any hotel inventory that go under renovation / closure? (i.e the impact of Metropolitan Hotel Dubai demolition, 255 rooms)

Budget Elaboration

The basis of the budget comes from a detailed demand calendar. It's very important to map the events, conferences (Trade Centre, Exhibition Centre), sports exhibition game, trade fairs, concerts, GCC holidays (UAE, Saudi, Kuwait...), International holidays (Russia, UK, India, China, Brazil) and local bank holidays. This can be carry out by the revenue manager or the marketing coordinator.

Looking at your first semester exercise, we are working with hoteliers for which we have implemented a detailed daily market segmentation so that they are able to perform analytical analysis instead of reporting. Results: they started gaining back control of their inventory in order to maximize revenues.

It is more precise to leverage your Monday trends by explaining that your market segmentation is composed of 25% local corporate, 15% best available rate, 40% local DMC, 15% OTA and 5% crew, rather than saying on Monday we have leisure clientele. Huhh? what does leisure means? If 55% of my hotel is booked towards leisure segment, am I consider a leisure hotel? well only a detailed market segmentation can answer to you.

A real budget exercise is an activity that need to be elaborated through 90-120 days work and not 10 days.

We recommend hoteliers to implement a day by day budget for their market segmentation mix and revenues, because they will feel more in control, than programming a xx% increase, and dividing by 12 months, dividing by 30 days. That's the old school, and will not support your strategic thinking.

The General Manager or the Revenue Manager or Director of Sales, should effectively perform displacement calculations on all segments and channels to uncover hidden revenue potential. Additionally, you should analyze the real cost of each distribution channels by paying attention to the travel agent commission, agency fees, sales blitz investment, GCC trips investment, sales payroll, marketing collaterals, reservation costs, extra commission level (end of the year, 3-5% based on volume of targeted room nights).

For budget, you should also compare your year on year growth per main segments and sub segments, to make sure this tally with your marketing plan.

Marketing plan is a must for any hotel that has a strategic approach from the management. When you start managing 15-100 Million AED business, you deserve a structural approach.

Marketing Plan: back to basics

The marketing plan can function from two points: strategy and tactics. As I see, most of approved marketing plans are locked up in a book shelf, in the Sales Office, and don't move until the next season. 

It should be on the Director of Sales desk at all times, to prevent that we don't follow the right strategy as outline 8-12 months back. Tactical decision to introduce new rates, or extend rates, should be record so that you could notice if your volume of bookings has made the difference...or not.

When looking at strategic information, RSVP Hospitality would recommend:

* Ministry of Finance information (GDP Growth, Inflation rate...),

* Ministry of Tourism Information (Arrivals, airport statistics, airline routes...),

* Overall Hotel + Hotel / Apartment Supply,

* Market Source by origin,

* Market demand by main and sub segments,

* Benchmark reliable online source for RevPAR,

* Geo-political opportunities and threats,

* Distribution channels analysis (local CRS provider...),

Taking in consideration, that most of hotels in GCC are growing their online sales, a part of your marketing plan should be focused on Internet marketing and Online Distribution. 

Another part of your marketing plan, will be on to protect your corporate clients (individuals and groups), from giving them the best prices and ensure there are producing as per rational level. How you will communicate on that? How the sales team would be organized?

Shall you need assistance from expert, contact us at info@rsvp-hospitality.com or call us @ +971 50 589 3011 (UAE) or visit our website at www.rsvp-hospitality.com 

RSVP Hospitality

Better Information, Better Decision for Better Results 

Beauty World M.E - Download Conference Presentations !

To the Beauty World M.E attendees, please find attached my presentation for the conferences.

1) Key Performance Indicator - Spa and Beauty Salon Industry

RSVP Worldwide Presentation: 

How to use KPI's to effectively identify revenue opportunities.

Visit the link 

2) Maximizing profitability - Spa and Beauty Salon Industry

RSVP Worldwide Presentation: 

Maximizing efficiency and profitability of your business

Visit the link 

Thank you and keep asking questions about your concerns.

Romain