Customer-Centric Revenue Management (CCRM)

In other words, CCRM, or Consumer Centric Revenue Management. It is neither CRM nor Revenue Management, but rather a comprehensive strategic vision that places the customer where they belong: at the centre of everything. Revenue Management is already widespread practice in urban hotels, while resort hotels are gradually discovering its benefits. We use Yield as a measure to maximise our revenue, with a clear focus on transactions across the various distribution channels. We stimulate demand through offers and promotions during periods of low occupancy, and benefit from periods of high demand by increasing our rates when we see an opportunity to do so. We rarely have a clear understanding of CRM and its non-technological implications. We know that guest relationships need to be managed, but we mistakenly tend to believe that the ultimate outcome of CRM is disintermediation. The Business Intelligence tools (data analytics) we use, if indeed we use them, draw information mainly from our Property Management System (PMS), guest registry, sales reports, and so on, but little else.

So, what do we generally base our strategies on?

• The price paid.
• The service type or room type booked.
• Purchase and stay dates, as well as the booking window.
• The guest’s city and country of origin.
• The distribution channel used to complete the transaction.
• With basic segmentation, we probably also know whether the guest is travelling for leisure or business.

Ultimately, we design our strategies based on guests who have stayed at our hotel. However, there are many other things we do not know about them—perhaps the most important ones. We know that users gather information about the destination and the product online before making a purchase. We know that throughout this research process, users are exposed to hundreds of different influences: reviews on websites, advertising, expert reviews, marketing campaigns, email marketing, forums, videos, photographs, and so on. Are we aware of what prompted a guest to book our hotel rather than another one? What convinced them? Or, more importantly, do we know why guests chose another hotel instead of ours? We always conclude that price is the decisive factor in a purchase, yet there will always be the question of whether a particular guest might have been willing to pay more to stay at our hotel. It all depends on the emotions they experience—their own emotions—on what we have done to convey our brand values, and on how the guest has perceived them. Ultimately, these are things we do not know. We should also take into account those guests we do not know because they never stayed at our hotel, and who, during their research, chose to book another property. What have we done wrong, or failed to do, in this case?