Efficient yield management plays a key role in maximising Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR) for hotels.
As the yield from rooms and food and beverage operations are under severe strain due to falling room occupancies the Hotel and Restaurant Association Western India (HRAWI) along with Pune Hotel Association organised a seminar on Yield Management in Pune.
Shantanu Jha, director of sales and marketing at Intercontinental hotel, Marine Drive, Mumbai and Homi Wadia, a veteran F&B expert, spoke on these two issues.
Talking about how critical it’s to make a co-ordinated strategy for room sales involving front office, marketing team, general manager and other sales departments, Shantanu Jha said: “There should be a proper strategy in place that should be evaluated every week to assess the performance.”
He suggested it is advisable to sometimes even lower prices to have greater occupancy rates rather than having empty rooms. He spoke of taking advantage of advanced software on yield management that can help determine your lowest quotable rates after calculating the existing hotel occupancy at that point of time.
Online marketing could also prove to be a strong marketing tool. “Effective marketing, however, can only bring customers for once or twice but it’s the service quality which plays the ultimate role in retaining your customer,”Jha said.
On the topic of yield management for F&B operations, Homi Wadia said one should take into account of how much money every chair in a restaurant can fetch.
