There was a time in the seventies, when modern Revenue Management was born to beat the competition in selling airline tickets. There was a time when computers were 10 million times slower (or worse) than today’s computers. There was a time when solving Revenue Management problems required supercomputers, drastic simplifications and unrealistic assumptions (the only way to get a solution for setting prices in hours and not in ages). There was a time when only big chains or huge hotels could afford to use Revenue Management systems.
But we are in a new century now, computers can solve problems that nobody anticipated could be solved years ago. Storage is abundant, and one can easily save all data of a large hotel in a cellular phone, big data is not the proper keyword in this context ?. With the cloud, even family-owned hotels can use Revenue Management tools with the same (or even better?) performance w.r.t. the tools used by huge multi-national companies.
We recently participated in the REVME conference organized by EHL Lausanne (organized by Prof. Cindy Heo), Dec 3, 2019. EHL school is number one in the world in the hospitality sector. It was a nice opportunity to see the state of the art in the area of Revenue Management.
We liked the presentations by the four great keynote speakers:
- Nicola Simionato Travel… with Google
- Jan K Krasnodebski Using Big Data and Machine Learning to Improve Business Performance
- Paul Van Meerendonk Beyond the Guest Room: The Journey to Total Profit Optimization
- Roberto Battiti From Revenue Management to Higher Automation via Machine Learning and Optimization.
We attach the presentation slides of the last talk (courtesy of the author) and will be happy to add other slides if they will be shared.
We are happy that Revenue Management, although an old field by now, is still so rich with disruptive innovation, pushed by the new technologies of Machine Learning (learning from data) and Optimization (for higher and higher levels of automation).
If you are interested in innovation in the field of Revenue Management, we recommend that you evaluate our new Revenue Management tool Sinapsi and subscribe to our Ciaomanager newsletter to receive our updates.
