ShareWhen HSMAI’s 2018 Revenue Optimization Continuing Education & Training (ROCET) program kicks off in Houston next week, the one-day conference — which is being presented nine times throughout the year — will offer a fast-paced overview of hospitality revenue management in three areas: tactics, strategy, and leadership. Bonnie Buckhiester, ISHC, president and CEO of Buckhiester Management, gave us a preview of the sessions she’ll be presenting or co-presenting at ROCET: 
A Tactical Perspective: Forecast Accuracy — “In this day and age, it’s difficult to forecast, even if you have a revenue-management software system,” Buckhiester said, “because there’s so many different factors that come into play. What we have found in so many discussions both on property and in our ROCET sessions are ways to enhance opportunities to grow hotel revenue by measuring accuracy differently. What we talk about in this session are different ways to look at forecast accuracy to support the revenue managers’ or the directors of revenue management’s abilities to be even better forecasters.”
Hint: “The way in which we actually measure success here isn’t as you would expect it to be. Every 10-percent improvement in forecast accuracy can deliver 1 to 2 percent in revenue growth.”
A Strategic Perspective: Total Revenue Management — “When we talk about total RM at ROCET, we’re talking about looking at the entire business and looking for the most profitable guest, looking for the most profitable market segment,” Buckhiester said. “What happens right now is that most revenue-management professionals at the unit level are focused almost entirely on rooms revenue. And that’s really just a piece of the puzzle. In total RM, we’re looking at not only the rooms revenue piece, which has its own set of margins, but ancillary revenues for those hotels that are larger, food and beverage for catering and conference services, and so on. What is it that’s making the most sense for that hotel from a bottom-line perspective?”
Hint: “Look at the whole picture of how those revenue streams flow into the hotel and how much there is at the bottom line. Know your most profitable market segment, then within that mix, find the most profitable guest.”
A Leadership Perspective: Data Visualization — Telling Your Story for Maximum Impact — “Revenue-management professionals are not always very good at telling their story,” Buckhiester said. “They tend to use a lot of Excel spreadsheets, and other team members look at those dashboards and their eyes can often gloss over. If they could do a better job of telling their story through different types of data visualization, they would have a more collaborative process, so that their weekly revenue meetings are not the same old, same old. The thing is, when you look at all the data sets that are available today, there are other organizations doing a better job at data visualization than we do at the property level, whether it’s an OTA or a STAR report.”
Hint: “They can pretty easily take their information, their data, and visualize it so that their audience actually gets more out of it.”
To learn more about HSMAI’s one-day ROCET conference — which is being offered in nine cities across North America in April, May, and November — click here.