Future developments of revenue management - perspectives of revenue management practitioners.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore revenue management practitioners’ view on future developments of revenue management (RM) with a focus on the hotel industry. While revenue management continues to evolve, there is a significant interest from academics and practitioners to explore future developments as this area is still under researched. In the presence of continuous evolving revenue management, criticisms on hotel revenue management practices have divulged and further developments are to be expected. The authors investigated prevailing literature on hotel revenue management to investigate a link between current criticisms on revenue management and possible developments by gathering practitioners’ perspectives on identified critics and new developments. The objectives involved a review of prevailing literature on hotel RM to investigate a link between criticisms on RM and new developments and thus gathering practitioners’ perspectives on identified critics and possible developments. The authors conducted an interpretive research philosophy, using a qualitative data collection process through semi-structured interviews with industry experts. Moreover, to ensure qualified participants a purpose full sampling was conducted and included seven RM practitioners. The foundations of the interviews were retrieved through the literature identifying several pattern codes. Findings obtained from the interviews were linked and compared to previous research identifying whether the results offered new insights or if they were in agreement with previous studies. The findings revealed that revenue management should focus on managing revenue from all revenue generating departments in order to optimize profitability. Also, a more technologically advanced and analytically tool focusing on customer behaviour and preferences through a combination of CCRM and CRM is to be expected. Thus, this should build up long-term customer relationships by communicating pricing practices to customers. It is very important to ensure that pricing practices are communicated to customers through clear, transparent and consistent RM.