Effective Revenue Management for Small Hotels / Homestays / BnBs

Effective Revenue Management for Small Hotels / Homestays / BnBs

Running an accommodation business be it hotel, homestay, resort or BnB is not an easy task. Like any other business the accommodation business also has some fixed costs and some variable costs.

The primary goal of Revenue Management is to ensure optimum use of available inventory (Rooms) to generate maximum revenue.

Here are some strategies and tips that all hoteliers can use to maximize their business:

1. Listing Property on OTAs - Check which OTAs are strong in your locality / state / country. Every OTA does not generate equal amount of traffic in all areas, for example in some states Makemytip would be strong and in some states Booking.com or Expedia would be strong. See which OTA generates more business in your area and list your property on the same.
2. Try generating business from Direct Sources : Read here
3. Try Hourly Rooms - If your hotel is near transit places like bus stand, railway station or airport then you can also try selling rooms on Hourly basis (3 hours, 6 hours and 12 hours basis). This will give customers a liberty to check-in at anytime and avoid the strict rule of 1200 hours to 1100 hours check-in and check-out time. This way you will be able to fill your rooms during the unoccupied hours too.
4. Offer Complimentary early check-in for 2 hours before the standard check-in time. This will encourage people to choose your hotel against others with strict check-in check-out time.
5. If you only sell your rooms on CP or With Breakfast plan online, then opening up 1 or 2 rooms without any meals can shoot up your revenues (we have tried this in many hotels). Since you are not providing any meals with this plan, you can always keep its price a little lesser than the “Including Meal Plan”, hence your property will attract more guests because of the competitive price point.
6. Most of the customers search hotels online by sorting them in the basis of price from Low to High. To catch eye balls of customers you need to show competitive price as mentioned above and there is another way to do it. Suppose you got only AC Rooms, then you can also sell at least 1 or 2 NON AC Rooms by switching off the AC or taking out the remote control or by turning off the mail switch of the AC. You need to sell the NON AC Room at lesser price and attract customers on the price point as mentioned above !
7. Bonus Trivia - The hotel which once starts selling good on OTAs, even the OTA algorithm starts promoting it, hence you can use the above 2 points (5 and 6) to leverage on the competitive price point and generate more and more revenue !

As a revenue manager I have tried these in many hotels and hot amazing results ! Thank me later !