Case studies

In 2019 a 70 room limited service hotel was looking at a year with no growth in occupancy projected as a new property was coming into a small market.  In order to find growth I recommended added a few pet friendly rooms (as they had none before) and implemented an upsell/upgrade program at the front desk.  The pet friendly rooms brought in $11,500 in pet fees as well as $38k in room revenue that would have gone elsewhere.  The front desk upsell program resulted in an ADR index increase of 11% over the comp set and an $5.5 lift in ADR resulting in $80K in upsell revenue at an average rate of $30 per upsell.  This hotel only had 7 rooms out of 70 that could be upsold to so it is not necessary to have a large amount of upgraded rooms or views, etc. to be successful.  The pet rooms and upsells are still in place 7 years later performing well. 

4 star resort in the Caribbean with two case studies.  #1 upon moving to this hotel in 2000 as a reservations/revenue manager when we were still publishing RACK cards with our annual pricing for wholesalers and the public, I determined that the high season demand should be extended an additional week.  They always shifted from high season to shoulder rates Easter Sunday, but I noticed our demand did not slow until the next Sunday.  The exec team updated the RACK cards for the next year continuing high season rates to a week after Easter which resulted in a $600K increase in revenue for one week - The difference in rate was over $200 per night for this property.  This was when I found my love for Revenue Management and had many more successes over the next 5 years at this property as Expedia and Priceline exploded and daily demand based pricing grew and use of restrictions such as minimum length of stays, hurdle pricing, and truly managing the market mix of business during high season which had tons of unconstrained demand.  

Covid was super hard on hoteliers but one area where we succeeded in increasing revenues was really digging in to the early check in and late check outs as well as pushing rates on larger rooms and suites due to an influx of local staycation demand in an averaged sized limited service property.  In 2020 and 2021 with stimulus payments and travel expenditures having been on hold for a while we found that we could increase the price of early and late check in/out and push the suite rates by 25% without hitting any rate resistance.  Early and Late check in/out went from about $15K ancillary revenue on average to $65K (by increasing the price but also by advertising it and asking everyone that checked in, occupancies were lower so we had the ability operationally to offer it to everyone for the most part.  And our rate for standard rooms increased $6 that year but the rate for our suites increased $44 and our occupancy for suites hit an all time history occupancy high of 65% vs 20% having been the norm.  The increase in OCC and ADR resulted in an additional $73K that year.