Pros And Cons Of Dynamic Revenue Management

Revenue management is a scientific method that helps firms to improve profitability of their business. For many years, firms use revenue management to predict demand, to replenish inventory, and to set the product price. The benefit of revenue management can be found in a variety of industries, including airlines, hotels, and electric utilities. Dynamic pricing is a popular method of revenue management, especially when a firm needs to sell a given stock by a deadline. The goal of dynamic pricing is to increase the revenue by discriminating customers who arrive at different times. For instance, if a firm faces a high level of demand, it has an incentive to increase the price to reserve some products for later customers who may be willing to

By matching price to demand, hoteliers have a greater opportunity to capture higher profitability business during high demand periods. On the flip side, lower flexible rates during low demand season help generate additional demand that might not have existed before. Although, it is always wise to set a floor price, which should be equal to the lowest “positioning” price that you might be willing to accept for your product. The challenge of having a dynamic structure is that the revenue managers need to be on top of their game to manage demand as it is very easy to lose control of inventory if forecasting is erroneous. Having a revenue management system minimizes these errors; however, the majority of hotels today do not have a revenue management system as it could be expensive or might not have been budgeted. Payback period of a decent revenue management system is typically less than a year depending on the size of the property. An interesting exercise to conduct is to look at a set of hotels’ past year occupancy and average-daily-rate data to ascertain lost revenue potential to the dollar amount and determine whether having a revenue management system would have mitigated that

In its purest form, we all should theoretically be perfectly ok with dynamic pricing, because we, the consumers, ultimately have a decision of whether we’re going to purchase the product or not. The onus is on the producer to make sure the price presented meets our willingness to pay to ensure a purchase aligning to our own personal equilibrium price in real time.

If you’re not willing to pay for the product, you’ll leave and maybe come back when there’s a sale or a cheaper version. If you’re willing to pay for the product, then your utility is met and you’re none the wiser about your friend getting a cheaper price. It’s perfect pricing and harmony in the free