It only takes a few taps of a finger to learn a new language, virtually redesign your living room or order a personal driver—who can also bring you dinner. We are one generation away from having to explain the concept of a desktop computer to a child, and with every passing day, technology continues to push the boundaries of what is possible.
Hotel CEOs, general managers and even revenue managers are no longer chained to their desks staring at a computer all day. They work from cars, airports, restaurants, planes and elevators, trying to maximize every minute of their day to maximize every revenue opportunity for the hotels they manage.
Ideally, the same benefits that technology affords you in your personal life should also be present in the technology of your professional life.
The best revenue management systems (RMS) bring together all of your meaningful data into the cloud. They aggregate your transactional data from your property management system (PMS), building a pricing and rate availability strategy in your central reservation system (CRS) and visualizing all your external data sources like competitor rate shops, STR reports and forward-looking market intelligence. Mobile user interfaces (UI) are important because you now have access to all this data, from multiple systems and data providers, within the palm of your hand.
When you’re at the airport getting ready to board a flight, it’s not convenient to boot up your laptop, get on a Wi-Fi network and log into your various systems to respond quickly to an email. The beauty of mobile RMS is that you have easy access to all that aggregated data, instantly. Science fiction has become reality. Now CEOs, GMs and RMs alike can access the information they need and even have it curated with the appropriate dashboards and permissions for each persona.
Users can view their previous day’s actuals, check the competitions’ rates for the weekend, make a pricing strategy change and even monitor performance against budget and forecast. In a world where consumers are hyper-connected, it’s no longer good enough for hoteliers to work between disparate systems. It’s important that the right insights are delivered to clients at their moment of need, all through their RMS in the cloud.
Whether it’s virtual reality, natural-language processing and voice search or an optimized mobile experience, it’s clear our interaction with technology is changing. The next UI will be no UI, and innovative revenue management solutions will ensure their users stay at the forefront. With the right security permissions, you’ll be able to use your smartphone, in a variety of ways, to easily perform on-the-go tasks such as raising the rate for this weekend. Don’t let old technology hinder your ability to stay on the move; tap into a solution that lets you order your revenue strategy “to go.”
