Hotel Revenue Management: The Post-Pandemic Evolution to Revenue Strategy

About the Author
Dave Roberts is a recognized leader in the hospitality industry, especially in the areas of revenue management and analytics. Dave joined Cornell's Hotel School faculty in the Fall of 2020. He teaches courses in operations and distribution. He previously taught graduate courses in business strategy and corporate finance at Virginia Tech. Dave retired from Marriott in 2019, after 23 years with the company. He was most recently the Senior Vice President of Revenue Strategy & Solutions, with global responsibility for revenue management, analytics, and sales systems. Prior to Marriott, Dave was a finance manager at American Airlines, and a technical consultant on missile defense for the US Department of Defense. Dave has a BS and an MS in Operations Research from Cornell, and an MBA with majors in Finance and Economics from Northwestern. He holds a U.S. Patent on a software product and has published several academic papers on such topics as forecasting, options pricing, and customer choice modeling. In his spare time, he enjoys martial arts and astronomy.
This book guides the reader from the building blocks of revenue management, to pricing science and merchandising, and to broader issues of setting objectives in support of a revenue strategy.
The discipline is evolving, and that evolution has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Leaders in hotel revenue management, and more broadly in sales & marketing, need to understand these changes, and lead and adapt accordingly. This will require a strong foundation in analytics–not just modeling, but also business analytics in support of a holistic strategy.
As more of the tactics of revenue management are executed through automation, and powered by machine learning, revenue managers will become more focused on strategy and will need to think about revenue management in the context of marketing, loyalty, and distribution. As the strategy component of the discipline increases, so too must the breadth of knowledge of revenue managers.