As COVID-19 is imposing different game rules, all businesses are adapting to sustain and kick off their operations. HN spoke with Pierre Marechal, director at RevUp, a hotel management consulting company specializing in revenue management and distribution, to highlight a few tips hotels could benefit from to boost their revenues while adopting the best strategies.

“As the world post-COVID-19 will be very different from the world pre-COVID-19, and before talking about post COVID-19 strategies, I recommend my clients to first take advantage of the (relative) “down time” to clean up their system and tools, and then ask them to brainstorm with a blank page approach,” he said. Marechal explained that the current compression won’t happen for a long time, and the traditional way to approach revenue management, based on past trends won’t be applicable anymore.

“This means processes such as pricing and forecasting have to be done differently.”

As guests’ expectations and needs will change, some hotels may be even more challenged than before by players like Airbnb. “But some may see a drop of the Airbnb rental pool in their market as landlords may prefer to find longer term tenants,” he added.

According to him, group business will be the last to recover. “I advise my customers who used to enjoy a healthy “group base” to rethink their commercial approach.” He concluded: “When finance allows, I advise some customers to renovate their rooms earlier than originally planned.”