45 Edition 2020 FINAL

16
45th | Vol 30 | 2020 | www.hotelier-indonesia.com
Additionally, if competing properties also reduce
prices as a reaction to your own discounting efforts,
these rival properties may not follow your
attempted price increase in the future, making it
difficult for you to return your prices to previous
levels for some time to come.
Hoteliers should not panic when faced with market
uncertainty resulting from lower demand due
to COVID-19. Slowdowns happen in all regions
and business (nearly) always comes back. Do
not implement anything you might regret later—
such as giving too much business to costly thirdparty
booking channels. Rather, take a long-term
view of what is best for your business.
It is not only tourist destinations popular with
Chinese travelers and hotel room revenues that
are being impacted by COVID-19. The viability
of major conferences and events are also being
affected due to travel restrictions. Already
the HSBC Singapore Rugby Sevens has been
postponed from April to October over COV-
ID-19 fears, and many corporate conferences
with potentially lucrative event-space reservations
may be similarly at risk of disruption.
Any hotelier who currently is, or may in the future,
be impacted by lower demand due to CO-
VID-19 related travel restrictions needs to have
a plan, even if it will not be fully implemented.
As hoteliers deal with increased demand uncertainty,
it is critical they map out and stress test
best-to-worst case scenarios and the activities
to counter each.
Activities should be multi-functional and cover
varying “what-if” scenarios. For example, what
if corporate demand drops by 10 percent? What
if group bookings fail to materialise? What if
weekend demand declines by 25 percent? Hoteliers
need to explore how their marketing teams
could redeploy and reassign planned campaign
funds to generate and secure alternative business
and new markets.
Revenue managers are instrumental in finding
alternative revenue sources and helping create
new ones in times of uncertainty. If weekday
demand declines significantly due to lower destination
visitation numbers as a result of lower
traveler numbers from China, revenue managers
should work with their sales and distribution
teams to explore alternative revenues to
make up some of the lost demand (e.g., locally
sourced business, meetings & events, etc.).
How much revenue can a hotel
protect by locking in contracts
for longer periods of time?
Hoteliers should also look at if their post booking
pre/at arrival upsell activities are optimised
and always take a long-term view with any decision-making.
The best way to prepare for future uncertainty
is by being certain about your own business
strategies under any condition. Hotels looking to
implement new promotions should look to simulate
what-if analysis and run A/B testing on potential
pricing scenarios, so they aren’t blindly
launching new campaigns at critical times for
their business.
Hoteliers must continue to execute a revenue
management strategy focused on not just the
next few months, but the next several years. The
overall trend for the hotel industry is and will remain
positive, tied to predicted sustained growth
for business and leisure travel at a global scale.
The bottom line for hotels operating across the
APAC region is that this is no time to panic, but
it is time to plan.
For more information,
please visit: www.ideas.com