Business Intelligence (BI) is critical to the revenue management landscape and any related decision-making process. Full stop.
Back in 2017 we started FLYR Hospitality with a focus on building a transformative pricing engine with our lead scientist - Professor John-Paul Clarke - and have been continuously innovating since then under the leadership of Chief Science Officer David Mateos Lopez. The point is to stress that Science (with a capital ‘S’…) has always been our core capability.
However, the human part of decision making cannot simply be ignored…particularly as there is clear evidence from myriad industries that the combination of a robot plus a human is what ultimately drives the best outcomes.
So the challenge becomes how to source clean data and present that correctly to a human being who, in turn, can make strategic decisions based on it. In other words…to help them make better data-driven decisions. This is what great BI looks like.
In our hospitality case, it is revenue managers in particular that need a platform that can deliver them the insight that will allow them to make well-informed decisions. We believe it’s that crucial to the future of RM that we’ve massively invested in building just such a platform within the FLYR Hospitality system. We call it FLYR Analytics.
We’ve seen definitive evidence that using good business intelligence in RM is genuinely transformative. Quantitatively, you see both material revenue growth and significant cost reductions. Smaller teams are able to do so much more as the business insight platform is able to do the heavy lifting.
“On a seasonal basis we can see that we are going to get more backpackers during the summer months so we can pivot to 6-bed and 8-bed dorms. While during the shoulder period we can see how many more private rooms we may need. FLYR Analytics let’s us plan for that. Right now we are 50% privates vs dorms. That used to be 10%…” Samesun Hostels
Qualitatively, the list of benefits is long. For example, there’s a massive jump in inter-team communication and collaboration because those on the revenue team can now more easily influence decisions being made in marketing, operations and other parts of their organisation because they have the right data to share with the stakeholders. Not to mention the ability to communicate the right insights with people outside of the business…
“I have an automated report going to marketing every week showing lead times so that they know when to push digital marketing. I have another report that gets delivered to our group CEO every day showing pickup. I even have one going to one of our owners with higher level metrics for him to stay abreast of performance.” Lark Hotels
We’ve also seen properties make staffing decisions based on FLYR Analytics, which we didn’t originally build it for, but it turns out that if you have accurate forecasting and certain other real-time data you can make long-term staffing decisions.
“FLYR Analytics made a profound human impact on our business during the pandemic, which hit Disneyland in Anaheim particularly hard. We could really plan the workload effectively in advance and distribute shifts and wages. As a result, over 80 percent of our staff were able to stay with us the entire time.” Alamo Inn & Suites
We’ve even seen management taking insights gleaned from the FLYR platform and into the boardroom and using the performance data to make decisions as to where and when the C-suite should be leasing another property or expanding the portfolio. Business Intelligence is a Trojan Horse of sorts…RMs ignore it at their peril…as it’s already allowing Revenue Management to force multiply its effect throughout businesses.