Hotel brand companies focused on demand generation amid the COVID-19 recovery have learned they must accelerate the changes made to revenue management strategies over the past year.

Ray Bennett, president of franchising and select brands, at Marriott International, said during the "Revenue Management" panel at the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference in Atlanta that his company is working on a new platform for its central reservations system, property management system and loyalty system.

"What we have learned is the way we merchandise to customers may not be the most advantageous for our owners from a revenue management standpoint," he said. "Today, a room is a room. But we want to be able to merchandise that room in multiple ways."

Marriott owners and franchisees have voiced that they are looking for ways to maximize the revenue of their inventory.

"Instead of what I would call change, I think we've accelerated what we need to do into the future in order to maximize the finite revenue in those boxes," Bennett added.

Chris Wilroy, senior vice president and commercial director for the Americas region at Hilton, said his company temporarily suspended brand standards and reduced capital expenditure.

From a revenue management standpoint, the company looked at its centralized revenue management center, which supports about half the enterprise through a subscription-based revenue management model.

"We quickly scaled up on our hotel to team member ratio and reduced our costs and [gave] a 50% discount to our owners," he said.

The reduced fees and scaled-up ratios will remain through 2021, and the company plans to continue to invest in price automation, he said. The goal with price automation technology is to gain better room type pricing, rate product pricing and to eliminate key bottleneck tasks that used to exist.

"We're now in deployment with these enhancements, and I'm pleased to say, as of today, we are deployed to about 1,700 hotels as a result of the investments we made through COVID," he said. "That's an example of something that will persist and will allow all [of our] hotels to be more efficient and give revenue managers the time to focus on strategy."

Wilroy said a revenue management system couldn't have priced effectively on its own during the pandemic, and must be supplemented by data analytics.

At the onset of the pandemic, Hilton leaned into those data analytics investments to "turbo-charge" its commercial actions, he said.

"We started ingesting all different kinds of new data. We knew the recovery of the business was going to be choppy market by market," he said.

Data input into the data analytics software included COVID-19 case counts, travel restrictions, forecast data and online traffic to rank markets into five different stages of recovery.

The Hilton team then tailored its commercial actions to those five stages to drive as much revenue as possible, which resulted in a redeployment of sales teams, changes to marketing tactics and new rate products.

Bennett said Marriott also began looking at a different set of metrics to drive revenue. For example, the company recognized a significant downturn in business travel.

"We started to research where demand [is] actually coming from and we quickly found that [demand from] first responders was an area where there was a significant uptick in certain markets," he said.

From there, sales teams brainstormed programs and packages that would appeal to that customer base.

Early on, there was evidence that leisure travelers would be among the first to return. Marriott researched extensively how to market to those travelers in drive-to markets.

Cindy Estis Green, CEO and co-founder of Kalibri Labs, said data and technology must be leveraged to rank markets, especially at a time when sales teams are cut by 30% to 50%.

"If you don't know the underlying data that's driving each of those sets of decisions, you're working blind," she said.

Kate Burda, CEO and founder of business management consultant firm Kate Burda & Company, said to elevate the level of play with sales and marketing, it's essential to have technology that looks at the customer journey from beginning to end.

Bennett said the profile for hiring revenue management candidates is changing.

"We're looking for an individual that can span the commercial side of things," he said.

"As we talk about commercial, it's no longer just the actual revenue management, it's no longer just the data analytics but it's the combination. ... One of the more insightful things in talking with our managed general managers and franchised general managers throughout this pandemic was, 'Do you know how your digital storefront looks?'" he added, noting about 90% of digital traffic comes from digital storefronts.

Wilroy said the most critical component of a commercial team — consisting of a director of sales, revenue management leader and led by the general manager — is an integrated strategy that connects revenue management, sales, pricing, marketing and digital storefront.

Green added that integration leads to more efficiency, and the commercial team must determine the highest and best use of available resources and what it can afford to spend.

Wilroy said the best sales, marketing and revenue leaders already seek to operate in an integrated way, and it's essential to free up structure and time for these leaders to think commercially and more about the whole business.