By Stefano Sciamanna, Senior Revenue Manager at Lybra Tech
The difference between a hotel that leads and a hotel that follows does not lie in the tools. It lies in the clarity of objectives and the ability to read data before the market moves.
When I ask a hotelier what their Revenue strategy is for the upcoming season, the most common response is a variation of the same answer: “We’ll see how the market goes and adapt.”
Adapting to the market is not a strategy. It is the renunciation of having one.
Strategy in Revenue Management is a set of actions and decisions that define the direction to be taken—on pricing, distribution, segmentation, and marketing. It can be adjusted along the way because the market is never static. However, it must have a clear, measurable objective consistent with the property’s positioning. Without this, every decision becomes a reaction. And those who react always arrive late.
The difference seen in the numbers
A hotel without a strategy navigates by sight. It chases competitors when they lower prices, increases visibility on OTAs when occupancy drops, and launches last-minute offers hoping to fill remaining empty rooms. Every action is a response to something that has already happened.
A hotel with a well-defined strategy works differently. It knows where it wants to go, knows which segments to target, and has decided in advance how to distribute and at what price to sell. Above all, by analyzing data as it goes, it can understand if the actions implemented are working—and correct the course before the problem becomes irreversible.
“Those without a strategy chase others. Those who have one are always a step ahead, because they know where they are going and can recognize when they are moving away from the goal.”
The forecast: the only tool that transforms data into decisions
Most Italian hotels do not have a structured forecast. Some have a summary forecast—a general occupancy estimate for the following month. Very few perform a forecast by segment. Yet, only the latter generates real value.
Generating one million euros in turnover from OTAs is not the same as generating one million euros from direct bookings. Net of commissions, the two results have completely different margins. A generic forecast does not tell you this. A forecast by segment does.
Real case
A few years ago, I worked with a property that had increased turnover compared to the previous year by applying aggressive pricing strategies and over-commissions on OTAs. The surface numbers seemed positive.
When we analyzed the costs—OTA commissions, additional management costs, margin per segment—the picture was completely different. The growth in turnover had translated into a reduction in net margin. The hotel had worked harder to earn less.
The problem was not the pricing. It was the absence of a strategy by segment that would allow for the evaluation of the real value of each booking, not just its contribution to gross turnover.
A reliable forecast is built starting from the property’s historical data and crossing it with the analysis of the destination’s future demand. It is not a static prediction: it is constantly updated based on pick-ups, events, and market variations. And it is always built consistently with the strategy decided upon—because the strategy determines the forecast, not the other way around.
Segmentation: every customer has a different value
An effective pricing strategy is not applied uniformly to all demand. It is built segment by segment, because each segment has a different profitability, a different booking window, a different preferred channel, and different service expectations.
Correct segmentation arises from the intersection of three sources: the property’s historical data, the analysis of destination demand, and the study of competitors. If the positioning has been done well and the competitive set is correct, it is possible to understand which customer profiles similar properties are working with—and from there define one’s own segmentation by nationality, trip type, spending capacity, and requested services.
There is no universally undervalued segment, but there are specific opportunities that depend on the context. In hotels in the historic centers of art cities, groups are often ignored despite representing significant volumes. In business hotels, the leisure segment on weekends is almost always overlooked—even when the demand is there.
The right price: when to raise and when to lower
The correct pricing strategy tends to raise the price as rooms are sold and the date approaches. This is the logic of yield management: scarcity has a value, and that value increases over time.
Lowering the price only makes sense in one specific condition: when the date is near with rooms still available and within the cancellation policy window. In that case, the risk of cancellation and re-purchase at a lower price is almost zero, and the discount can recover occupancy that would otherwise be lost.
Lowering the price to chase competitors or to stimulate demand that isn’t there is, however, almost always a mistake—because it compresses margins without guaranteeing occupancy.
Anticipate the market, don’t chase it
Anticipating the market means reading future demand data before the demand materializes. Analyzing pick-ups week by week, monitoring emerging nationalities, and identifying new segments growing in the destination. Today, tools exist that make this possible even for medium-sized properties: data provided by OTAs, rate intelligence tools, and solutions like Zucchetti’s Travel Data Lake that allow for reading future aggregate demand with a level of detail previously unthinkable.
With these tools, you can understand who is searching for the coming months, intercept the right segmentation at the right time, and set the pricing and distribution strategy weeks ahead of the market.
In Revenue Management, there are no magic formulas capable of solving all problems.
Every action must be weighed, evaluated, and based on data. And applied with the weight of experience. Strategy is not a document to be written at the beginning of the year and forgotten. It is the thread that connects every decision to the goal. Without that thread, you work hard. But you don’t get to where you wanted to go.
