Revenue Management Execution & Technology Vacation Rental Managers Find Themselves Having to Piece Together Technology Systems to Execute Revenue Management Strategies By Emily Pattillo
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n business and life in general, they say to avoid extremes. Make a solid plan, make corrective adjustments, but stay the course and “fly in the middle.” Because 2020 was a year of extremes, it did not afford us that option. The pendulum swings were both swift and wide. Extremes in bookings, demand, staffing, politics—you name it, we experienced it. As we reflect on this past year and get excited to see each other in person again at the upcoming Vacation Rental Data and Revenue Management (DARM) Conference, it’s important to really take a look back internally and identify our biggest challenges so we can ask the right questions and get the answers that we need. We all have experiences to share. We all have had horror stories, success stories, and likely plenty of aha moments along the way. We all have something to offer, but more importantly, what do we want to learn from each other? What do YOU want to learn the most? 78
VRM Intel Magazine | Summer 2021
Revenue Management Strategy Revenue management in the vacation rental industry is an amalgamation of many different moving parts including distribution, pricing, digital marketing, and reputation management. Throw in the seemingly infinite metrics and data points, some of which the industry can’t even agree on, and vacation rental revenue management gets complicated pretty quickly. But how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So, we’ve been breaking down and analyzing our strategies and processes to find out what worked this year, what stood the test of time in extreme climates, and what we completely abandoned. Like you, we learned a lot at Casiola this year. Some lessons were forced out of necessity, some were happy accidents, some were intentional wins that knocked it out of the park, and others were failures we had to abandon quickly. We learned that no matter how