With the rapid rise of Revenue Management as one of the most important tools in hospitality management, HOSPA – the Association for Hospitality Finance, Revenue Management and IT professionals – has published a FREE introductory interactive iBook and an ebook version to the world of Revenue Management and how it can be used in the hospitality industry.
Part of HOSPA’s Practitioner Series, the new book – appropriately entitled ‘Revenue Management; an Introduction for Practitioners’ – has been prepared by HOSPA with the financial support of the Savoy Educational Trust, with the additional support of Oxford Brookes University.
What is Revenue Management? “It’s the art and science of maximising revenue under variable conditions,” explained Chair of the HOSPA Professional Development Committee and Editor of the new book, Professor Peter Jones MBE. “It’s a management tool for increasing sales revenues by manipulating the prices at which fixed products, such as hotel rooms and airline seats, are made available for sale in relation to current and forecasted demand. Customers are now very much aware that the price they would need to pay for a hotel room or airline seat will vary significantly, depending upon availability and the point at which they make a purchase decision. The change in the way customers perceive the pricing of such products has been relatively recent but universally accepted.
“The new HOSPA ‘Revenue Management’ book is designed to address this development and provides an in-depth introduction to Revenue Management and how it can be effectively used in the hospitality industry. It covers everything from understanding the motivation of the customer and the influence of the economic cycle in making purchasing decisions, as well as competitive markets and the principles of hotel market segmentation, to understanding the core components of pricing and its impact – in a variety of demand periods – on value perception; and the key skills required for a Revenue Manager.”
The new HOSPA ‘Revenue Management’ iBook is fully interactive – including audio elements, 3d graphics and self-paced review questions, and is available as a FREE download via iTunes. It is also available via iTunes U as part of a self-paced online course. The ebook version, without the interactivity, can be found here.
The central pillars of the HOSPA Education Programmes are the Education and Training programmes in Financial Management and Revenue Management. The latter was successfully launched in 2011 and the first HOSPA Revenue Management student award winners were honoured at the Annual HOSPA Christmas Awards Lunch in December 2012. Currently, the Association is planning to launch a Hospitality IT programme in 2014.