So how can we make informed decisions about our pricing strategies? I mean decisions founded on solid data and statistics. A demand calendar is the answer for your revenue management operations.

A hotel needs an extensive revenue management demand calendar show multiple demand indicators to appropriately analyze market situations. Sounds nice no? But what are we talking about....

The most basic version of a demand calendar you contain the following information;

• RevPAR last year
• Groups or events last year
• Demand level indicator last year (High, Medium, Low, Distressed)
• Demand level indicator this year
• Bank holidays
• School holidays
• Exceptional demand indicators
• Hotel marketing plans

So a lot of the information is easy to get. RevPAR last year, groups or events in the hotel etc, can be retrieved from internal PMS data. Te determine if school holidays or bank holidays affect you you should run arrival statistics of last years holidays per feader market (country) against their holidays. This way you can see if any particular school or holiday from a particular country affects your hotel. It will allow you to target it intelligently with special offers and packages this year.

We have done some leg work for you and put together an international holiday calendar for half of Europe. It includes holidays and national festive days in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Spain (and provincial celebrations like in Catalonia), Portugal, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.

We use this calendar for the hotels we manage to determine if any country specific holidays affect our demand, in a negative or positive way. It also allows us to create promotions targeting specific vacations or celebrations. The document is based on Google Docs, shared with all our clients to expand and add countries and holidays etx... We are working together to make become stronger...

The data and information from the demand calendar can now be integrated into your OTB (on the books) and pick-up summaries. It will give you a much broader view of where your hotel is trending.

In the end informed decisions are better decisions, leading to better results!