Yield Management - Tips and Best Practices

Tips and Best Practices

• The easiest way to use the Yield Management is to user simple, and easily - setup Yield Sheets.  This approach works for the majority of customers who desire to automate pricing, and is included with a Yield management subscription.
• Group Booking 'hard allocations' affect your occupancy, so be clear that allocating to Groups will affect your rates if 'Yielded' according to Occupancy. Some Groups cancel and this can have unintended consequences on occupancy patterns.
• Rates can be 'Yielded' for either Time or Occupancy. If you just want Rates to rise or fall according to 'Time' (ie, 7 days prior to arrival) you can use the Yield Management Module to affect rates only based on the Time value, regardless of Occupancy. This makes the Yield Management Module a 'last minute' rate tool.
• Rate tracking can become complex, as both 'Rate Loading' and 'Yielding' can affect a Rate's price. This tool is best used by a Revenue Manager who understands and tracks Rates as a professional. It's for this reason that BookingCenter charges a monthly fee for the service, as our support staff often has to untangle questions relating to the various channels a rate is booked.
• Once a rate has been delivered to an Agent Channel (such as an OTA like Booking.com or Expedia), it can take up to 6 hours for the Yielded rates in the OTAs (Booking.com, Expedia, etc) top show as these systems can accept only a limited rate update at a time.
• Yield management affects only Rate pricing for the 'First x people' on 'occupancy rates' and the price for 'flat rates'. It does NOT affect pricing for 'additional adults/children' nor does it affect Minimum or Maximum Length of Stay values.
• If you are using Yield rules that apply to CHILD RATES, then the Parent to Child offset (for example, the AAA discount of 10% from they Parent rate) will occur first and then the Yield factor calculates from that 'child rate' value for the given day will occur second.
• When setting up Yield management you must choose either a flat rate yield, ie: $10 or a percentage yield, ie: 10% to increase or decrease your rates. You cannot mix the two paradigms.