Protecting hotels from striking out

Strikes will always happen; we have seen a growing number of them in recent years. And while they are an impediment to business, the fact that we are usually forewarned gives hotels the chance to prepare a strategy to protect and possibly generate demand. It may only be a few weeks of warning – and the strike may be called off – but preparing is better than doing nothing.

Generally, strikes would mean that we would keep all of our channels open, in addition to pursuing a midweek revenue strategy. That way, we can ensure that all the channels are yielding without any restrictions. There is very little you can do to boost visibility for one day on the different channels, so your strategy will be led by pricing.

You are – of course – shifting your approach to accommodate the fact that there is going to be less demand. Traditionally, revenue management systems are set to look at historical data and utilise that data to make better decisions. But the reality is that it is unlikely that there was a strike at the same time last year, so historical data will not give you the correct information to gauge a response.

In that case, you need to override the data and we would look at the forward demand for those dates. If that were to change (if the strike were to be called off), we have the agility to change our strategy again immediately. The technology is always going to be looking at the demand patterns and reacting to them, but in order for the technology to be effective, we have to combine it with our knowledge of the market.

This is the marriage of people and technology: technology might see spikes, but not understand where they are coming from, which is where our experience comes to bear. We work in multiple different markets and they all follow certain trends. When you understand those trends, you can learn how to manage your business alongside them. And while we focus on forward demand rather than historical data as the benchmark for our pricing, we know that those demand patterns do follow a certain curve – and that is what revenue management is about.

For example, a Tuesday night may be restricted and high priced, generally. But in the case of a strike, where we know that many people are going to work from home and not come into town, it might be that leading up to that date we are looking to fill it with low-priced business. But then on the day, come six o’clock in the evening, we know that anyone that is stuck in London is not able to get home. And so our prices would change to reflect that, in order to maximise that last-minute opportunity.

What is increasingly interesting and applies to general demand, is that, with the growing availability of tools to facilitate remote working, strikes no longer carry the threat of lost productivity. It is a completely different dimension. People are no longer obliged to come into work and the offer of a cheap room may not necessarily encourage them to come into the office; but it might encourage them instead not to fight the crowds getting home that night, and come in and make a day out of it.

That flexibility – for those lucky enough to be able to access it – means an evolution for how we as workers respond to strikes. But even Zoom and our decades of experience can’t help when we’re stuck in the airport after a strike.