EzRMS is expanding its reach to Singapore, which has been significantly growing in the hospitality industry.  I always had a feeling that countries in Asia were being late in adopting technology to revenue management practice.  As more hospitality tech companies in western countries go into the Asian market, it is expected that the usage of RMS will become more ubiquitous.

This article talks about the acquisition of Restaurant POS system company, Breadcrumb, by Groupon. This will provide seamless service to all Breadcrumb and Groupon  customers. This will also allow Goupon to observe customer spending patterns which it was not be able to see before. 

This article is about a decision made by Texas Western, Hotel Management Company, to introduce Cloud-Based Business Intelligent system. According to the interviews with the company executives, this investment is really paying off. This system has taken system responsibility off their hands and allowed them to cut labor costs which were used to prepare daily revenue reports or spread sheets. Mobile access to all the information also appears to be a useful feature offered by Cloud-based system. 

This article showed how online marketing analytic tools have become sophisticated and help hoteliers to develop more effective marketing strategy. For example, Adobe Site Catalyst has developed its segmentation capabilities that allow users to quickly dissect a slew of visitors to unveil special characteristics otherwise you would not be able to notice. This is a revolutionary way of data mining which was not in our marketing text book. As opposed to that Google Analytics is free, you have to pay to use this SiteCatalyst. Whether it is worth your dollar is depending on your size of business and branding strategy. 

This article lists pros and cons of Cloud Computing for Hotels. What is surprising is that Cloud Computing can be costly as opposed to the common belief that Cloud Computing is a great cost saver. According to this article, if your IT resource pool is too big, it is less likely that you'll see any enormous financial advantage in outsourcing to the cloud. In addition, there is a method being used by hackers to increase your Cloud usage significantly and make you end up paying a lot for it. The method is called DDoS(Distributed Denial of Service). Even a low-level of this can keep your server busy and give you an enormous bill. Sure, these problems can be prevented and benefits of Cloud Computing can outweigh them. However, this technology is quite new, you need to think strategically before you pounce on  it.

This article addresses the issue of mobile bookings that revenue managers have to be careful about. Mobile bookings have become very common among customers and the number is still growing. Last year bookings via mobile devices accounted for $3 billion. Needless to say, it is a key for success of your hotel to capture revenue from this growing segment. It is no surprise that many hotels are launching new apps to tap into the mobile device market. However, this article points out that although investing in technology is important, you also need to review revenue management strategy of your hotel based on the current change in booking trend. For example, like other booking channel users, mobile customers have their own characteristics such as length of stay and average spending. It is the role of revenue managers to identify these common behaviors and create the best revenue generating tactics in collaboration with their existing revenue management and channel strategy. Last minute deals, which is a growing trend as there are more last minute booking mobile users, have pros and cons for hotels. Revenue managers have to make a judgement on such tactics based on what is the best for your hotel in long term.