Gianni Di Fede, Senior Vice President of Revenue Management, Distribution, and RevGen BI, EMEA, joined Radisson Hotel Group in 2017. From day one he had the vision to streamline revenue operations, with the aim of driving increased revenue and efficiency.
Now the company has an organized global revenue structure that cascades down to regional and even local levels, while all move in the same direction to deliver best-in-class revenue management.
Central to this is The Revenue Club, which according to Radisson Hotel Group, “redefines what future revenue management will look like by mixing human intuition, cutting-edge innovation, and strategic partnerships.”
Duetto is proud to be one of the key technology partners supporting The Revenue Club – with members of our team recently joining The Revenue Club for its first post-pandemic meeting in Gran Canaria in June.
“We see Duetto as an enabler of the Revenue Club.”
Gianni Di Fede, Senior Vice President of Revenue Management, Distribution, and RevGen BI, EMEA
Global revenue
At a global level, Radisson Hotel Group has a Corporate Support Office (CSO), made up of three different teams:
- Revenue management.
- Distribution.
- Business intelligence.
Within the revenue management team there are:
- A rate loading team, which takes care of the manual tasks of the revenue manager.
- A five-year plan team, which is looking at what is going to happen in the coming years, with a view to finding new revenue streams.
- Revenue operations, which is the day-to-day business of revenue management at a global level.
This layered approach enables the team to specialize and work according to their strengths. It also works well for attracting and developing revenue talent, as team members can work up through the various levels and disciplines.
The CSO is powered by Global Centres of Excellence in each of its main geographic areas:
- Madrid covers Europe.
- St Petersburg covers Russia, Turkey, and Eastern European countries.
- Dubai covers the Middle East and Africa.
According to Di Fede, there are many efficiencies in running such a strategy, with the CSO offering corporate support to regional and in-market teams.
“The efficiencies of running a corporate-level centralized revenue strategy are huge. When you sit beside another revenue manager, who is looking at a similar portfolio or the same destination, if you don’t spot an event or see a trend, you can rest assured that that trend is spotted by someone else,” he shared.
Using technology – welcoming EMMA
EMMA is the Radisson Hotel Group’s exclusive unified technology platform that serves all core functions, to incorporate all hotels in the portfolio within one unified Revenue Management System.
“We combine business intelligence, distribution, and revenue management. To achieve this, we have built a business intelligence solution where all the data, including the data from Duetto, is cross-referenced with the PMS data, the market share data, and more, and they sit in the same environment to be then used and consumed by both the corporate teams and those on-property if they want.
“You just connect to the application, and you see all the data: the revenue management system recommendations including pricing, the pricing of the competition, your on-the-books (OTB) data, your forecast, all at a glance. We are one of the few hotel companies that combined business intelligence and revenue management all in one place,” Di Fede explained.
For Di Fede this setup enables the team to scale, bring new properties to market faster, and drive efficiencies.
“It helps you with scaling your portfolio faster. You have people specialized in certain areas, who know what to do and do it quickly. Using the same system, you can copy/paste the same items into multiple hotels which saves time.”
Pierre-Baptiste Lechien, Director of Revenue Technology, EMEA, Radisson Hotel Group, is a day-to-day user of Duetto within this platform.
“It’s important to have the technology on board and Duetto is a great help. We are benefitting from the automation.”
Pierre-Baptiste Lechien, Director of Revenue Technology, EMEA
“Having almost real-time rate refreshes for all the hotels, making sure that you can react on time to the pickup for each destination is important. Having technology like this on board is crucial. Also, having this complementarity with Duetto to be able to insert the strategy that we want to achieve into the tool and having this flexibility is key to making sure that we can have the strategy that we want and have Duetto as part of that journey,” Lechien added.
Cluster operations
Using this technology, Radisson Hotel Group sees huge synergies and efficiencies in terms of revenue managing multi-hotel city destinations, such as London or Amsterdam.
“In such destinations, you can work together to push one hotel above the rest, depending on demand. This strategy gives you an enormous advantage compared to those hotels or chains managing revenue only on an individual property basis. It’s easier from a global point of view, to go and share a strategy and make sure that the strategy gets immediately translated into actions,” explained Di Fede.
“Duetto is critical to improving efficiency here. When you manage multi-property destinations then you can also identify the sister properties and build a strategy, one after the other.
“When you manage events when demand is very high and constrained Duetto helps you to have one strategy and cascade it down to multiple properties.”
The centralized strategy also helps Radisson Hotel Group to ensure price integrity across its brands and ensure that the various hotels and brands are complementing rather than competing in the market, but always with a total company revenue objective as the target.
“Our Brand Indexation is harmonized, so we know what the average price gap is between a Park Inn, a Radisson Red, and a Radisson Blu, for example. But I am a fan of following demand. So, demand is always taking the ultimate decision,” said Di Fede.
“Brand indexation is the way to protect brand integrity. However, a mid-range property may sell at the same rate as an upscale property based on demand, given specific market conditions, especially if you manage hotels in the same destination. As a revenue manager, you use Duetto, you read demand and you react to the demand all the time.”
Local input
Balancing a centralized strategy with local knowledge and responsibility is always challenging, but Radisson Hotel Group seems to have this down to a fine art.
“The GM is always the ultimate one responsible for the strategy because they are responsible for the P&L. We provide support from a cluster level, which is specific, specialized, and benefits from our best practice to best drive the revenue. The main benefit when you externalize such a service is that you take the emotions away,” said Di Fede.
“But this doesn’t mean that we can always spot all the opportunities on a local basis. That’s why the GM works together with their revenue manager. There is always the possibility to deviate from a strategy if it makes sense. So yes, there is empowerment and there is flexibility.”
