Vivek Bhogaraju is on a mission – he wants to democratise revenue management so that “everybody can be a revenue manager”.
The director of revenue management platform for Expedia Group believes that with advances in AI, overall data processing power and data sets – “there are over 20,000 pricing and availability changes on its lodging platform every second” – the industry is at an inflexion point.
“With the right building blocks and machine learning, everybody should be a revenue manager.”
His goal is to collaborate with the industry and impact at scale the way revenue management is perceived and practiced. As Bhogaraju sees it, there are three big pillars driving the adoption of revenue management – data and tech, sustainable practices and talent.
“What we are finding is of the base of a million properties globally, probably five percent are using revenue management. If we can add another 10%, that’s 100,000 more properties and that would only be 15% of lodging properties globally.
“How do we level the playing field so that no matter what size of property you have, you are able to drive revenue performance? What do we need to do differently in these three areas to make that happen?
“We are spending lots of time addressing this question, both as an industry and within Expedia.”
Saying there was so much opportunity that was not being tapped, he said, “If you ask a question why a certain RM is successful and able to do better, she or he will say, ‘I am consistent with what I am doing, the business doesn’t stop and I take timely actions, when the opportunity is there’.
“The question is how can we use data and tech and later machine learning to make consistent decisions in a timely manner. We want to help them with the next best action to drive revenue performance.”
With 1.4m properties on its platform, he said, “we understand what a hotel, hostel, service apartment, short term rental needs to do with low vs high demand”.
He said that Expedia Group was working with lodging partners to try to address revenue management on a broader scale. “We are engaging lodging tech partners such as PMS, CRS – to see how we can get seamless insights flowing and enabling timely actions.”
He acknowledges there are companies which are protective of their walled gardens, “but we want to open up our platform for others to use our capabilities”.
Asked why Expedia was being such a “good guy”, he said, “We want to power lodging partners to make data-driven decisions leveraging the data we have, we believe that, as an industry, if we can improve revenue management adoption – the entire market can do better.”
On practices, he said, in the past 12 months, Expedia has added $200m in incremental revenue to its core partners who are engaged with Rev+ on a consistent basis. “We are taking playbooks and best practices to the rest of the industry. Of course there are local exceptions but the fundamental disciplines – hygiene of data, reporting, who’s making decisions – are similar.”
On the last piece of talent, he said that while there were certifications and resources available for professionals to get trained in revenue management, there was a bigger opportunity to scale and organize it.
“How do we engage the community? Could we curate content for non-revenue managers, for example, so that it can be practiced by more people, and you don’t have to be specialists? We have asked lodging partners why you haven’t adopted, and the reasons are, cost, complexity, lack of trained RM analyst and lack of actionable data.
“What if we were to make it more universal so that you don’t need specialists or fulltime revenue managers?”
Asked if Expedia Group is planning to engage current hospitality students, he said, “That would be a great next step to make the resources available to students through academic partnerships where we can embed some of our solutions but our priority is to train hospitality professionals first. If we do this well, then they can learn on the job as well.”
Having been in revenue management for 15 years, Bhogaraju said he spent the first 13 years of his career focused on large chains and large independents. “When I was recruited for Expedia two years ago, the value proposition for me was the question, the vast majority of properties are being left behind, do you want to help us solve that?”
He said the breakthrough moment is coming with the emergence of data and tech to make this possible. “If you want to deliver that customer experience, you have to deliver profit. You have to invest in the whole value chain.”
