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Group Business is More Complex
When dealing with transient business, revenue managers work with unconstrained demand, using price as a lever – yielding to maximize revenues which simultaneously decreases demand from your more price-sensitive customers. Attempting to apply transient revenue management techniques to your group business doesn’t work. The challenge with groups, is that you must manage interdependent, fixed inventories: guest rooms and meeting rooms. And to optimize profitability across these inventories, you must strive to achieve the best possible business mix between convention groups, local catering groups, and transient business.

RM Focus on RevPAR
The RevPAR index is a key performance metric that drives a myriad of decisions within your organization. However, growth in RevPAR does not mean that your hotel profits are increasing, just as a decline in RevPAR does not necessarily indicate a decline in profitability. When making decisions related to group business, RevPAR only calculates your income as a percentage of room sales and it does not incorporate other revenue streams that contribute to your profitability, such as function space, food and beverage, and AV rental. If you rely solely on RevPAR to determine whether or not to accept a particular piece of group business, you may end up making poor decisions that are detrimental to your hotel profitability.

Incentives for RM Leaders
Further contributing to the problematic focus on RevPAR, is the distorting factor of revenue management incentives. According to research from professional services firm ZS and the HSMAI Foundation, industry incentive compensation often relies heavily on the RevPAR index or room night revenue. This creates a culture that leads to counterintuitive decisions about group business because it doesn’t benefit managers to account for the considerable revenue and profit generated from areas outside of guest room bookings.

Not Incorporating Meeting Space in Decision-Making
Group business is varied, including meetings and conventions, trade shows, incentive trips, sports tournaments, and SMERF (social, military, educational, religious and fraternal) events. It also includes local catering groups. With the right tools and proper forecasting that accounts for the differing lead times (conventions typically booking further out than local catering groups), you can maximize hotel profits on function space as well as guest rooms. Once you have meetings/convention groups and transients on the books, you can fill – and optimize yielding on – unused function space with local catering groups.

Not Incorporating F&B in Decision-Making
In a recent International Association of Conference Centres (IACC) survey of event planners, hotel F&B was found to be a determining factor in site selection. And a trend report from Avendra found that F&B is growing in importance as a revenue stream. Groups that frequent full-service hotels are spending more on F&B, and they’re moving up to hire-tier proteins and beverage options – with group business being the biggest, most important driver of F&B demand.

An STR research presentation during a Hotel Data Conference, showed that food revenue made up:

• 57 percent of catering-and-banquet revenue at luxury hotels.
• 59 percent of catering-and-banquet revenue at upper-upscale properties.
• 58 percent of catering-and-banquet revenue at upscale hotel.
• Plus, hotels earned an additional 6 to 10 percent in beverage revenue.

Rise Above the Competition
Cvent recently published their Q1 2019 Group Business Outlook, a 24-month forecast that highlights group booking activity in the U.S. Data within the report showed that while there was a substantial increase in awarded request for proposal (RFP) activity at the end of last year, that increase was likely fueled by meeting planners’ desire to finalize group contracts before major hotel chain commission policy changes went into effect this year.

Looking forward through Q2 2021, group bookings are actually pacing down due to relatively flat group business demand and increasing supply. This combination is creating a hypercompetitive market that will require hotel owners to reevaluate their group strategy. By proactively changing from a RevPAR or “rooms first” focus to a total revenue management focus, you will increase profitability from your group business and stay ahead of market trends.

A Practical Look at Total Revenue Opportunity
In order to form an effective group business strategy and grow group revenues, you must focus on the total revenue opportunity for each piece of group business – accurately and thoroughly calculating all revenues associated with each booking. Because there may be times when you should accept a group, even though a RevPAR analysis makes it appear as if the booking is losing revenue. It’s only when you look beyond room revenue to include ancillary options like food/beverage and meeting space in your group business evaluation that the true value of the business is revealed. Only then can you decide whether to accept or reject a particular piece of group business, as well as determine the optimal rate to offer for that business. 

Consider the following scenario:

A 300-room hotel is considering a large group opportunity spanning four days, beginning on October 5, 2020, at a rate of $200 per room/per night.
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Based on the analysis completed by the hotel, it would appear as if accepting the group would result in a loss of $32,100 in room revenue due to displacement of other higher-rated transient business. However, by including food-and-beverage minimums as well as meeting room rental fees into the calculation, it becomes clear that accepting this piece of group business actually increases profits.

Even when examining historical performance, if the hotel accepts the group, the hotel’s revenue generation index (RGI) may drop below last year’s level, perhaps even below the level of its competition. But in fact, the hotel would still have generated more revenue. This example illustrates the potentially negative impact on profitability that can come from focusing on rooms revenue as your only goal when evaluating group business

The time has come to rethink the way we measure group revenue – with an eye toward optimization. By taking a scientific, data-driven approach to managing your group business, one that accounts for total revenue opportunity, you’re empowered to drive further performance improvement from groups and thus maximize overall hotel profitability.

About the Author
Matt Curry joined Rainmaker in 2016 from Cvent, the world’s largest digital marketplace that helps hotels attract and convert group business. In his time at Rainmaker, Matt has served in various leadership roles primarily focusing around Sales and Product Strategy. Today, he leads global sales and marketing efforts to help fuel growth and exceed company revenue targets.

About Rainmaker
Rainmaker is the hotel revenue and profit optimization cloud. The company partners with hotels, resorts and casinos to help them outperform their revenue and profit objectives. Rainmaker's cloud-based solutions for transient and group pricing optimization, forecasting, and revenue-centric business intelligence are designed to help hoteliers streamline operations, enhance revenue optimization processes, improve lead performance, and drive guest bookings. Recognized as one of the top privately-held companies in the United States, Rainmaker has been named to Inc. 5000's 'Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies' for the last seven years and to the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s list of '100 Fastest Growing Companies in Atlanta'. Rainmaker serves hospitality customers throughout the world from its corporate headquarters in Alpharetta, Ga., and from offices in Las Vegas, Singapore and Dubai. To learn more about Rainmaker and its suite of hotel revenue and profit optimization solutions, visit www.LetItRain.com.

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