Hotel Inventory Management: Top 3 Strategies to Manage Inventory to Maximise Profits

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What is hotel inventory management?

Hotel inventory management is the process of understanding, overseeing and controlling your hotel’s inventory. Rooms are the primary inventory in hotel industry. If these rooms aren’t open for booking at a competitive price, they remain unoccupied, thus decreasing the hotel revenue. Managing the inventory optimally means effectively balancing need and demand while maximising returns.

Top 3 Strategies to Manage Hotel Inventory

Earlier, hotel inventory management was a manual process. The staff would allocate inventory for different sales channels (like direct sales, corporate sales, online sales, etc.).This manual process of inventory management was not only time-consuming but also highly inefficient.
The rise in hotel technology automated a lot of repetitive manual tasks, including inventory management.

In this article, we’ll look at different strategies where technology has helped hoteliers manage their hotel inventory efficiently to maximise profits.

Integration with the channel manager:
Initially, the channel manager could pool inventory only for all online channels and OTAs (along with rate parity). However, as technology improved, it evolved and could pool inventory across all sales channels, including online and offline. This advancement was possible because of the integration of the channel manager with the property management software (PMS). With an integrated system, managing room rates, bookings, and distribution of inventory across multiple properties and channels can be done with a single click. Integration ensures that room rates and inventory availability update accurately and simultaneously across all booking channels, giving you the flexibility needed to optimise inventory for maximum revenue and occupancy. In simple terms, the integration of the channel manager with the PMS ensures that inventory in real-time is visible across all sales channels (online and offline) and can be optimised for sale. The integration makes sure that the same inventory is not sold on multiple platforms (overbooking) while ensuring that the inventory is not left undersold.
Data-driven decisions:
Your rate setting and inventory allocation decisions should always be backed by data. With the help of data, you can make timely and informed rate and distribution decisions, thus maximising revenue-generating opportunities and hotel performance. With an integrated system, data is available at a click of a button, making it easy for you to monitor performance metrics such as ADR, RevPAR, booking source, occupancy, etc. You are able to also figure out your best-performing channels and price points that are the best fit for your target market. You can also combine and analyse various data sets simultaneously, such as seasonality, customer segmentation, booking trends, special events, competition rate-setting, etc. These insights empower you to forecast demand and create the right pricing and promotional strategies targeted at different customer segments.
Leveraging mobile technology:
In the hotel business, it’s important to have real-time visibility to make timely informed decisions. A cloud-based mobile PMS allows you to view, monitor and access information in real-time from anywhere and at any time. This flexibility empowers you to make strategic rate and inventory decisions and necessary adjustments, if required, depending on market conditions to deliver the right inventory to the right people at the right time, thus maximising revenue opportunities.

Aiosell’s property management software offers the right integrations for inventory management.

With the right technology and the right integrations in place, you can easily maximise return on your inventory and increase the hotel’s revenue. Aiosell’s cloud-based property management system can help you make smarter and potentially more profitable inventory decisions.

Aiosell offers a fully integrated cloud-based hotel management system that integrates seamlessly with your revenue management, channel manager, reviews manager, booking engine, and reporting system to provide an all-in-one integrated solution.

Hotel inventory management is effectively done when your systems are seamlessly integrated with Aiosell’s property management system. Book your free trial now.