Prestigious independent hotel group bolsters both revenue management results and processes with solutions from industry leader in total profit optimization.
ALPHARETTA, GA – Irvine Company Resort Properties, the hospitality division of real estate development company, The Irvine Company, has successfully implemented advanced revenue management solutions from The Rainmaker Group (Rainmaker) across its portfolio of luxury hotels and resorts in southern California. The internationally renowned real estate development company has deployed Rainmaker's guestrev and grouprev solutions to optimize both transient and group profitability at Island Hotel and The Resort at Pelican Hill in Newport Beach, as well as Hotel Irvine.
Prior to making the switch to Rainmaker, The Irvine Company had tried several different approaches to revenue management automation, including the use of a competing technology provider system at one property, as well as attempting to build its own proprietary solution for pricing group business RFP's. After experiencing less than expected results from those attempts, Rudy Benavides, corporate director of sales strategies for the company, set out to identify an ideal system for balancing the complexities of transient and group pricing for their multi-property, regional portfolio and for maximizing the potential for winning highly profitable group business.
"Our philosophy goes beyond simply managing transient and group pricing decisions independently, and focuses instead on the total revenue and profitability of our resorts," adds Benavides. "For our operation, we need a science-based approach to data analytics that aligns with this focus, and solutions that allow our revenue management team to quickly extract and analyze both historical and forward-looking data at a granular level to make better decisions, save time, and improve our overall bottom line. Another important aspect for us is to have a flexible product development team who will work directly with us to solve the specific challenges of our properties."
A particular challenge that the Irvine Group Sales team struggled with was knowing when to release un-sold function space for availability to local catering groups that do not include sleeping rooms. Rainmaker aided in solving this challenge through the new free-sell calendar functionality within grouprev, which seamlessly communicates with Irvine's existing systems to simplify and streamline local catering decisions, based on the unique attributes of each individual group request. This greatly reduces the time needed to turn around requests, while optimizing the profitability of the event space.
"We realized our operational need for visibility into the availability and maximum utilization of our valuable function space inventory," Benavides concluded. "We wanted to gain the ability to see real-time free-sell status for any given function room at any point in time as that is far superior to – say – relying on an over-simplified '30-day policy' for releasing space. Being able to see free-sell status and availability on a mobile tablet, while working with a client on planning an event, is an incredible time-saver and something that we wanted to take advantage of to significantly increase our chances of winning the business."
In addition to other proprietary features, both guestrev® and grouprev have now been augmented with the group forecasting functionality, an enhancement that was announced earlier this month at OPTIMIZE2017, the largest user conference in Rainmaker's history. Group forecasting provides the unique ability to project future group business demand, allowing hotel revenue managers to significantly improve the accuracy of their pricing, as well as the overall profitability of their property or portfolio-wide revenue management strategies.
Angelos is the news editor for TravelDailyNews Media Network (traveldailynews.gr, traveldailynews.com and traveldailynews.asia). His role includes to monitor the hundrends of news sources of TravelDailyNews Media Network and skim the most important according to our strategy.
He currently studies Communication, Media & Culture in Panteion University of Political & Social Studies of Athens.
