Success always starts with a plan. But planning and budgeting for hospitality organizations is a painful, time-consuming process, especially during times of increased uncertainty.
And for all the pain that it requires, we all know how critical of a role budgeting and planning plays in assuring the success of a hospitality organization—whether it’s a five-star hotel, a chain of extended stay apartments, a resort, or even a humble campground or RV park.
But budgeting and forecasting still rely heavily on labor-intensive spreadsheets, cumbersome rule-based pricing tools, and precious time spent collecting, preparing, and organizing data.
However, there is a more time and cost-efficient way to budget and forecast for hotels and other hospitality organizations.
It’s called RevPlan.
And since IDeaS first introduced RevPlan years ago, hospitality professionals have been raving about the benefits they’ve experienced from using it.
So, which benefits do RevPlan customers most appreciate?
What are these hospitality professionals saying about how RevPlan has helped their organizations streamline operations, save time, and earn more revenue?
We answer those questions below. Read on to find out more.
What is the RevPlan total revenue budgeting & forecasting tool & how does it benefit hotels & hospitality organizations?
Historically, hotels have relied on manual data collection and forecasting to plan their total business operations. But this time-consuming process often leads to errors, inefficiency, overly-narrow decision-making, and ultimately diminishing profits.
However, RevPlan changes all of that.
RevPlan helps revenue managers, finance directors, and other hospitality leaders to budget, plan, and strategize more efficiently through automation and scientific forecasting.
By uniting data from all revenue streams and their individual systems, RevPlan provides hospitality professionals with up-to-date insights that allow for quicker strategic adjustments.
And so far, RevPlan clients love the benefits they’ve experienced by using the solution to supplement their existing hospitality revenue management system from IDeaS.
The testimonials below showcase their experiences with RevPlan and the three main benefits they appreciate most.
1. Boost productivity & efficiency
IDeaS designed RevPlan with hoteliers, revenue experts, and hospitality professionals worldwide.
That collaborative effort resulted in a system that takes the burden out of collecting and organizing data used by hoteliers and hospitality professionals to forecast and budget revenue efficiently and successfully.
Using RevPlan, hospitality organizations such as hotels, casino hotels, resorts, extended stay and serviced apartments, and outdoor accommodations can build a total revenue forecast or budget with data from across the organization’s technology stack.
From there, they can submit the optimized forecasts and budgets to the finance team with the click of a button. Easy, as it should be.
What do RevPlan users say?
Don’t just take our word for how RevPlan benefits hospitality professionals. Here’s what RevPlan clients have to say about their experience using RevPlan to budget and forecast.
“Forecast accuracy is not just labor savings. It’s also increased revenue. We see this happening in staffing where, if you’re understaffed, somebody should be drinking three drinks an hour, but now they’re drinking two because everyone’s in line. Whereas if you’re overstaffed, you’re sending staff home, which isn’t right in the current labor environment.”
“I love the freedom that RevPlan allows us when hiring. Now, when hiring a number two, we don’t have to focus on finding someone with Excel skills or an expert in macros. We can hire the next generation of revenue directors who are already going to be groomed to be strategic thinkers. That gives us long-term bench strength.”
- Mehernosh Jehangir, Corporate Director of Revenue Management, Loews
2. Gain a complete picture of your organization’s revenue streams & untapped opportunities
RevPlan’s flexibility and broad reach across the entirety of an organization make it quick and easy for hospitality professionals to collect data and create one source of truth. Ten disparate spreadsheets, 23 email chains, and 17 handwritten notes just became a single, consolidated digital dashboard integrated with a cloud-based system.
Whether serving a single property or an entire portfolio of properties, RevPlan empowers leaders to build a comprehensive revenue strategy based on data versus assumptions.
Yes, gut instinct and lived experience factor into decision-making equations, but those instincts grow even sharper when tempered by comprehensive insights from a revenue management system supported by RevPlan.
And those aren’t just our words. Our clients offer similar testimonials that praise the benefits of RevPlan.
What do RevPlan users say?
Here’s what hospitality professionals say about how RevPlan helps them gain a complete view of each revenue stream within their organizations:
“We have two systems from IDeaS that provide a forecast (G3 RMS and RevPlan). Why would we need two different forecasts and systems? Well, the two systems don’t answer the same question. Ultimately, they complement each other. Instead of having multiple Excel spreadsheets, everything from forecasts to budgets gets consolidated within RevPlan—not only for rooms forecast but [also] for the total revenue forecast and budget, including rooms, F&B, and ancillaries.”
- Albane Colmenares, Director of Revenue Strategy & Analytics, Hard Rock
“In the process of configuring RevPlan, we found so many different opportunities. For example, we did not even have a way of measuring how many guests ate in the restaurant or stayed in the hotel versus walk-ins. We are uncovering so many basic questions even before we have a forecast from RevPlan. It is already helping us get better.”
- Mehernosh Jehangir, Corporate Director of Revenue Management, Loews
3. Generate scientific forecasts of total revenue (without pouring over old spreadsheets)
It’s time to say “goodbye” to relying on gut instinct alone while creating revenue forecasts. That’s especially true when considering the second most profitable revenue stream for many hospitality organizations: food and beverage (F&B).
To maximize profitability for a stream of revenue as complex and diverse as F&B, hospitality professionals need to go deeper than a summary-level forecast.
And that’s where RevPlan shines.
The system provides a comprehensive forecast and tracks performance for each revenue outlet within a hospitality organization – down to the meal periods, residential vs walk-in covers and more. This permits an organization to make strategic decisions based on credible information they can trust.
Finally, a hotel’s F&B forecasting can have the same accuracy and precision as a room forecast.
Conventional wisdom in the hospitality industry tells us that revenue management needs to move toward profit optimization.
And thanks to advances in revenue strategies, technology, and education, organizations now have a golden opportunity to bridge the gap between revenue management, profit optimization, and many of the other disciplines in between.
RevPlan facilitates that process by breaking down silos, tracking performance, and forecasting all revenue streams in a scalable and sustainable way.
By putting total revenue intelligence in the hands of hotel and revenue leaders, RevPlan helps hospitality professionals build innovative, forward-looking revenue strategies for each revenue stream.
What do RevPlan users say?
Here’s how RevPlan users put the benefits mentioned above into their own words:
“As a corporate organization, everybody is doing their own thing. With Excel [spreadsheets], how do you summarize? How do you capture all the data and look at it to make decisions? [How do you] challenge those decisions? RevPlan allows us to gain control of the forecasting process.”
- Matthieu Lafaurie, Head of The Club (Revenue Management for Hire) & RM Projects, Radisson Hotel Group
“When we were talking about total revenue management, I always went back to my revenue management 101, which says you need a forecast to do anything. And we didn’t have a forecast in all these different areas. We were living in spreadsheets and using different metrics. I’m really happy that IDeaS took it up to forecast total revenue using RevPlan.”
- Shawn Jereb, Senior Vice President, Revenue Management & Distribution, Montage International
“We have a great financial forecasting system, but it’s a system of record. There’s no data analytics or demand data—nothing like that. You enter what you’re forecasting, and then it spits out P&Ls. What I like about RevPlan is that it gives the teams that are not used to forecasting the right data and analytics they can trust. Then they can create a more accurate top-line forecast. So, when they go to the day-to-day expense forecasting with the top part right, they can get the bottom line even better.”
- Derek Brewster, Director of Revenue Management, New York Palace
Ready to take the next step?
Find new ways to align departments around common objectives, leverage cutting-edge revenue management tools, and adopt updated metrics for tracking performance.
