Revenue Management 360Cornell

Certificate Program

Revenue management is key to any business that has relatively fixed capacity, perishable inventory, and time-variable demand. This course introduces you to the basics of revenue management in the hotel industry: how to apply pricing and length-of-stay tools and how to measure your revenue management performance. It is designed to inspire you to shift your thinking about revenue management from a focus on occupancy and average room rate to a focus on revenue per available room (RevPAR).

This course teaches you how to accurately forecast guest arrivals at your hotel, examine pricing models in accordance with revenue management principles, and to manage overbooking. All of the techniques and practices discussed in this course are applicable to a variety of service management roles.

By completing this course you will have compiled detailed notes and recommendations for implementing revenue management at the organization where you work.

Successful revenue management strategies hinge on the ability to forecast demand and to control room availability and length of stay. This course explores the role of the forecast in a revenue management strategy and the positive impact that forecasting can also have on staff scheduling and purchasing.

Authored by Professor Sheryl E. Kimes from Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, during this course you'll get a step-by-step approach to creating an accurate forecast as you learn how to build booking curves, account for "pick-up", segment demand by market, group, and channel, and calculate error and account for its impact.

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Introduction to Hotel Revenue Management

A smart pricing strategy is the best way to increase revenue. This course teaches you how to set prices, develop rate fences (differentiate prices by customer type), and use multiple distribution channels to manage price more effectively.

You'll also learn about the impact of variable pricing and discounting on revenue management in the context of price elasticity, optimal price mix, perceived fairness, and congruence with positioning and sales strategies.

Discover the ins and outs of channel management, an essential tool for controlling differentiated pricing, maintaining rate fences, and increasing revenue. Explore various approaches to managing distribution channels including direct sales, agencies, the Internet, and opaque pricing channels. Sheryl E. Kimes, professor at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, will provide you with the knowledge you need to help run a successful organization.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Introduction to Hotel Revenue Management
• Forecasting and Availability Controls in Hotel Revenue Management

Businesses that accept reservations must cope with the problem of no-shows: customers who make a reservation but fail to honor it. Hotels can protect themselves against revenue loss from no-shows by overbooking. This course teaches you how to strategically overbook and how to evaluate groups in order to determine which rates to charge.

You will examine the components of a successful overbooking strategy: no-show forecasting, no-show rates, arrival uncertainty, pricing policies, and cancellation forecasts. You will consider the risks of overbooking and review strategies to minimize costs and mitigate customer impact.

This course, authored by Cornell University Professor Sheryl E. Kimes, will help you create a group forecast and explore yieldable and non-yieldable business and incremental group costs and revenue opportunities. Finally, you will employ models to calculate displacement costs and contribution margins to determine which customer groups will return the most profit.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Introduction to Hotel Revenue Management
• Forecasting and Availability Controls in Hotel Revenue Management
• Pricing Strategy and Distribution Channels in Hotel Revenue Management

Any business that has relatively fixed capacity, perishable inventory, and time-variable demand can increase revenue using revenue management—not just hotels. This course, authored by Cornell University's Professor Sheryl E. Kimes, reviews the basics of revenue management and outlines the application of revenue management principles to other businesses, both inside the hotel and beyond, such as spas, restaurants, and golf courses.

Through your work on the course project, you will reinforce what you have learned about the refinement and extension of revenue management practices and will develop notes and recommendations for implementing and extending revenue management at the organization where you work.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Introduction to Hotel Revenue Management
• Forecasting and Availability Controls in Hotel Revenue Management
• Pricing Strategy and Distribution Channels in Hotel Revenue Management
• Overbooking Practices in Hotel Revenue Management

Revenue management is about rejecting current opportunities for potential future opportunities while maximizing profit. This course provides a rigorous foundation in traditional revenue management control of room and rate availability. You will begin by exploring inventory control, focusing on controlling rate but not length of stay. You will then add uncertain demand and discuss traditional availability controls such as requiring a minimum length of stay. Finally, you will explore optimization and illustrate methods for full-rate and availability control. This foundation is necessary if you want to develop your own revenue management system or engage effectively and fully with commercially available revenue management systems.

Note that you are being asked to use Microsoft Excel for this course. It contains an add-in called Solver. While many open-source spreadsheet programs include Solver, the MS Excel version has a specific function that you will need for this course.

Pricing has become an increasingly important mechanism in maximizing a firm's profits. The ease with which consumers comparison-shop has inspired firms to become more active pricers. Unfortunately, if you lack a proper understanding of the impact of price on demand (and contribution), changing prices can quickly erode your firm's profits. This course describes the impact of changing prices in a competitive environment and describes several methods for measuring demand sensitivity to price changes, or price elasticity.

The course begins with a strategic look at pricing and discusses the impact of price changes, including the anticipated reaction of your competitors. You will examine these impacts through a discussion of recent price changes during economic declines as well as a well-documented airline price war. Following this strategic discussion, you will use a set of tactical tools to evaluate the effect of a price action on demand and, ultimately, on profitability. You will have a chance to immediately practice what you've studied by participating in a pricing simulation game.

This course contains an optional module on Tableau, an interactive visualization software used for business intelligence. You can download a free copy of it to your desktop. While this is optional material, you can use Tableau skills for data analysis and presentations.

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Price and Inventory Controls

Today's progressive businesses use technology to evaluate and set prices in almost every major market. This use of technology has quietly revolutionized the way we do pricing. Shoppers find that prices vary widely, from customer to customer and even from day to day, and businesses can target individual customer segments to maximize their profitability.

In this course, you will examine techniques for analyzing and setting prices. The first part of the course focuses on variable pricing, exploring how to create different prices for the same service or product and how to use segmentation, communication, and upgrading to capitalize on those prices. The second part of the course examines dynamic pricing, or how prices evolve over time.

You will complete a project designed to evaluate the variable and dynamic pricing strategies of your firm or another hospitality-related firm. Over the duration of the course, you will monitor and record prices at a firm of your choosing. Toward the end of the course, you will analyze and report on the data.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Price and Inventory Controls
• Price Sensitivity and Pricing Decisions

Group business from associations or conferences often comprises 50% or more of hotel room nights. Although groups typically negotiate their rates, systematic approaches to group pricing are still underdeveloped. In this course, you will examine strategic and tactical group-booking decisions over the long, medium, and short terms. You will examine why the hotel's strategic focus is the mix of groups while its tactical focus is rate and availability decisions for specific group requests. In the medium term, the hotel's focus shifts as both group and transient reservations begin to arrive. Finally, in the short term, the hotel's focus is on group materialization. In other words, will the group use its entire block of rooms?

The course demonstrates how an effective revenue management strategy deals with arrival uncertainty using forecasting and overbooking. It explores the issue of displacement, looking specifically at how a property, when considering a group booking, should estimate the future arrivals that could be rejected due to lack of room availability. You'll discover that, using estimates of displacements, hotels can determine the number of rooms to allocate to each segment.

Note that you are being asked to use Microsoft Excel for this course. It contains an add-in called Solver. While many open-source spreadsheet programs include Solver, the MS Excel version has a specific function that you will need for this course.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Price and Inventory Controls
• Price Sensitivity and Pricing Decisions
• Segmentation and Price Optimization

Today's hospitality consumers rely less upon traditional travel agents and more on web-based research when booking travel. In this course, you'll explore how to develop strategies designed to improve your standing in internet search results, known as search engine optimization (SEO), and increase your visibility to target customers.

You will also investigate how to optimize your position on internet search results and increase conversions: the moment when a search becomes a purchase. Online travel agencies are especially popular because they provide one-stop convenience and notifications for consumers searching for deals and promotional opportunities. The success of online travel agencies is largely attributable to their marriage of leading-edge technology and a keen insight into consumer behavior patterns.

You will have a chance to immediately practice what you've studied by participating in a pricing simulation game.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Price and Inventory Controls
• Price Sensitivity and Pricing Decisions
• Segmentation and Price Optimization
• Displacement and Negotiated Pricing

Every property's finance function keeps detailed records of the daily transactions involved in the running the organization. Periodically, they create reports that allow management, stakeholders and regulating authorities to have insight into the financial health of the organization. As a manager, you need to understand both the metrics that are reported in income statement, balance sheets, and cash flow statements, and how they relate to each other. You also need to understand how comparing numbers across your company, the industry, and from year to year, can help you assess the overall financial performance of the firm.

The in-depth review of sample case studies in this course will provide you with the tools you need to examine your own property's reports. As you make budgeting and investment decisions, your knowledge of how vital financial markers indicate relative health in the organization will help drive initiatives to meet your company's financial goals.

A company's financial performance, and its ability to grow and thrive over time, can be assessed through ratio analysis, the basic evaluation tool for asset management, solvency and profitability. Whether you are managing the financial performance of a department, unit, or the organization as a whole, working with these ratios can help identify opportunities and allow you to make adjustments to improve performance.

As you become familiar with asset management ratios such as days sales outstanding and days to turnover, you will be able to apply these techniques in comparing your company's performance against others in the industry and against its own financial history. The ratio analysis tools you learn will help your organization to design and implement initiatives for increased productivity and profitability.

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Understanding Financial Statements

Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is both a theory and a process. The goal of IMC is to make sure the promotional elements of a business work together and communicate a consistent brand experience for current and future customers. In the information age, it is critical that your brand penetrates through the dense marketing landscape and connects with your target audiences.

In this course, you will examine what integrated marketing communications is and how you can use it to communicate your brand's strategy and promise. You will also identify why an IMC plan should constantly evolve in the face of a shifting media landscape and dynamic business realities and market conditions. You will discover how you can use marketing communications to effectively shape consumers' brand beliefs and persuade them, while doing so in ways that are legal and ethical. Finally, you will explore a number of conceptual models that can help you define and refine the brand's marketing communications goals. Throughout, you will utilize these strategies to begin to build an IMC strategy for a fictional hotel in Baltimore, Maryland.

A brand's marketing communications must be where target consumers are, and they are increasingly online. As the number of online channels grows, it becomes even more important to ensure that marketing communications are integrated and targeted to the brand's key audience. Successfully defining that target audience, then designing communication that will resonate with them and shape their brand beliefs, must be the basis of the organization's online marketing. With those in hand, you can focus on the two main channels of online marketing: website and search engine marketing.

In this course, you will examine how to identify the brand's target market and develop a brand voice that will resonate with them. You will also determine how to develop a creative strategy and marketing messages that will effectively shape the target audience's brand beliefs. You will then examine the importance of the brand website as the centerpiece of your online channels along with the many ways to keep the website functional, engaging, and fresh. Finally, you will explore search engine marketing, including how to bid on search keywords, which keywords to bid on, and how to make effective use of online display advertising. Throughout the course, you will remain centered on the importance of ensuring that the brand channels speak with one voice, with messaging tailored to the target audience and in support of the broader integrated marketing strategy.

It is highly recommended that you have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Marketing the Hospitality Brand Through Digital Media

Symposium sessions feature two days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions that will explore today’s most pressing topics. The Marketing Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium, in which we’ll share experiences from across the industry, inspiring real-time conversations about best practices, innovation, and the future of marketing work. You will support your coursework by applying your knowledge and experiences to some of the most pressing topics and trends in the marketing field. By participating in relevant and engaging discussions, you will discover a variety of perspectives and build connections with your fellow participants from across the industry.

Upcoming Symposium: March 11th – 12th, 2025: 

• Tuesday, March 11, 2025 11AM – 1PM ET
• Wednesday, March 12, 2025 11AM – 1PM ET

All sessions are held on Zoom.

Future dates are subject to change. You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete any certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.

Symposium sessions feature two days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions that will explore today’s most pressing topics. The Hospitality Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium, in which we’ll discuss how both day-to-day operations and strategic goal setting in the hospitality sector have rapidly evolved over the past two years, opening up new space for real-time conversations about the future of the industry. You will support your coursework by applying your knowledge and experiences to various areas of the industry, examining the innovations and accommodations you have all had to make throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and strategizing on future directions. By participating in relevant and engaging discussions, you will discover a variety of perspectives and build connections with your fellow participants from across the industry.

Upcoming Symposium: April 1 and 2, 2025

• Tuesday, April 1, 2025 11:00AM ET – 1:00PM ET
  • Session title pending
• Wednesday, April 2, 2025 11:00AM ET – 1:00PM ET
  • Session title pending

All sessions are held on Zoom.

Future dates are subject to change. You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete any certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.