Advanced Hospitality Revenue Management: Pricing and Demand StrategiesCornell

Certificate Program

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

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.