Chris Anderson is a professor at the Cornell Nolan School of Hotel Administration. Prior to his appointment in 2006, he was on the faculty at the Ivey School of Business in London, Ontario, Canada. Professor Anderson’s main research focus is on revenue management and service pricing. He actively works in the application and development of revenue management across numerous industry types, including hotels, airlines, and rental car and tour companies, as well as numerous consumer packaged goods and financial services firms. Professor Anderson’s research has been funded by numerous governmental agencies and industrial partners. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management and is the regional editor for the International Journal of Revenue Management. At the Nolan School of Hotel Administration, Professor Anderson teaches courses in revenue management and service operations management.
Advanced Hotel Revenue Management
Overview and Courses
Increasing sales and profits entails a comprehensive revenue management strategy that includes creating and managing customer demand and establishing a marketing strategy built around rigorous control systems. Doing this better than the other players in the market will produce a clear, competitive yield advantage.
This blended certificate program, which begins with a series of online courses and culminates in a four-day capstone experience at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration in Ithaca, New York, builds on the fundamental principles of pricing and revenue management to give you advanced tools and techniques to make strategic hotel pricing decisions, set inventory controls, and encourage demand manipulation to drive profits and overall organizational performance.
After completing the online courses, you will travel to the Cornell campus* to work with faculty experts and hospitality professionals from around the world to further explore revenue management via hands-on activities, interactive case studies, and team assignments. You’ll run a competitive revenue management and pricing simulation that will enable you to test your skills and knowledge, apply new tools to today’s revenue management challenges, and discover new approaches to maximizing profits versus revenues. You’ll gain new skills, a powerful network of international colleagues, and an affiliate membership in the Cornell Hotel Society.
This advanced certificate program is part of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration Anheuser-Busch Professional Development Program (PDP). First launched in 1928, this world-renowned executive program has welcomed hospitality professionals from around the globe for over 90 years. Please review Frequently Asked Questions about the program here, including information about traveling to Cornell.
*Please review Cornell’s COVID-19 guidelines prior to traveling to ensure you meet requirements for on-campus participation.
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
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
This session takes place June 13-16, 2022 on campus at the Cornell Hotel School in Ithaca, NY. Sessions run from 8:00am-5:00pm ET each day.
Days 1 and 2: Strategic and Competitive Pricing
Revenue management has historically been focused inward; you've used historical transaction data to generate a forecast and manage prices and inventory. As information has become more readily available, you need the ability to more directly model and take into account the pricing and inventory actions of your competitors when contemplating revenue management decisions. In this intensive session, you'll take a strategic and competitive look at revenue management and pricing decisions with a focus on both understanding the reactions of others as well as how to use today's tools to make pricing and inventory decisions to drive profitable revenue. Using a strategic pricing simulation, you'll develop an understanding of the interplay between pricing and digital marketing in competitive markets and refocus your efforts on profit versus revenue.
Days 3 and 4: Driving Profit Through Performance and Demand Management
Defining the “revenue performance” of a hotel has traditionally involved a series of benchmarking approaches like comparisons to last year; budget; forecast; and, of course, the competitive set. As the discipline evolves, performance metrics need to evolve as well. Metrics such as RevPAR Index will likely remain crucial for the foreseeable future. That said, the role of revenue management is to make tactical and strategic decisions to further the goals of a hotel or set of hotels, and these goals extend far beyond revenue maximization; in fact, some of these goals are actually counter to revenue maximization. In this session, you'll examine the often-competing goals of customer acquisition, customer retention, engagement and loyalty, and channel choice, along with the corresponding revenue management approaches. You'll also examine a “balanced scorecard” approach, which presents a much more comprehensive assessment of revenue performance. You'll leave equipped with the tools to excel in today's more active revenue management environment.
How It Works
Ithaca, NY
Ithaca, NY
Faculty Authors
Dave Roberts retired from Marriott in 2019, after 23 years with the company. Most recently, he was the Senior Vice President of Revenue Strategy and Solutions; in this role, he was responsible for revenue management strategy and execution for around 7,000 hotels worldwide. He also led revenue analytics, providing top-line analysis for the company; as well as sales systems, providing strategy, development, and deployment of technology to manage meeting and event business. Prior to this role, he led Consumer Insights, providing consumer research and analytics for regional and corporate stakeholders. Mr. Roberts has also been Regional Vice President of Market Strategy for Marriott’s Eastern Region, as well as Vice President of Global Pricing, in addition to several other roles in the company.
Prior to Marriott, Mr. Roberts was a manager in the Finance Department at American Airlines, working on airplane purchases and route economics. He was also a technical consultant on missile defense for the U.S. Department of Defense, as part of the “Star Wars” initiative. Mr. Roberts has a B.S. and an M.S. in Operations Research from Cornell University, as well as an MBA with majors in Finance and Economics from Northwestern’s Kellogg School. He holds a U.S. patent on a software product (a “data matching” algorithm) and has published several academic papers on such topics as forecasting, options pricing, and customer choice modeling. Mr. Roberts was on IBM’s Business Analytics Advisory Board for six years and on Cornell’s Center for Hospitality Research Advisory Board for five years. He has been a frequent speaker at industry events as well as several top universities. In his spare time, Mr. Roberts enjoys martial arts and astronomy.
- Employ a strategic and proactive approach in pricing decisions
- Anticipate the reactions of your competitors regarding price changes
- Convey an understanding between transient revenue management and negotiated selling
- Recognize the role of online channels and the opportunities they provide in demand creation and management
- Examine the fundamentals of competitive pricing
- Use segmentation to devise effective revenue management and distribution strategies
- Analyze the moderating role of digital marketing in low-demand environments
- Utilize today’s forward-looking demand signals
- Advanced Hotel Revenue Management Certificate from Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration
- 94 Professional Development Hours (9.4 CEUs)
Who Should Enroll
- General managers, revenue managers, marketing managers, and other hospitality professionals who are responsible for the financial performance of their organization
{Anytime, anywhere.}
$8,500
Advanced Hotel Revenue Management
| Select Payment Method | Cost |
|---|---|
| $8,500 |