Course list

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

Successful marketing and revenue generation in hospitality requires the management of an array of new media including, social, mobile, and search. While these new media enable marketers to reach customers in ways that were previously not possible, successful use must be anchored by core marketing and demand management principles. This course provides you with a grounding in brand management and focuses on the importance of identifying and establishing your "brand promise": the experience your guests take away from engaging with your brand as the basis of new media management.

You'll experience the challenges involved in maintaining your brand's promise across a growing array of new media channels. You'll be exposed to sound marketing concepts, advice from industry experts, and actual experience with new media in exercises and simulations. You'll then take what you have learned and apply it to your existing marketing efforts based on industry best practices and time-tested frameworks for profitable marketing.

You'll learn directly from some of the heaviest hitters in new media for hospitality - CEOs, search, social and mobile media consultants, property-level managers, and more through interactive projects and compelling video exercises. See first-hand how the successful implementation of new media can help you deliver on your firm's "brand promise", enabling you to deal with market uncertainties and guide your organization toward sustained profitability.

Hospitality marketing is fast shifting from traditional media to digital forms (e.g., social media, video, website and search, plus mobile applications). New-media technologies have changed the ways consumers experience and value a product or service. So how can you draw on these technologies to enhance your operations and provide distinct customer value? And how can you be sure your efforts in new media are producing tangible returns?

In this course, you'll examine innovations and trends in new media, and ways to leverage them to your brand's advantage. You will consider how new media can improve your marketing efforts by managing customer expectations and enhancing the consumer experience, and you'll discuss how to measure the success of those efforts. You'll also determine what organizational considerations will allow you to better leverage the evolving impact of new media and plan the future structure and role of your organization in this important area.

Explore this content through a mix of input from hospitality industry experts, hands-on practical activities, and the presentation of sound principles by Cornell faculty. Experience the content through the use of a fictional hotel case study with valuable feedback provided by your online instructor and peers.

You are required to 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 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.

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 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.

    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.

    Managing a business means managing its financial resources, regardless of your job title. Your ability to make smart decisions about projects relies on your understanding of  timelines and cash-flow calculations to track cash flow and payments, the value of securities and investments, and how to determine overall cost effectiveness. To do this, you need a good working knowledge of a number of financial concepts.

    This course introduces you to those concepts and shows you how to perform important calculations using financial calculators and popular spreadsheet applications. You'll develop an intuitive understanding of the concepts and have a chance to practice applying the tools. You will come away with the tools to ensure that your company has the best possible chance of project success through managing its financial resources wisely.

    * Participants in this course need one of the two financial calculators below.

    • Hewlett-Packard 12C, or
    • Texas Instruments BA II Plus

    Both calculators are available at most office supply stores and from a variety of online sources. There is also a Texas Instruments BA II Plus app for iPhone and iPad , which meets the calculator requirement for this course.

    The key to financial success for any business is choosing the right projects to pursue at the right time, for the right price and with the right financing structure. Your role as a manager includes participating in decisions about which projects make sense for the company and are likely to return a profit.

    To do so, there are six concepts you need to understand: net present value, internal rate of return, payback period, discounted payback period, profitability index, and equivalent annual cost. Non-financial managers need to be conversant in how each of these concepts work to be able to offer valuable insight and expertise.

    Working through the examples in this course using both a financial calculator and popular spreadsheet applications will help you practice applying the tools and strategies, and will set you up to make project decisions that lead to growth and profitability.

    * Participants in this course need one of the two financial calculators below.

    • Hewlett-Packard 12C, or
    • Texas Instruments BA II Plus

    Both calculators are available at most office supply stores and from a variety of online sources. There is also a Texas Instruments BA II Plus app for iPhone and iPad , which meets the calculator requirement for this course.

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

    • Mastering the Time Value of Money
    Every financial decision a firm makes is a balancing act between risk and return. Funded projects can return significant revenue to the company. The risk is that the cost of the project may exceed the return, especially when the need to compensate capital providers is factored in. Being able to accurately assess both the risk and potential return of capital budgeting projects is an important part of your role as a manager.

    Your work in this course will include learning how to calculate the hurdle rate, which is the minimum value a project must return, and then how to forecast the expected return. You will get to know the different asset classes and how to think about them in terms of the associated risks.

    The tools from this course will help you measure risk and calculate the weighted average of the required returns as a way to ensure that your company chooses the right capital projects.

    Your new project not only needs funding—it needs the right type of funding. You need to know how to choose between debt and equity funding, and when to consider acquiring funds from capital markets. These outside funding sources will have their own expectations for rates of return, and the cost of this funding is driven by a number of external factors such as the state of the economy and the industry.

    Making sound capital budgeting and funding decisions is a vital part of your role as a manager, and this course shows you how characteristics of capital markets impact the process and prospects of raising capital. Learn how to observe external economic data, tips for developing strategies to balance debt and equity at your firm, and how decisions regarding corporate restructuring, mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcy are made.

    These concepts, when put into action, will help ensure that you are maximizing the value of your firm using the correct balance of debt and equity.

    Services marketing is often viewed in terms of outcomes, but services marketing is also an ongoing analytic process. In this course, you will learn how to properly analyze frameworks, tools, channels, data sets, customer behavioral data, decision-making factors, and strategies that support broader marketing decisions.

    Authored by Robert Kwortnik from Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, this course will teach you how to review the way marketing works in your organization and how to create and apply a services marketing process.

    To make services marketing work, you need to have a clear picture of the business environment and understand how your target customers behave. Knowing your market and assessing consumer demand can help inform and guide your marketing strategies. In this course, you will explore the role that micro and macro forces  play when conducting a situation analysis. You'll also take a deep dive into what drives consumer behavior.

    Your services marketing efforts depend on information. Without relevant and accurate information, every decision you make will suffer from bad input. 

    A well-run marketing information system captures, organizes, analyzes, and interprets data from a wide variety of sources to create a robust portrait of the ideal customers and their specific wants or needs. With the ideal buyer in mind, you can better target them with high-impact messaging that communicates a compelling brand promise and a clear reason to buy. 

    In this course, you will learn when to use internal or external market data and when to conduct your own primary research. You'll also discover how segmentation, targeting, and positioning (the STP process) translates your analysis and research findings into a positioning strategy that appeals to the right target market at the right time and at the right price. 

    You have marketing goals and you're feeling ready to execute. Maybe you want to increase market share, retain more customers or generally broaden consumer awareness. 

    But how do you turn your goals into action? And how will you measure success? In this course, you will explore how to turn marketing goals into action by developing a marketing strategy and creating an enduring brand promise.

    You want your marketing efforts to generate demand. While increased demand naturally drives business and success, it does come with specific sets of challenges. 

    Mitigating these challenges requires a keen understanding of demand management. In essence, demand management requires us to ask “How should we set our prices?” “How will we guarantee that our distribution partners ensure timely delivery?”

    In this course, you'll answer those questions and explore how pricing and distribution strategies can directly affect demand for your service.

    It's hard to overstate: A marketing strategy lives or dies in communication with the customer. And there's a methodology to it—it is the culmination of all of the marketing research and analysis you've done. 

    What you say, how you say it, how often you say it, the media channels you use to distribute your message, how you respond to complaints—all of this affects customers' experiences with your brand. 

    In this course, you'll take a deep dive into integrated marketing communications, or IMC. You'll explore a process-based approach to designing creative communications using a variety of methods and media. Finally, you'll examine ways to assess the performance of an IMC campaign.

    Owning or managing a restaurant is a challenging prospect in today's competitive food service environment. To increase your chances of success, you need a proven system of data-driven tools focused on profits, not just costs.

    In this course Professor Kimes will guide you through the restaurant revenue management process, providing real-world examples, strategies, and techniques that will help you apply these tools to your own restaurant. You will explore the key inputs of space, time, and price to determine how you make appropriate trade-offs to maximize restaurant revenue. Using spreadsheet tools, you will calculate critical metrics and establish baseline performance levels. Based on these levels, you will identify the most significant challenges and determine which strategies will be most effective in overcoming these issues and optimizing your restaurant's revenue and overall performance.

    According to recent research, customers spend only one or two minutes reviewing a restaurant's menu. This provides you with just a small window of opportunity to capture your customers' attention and help them find just what they are looking for. In this course, Professor Sheryl Kimes will present you with proven strategies and techniques that can help you optimize your menu and increase the revenue it generates for your restaurant.

    Through the process of menu engineering, you will explore a unique approach to categorizing menu items based on profitability and sales volume. Using this categorization, you can implement a variety of strategies to increase the overall profitability of your menu. You will also explore several effective menu design techniques that will help you improve how you name and describe menu items and organize and highlight them to showcase your most profitable, best-selling dishes. Critical to your restaurant revenue management program is your approach to pricing, and you will determine the strategies that make the most sense for your restaurant. You will walk away from this course with a set of practical tools you can use right now to maximize your revenue, whether your restaurant is slow, busy, or somewhere in-between.

    When your restaurant is busy, you might think that you can't possibly generate any additional revenue. However, in this course Professor Sheryl Kimes will provide you will a set of tools you can use to optimize your table mix so it better reflects the mix of parties you have coming in through the door. You will also learn how to select and place tables, assign guests to tables, and set the ambiance of your restaurant to grow your revenue. Finally, you will devise pricing strategies that are most effective when your restaurant is busy.

    When your restaurant is busy, every minute can count towards increasing your revenue. Professor Kimes explores how reducing meal duration, even by a single minute, can increase revenue potential. You need to consider the style of your restaurant and your customers when thinking about what an appropriate meal duration is. Then you can analyze the six stages of meal duration to determine where you can reduce time while maintaining a pleasant dining experience for your customers.

    Additionally, the way you manage reservations is crucial, especially during busy periods. There are several things you need to decide when it comes to how you are going to take reservations in your restaurant. You will examine the different approaches to taking and managing reservations, whether by phone, online, or mobile. You can use a dedicated website for the restaurant, a third party website, or a third party app.

    Professor Kimes will give you practical strategies to determine how you can improve your meal duration and your reservation systems, which are critically important to increasing revenue when your restaurant is at capacity.

    How can you increase your revenue when your restaurant is slow and not performing to capacity? In this course, Professor Kimes will discuss several revenue management tools and techniques you can use to improve your restaurant's performance when it is slow.

    First you will consider how to maximize your distribution channels and consider the costs of online reservations and ordering systems and how to balance the costs with the benefits. How can you make it easy for customers to come to your restaurant? Another important tool you can use is promotions. You will explore different strategies such as happy hours, special events, and other options that can entice customers to come to your restaurant. Finally, you will consider pricing and determine what approaches are most effective when your restaurant is slow.

    How It Works

    Download Now

    Request Information Now by completing the form below.

    Act today—courses are filling fast.
    By providing your information, you consent to receive communications by phone and email including via automated technology from Cornell. You may also choose to opt into text messaging.
    This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.