When I first started down the path of revenue management when I worked as the Revenue Manager for two hotels, it quickly became obvious to me that I was going to have to learn and master Excel. The reason for this is because revenue managers have to keep track of a lot of data and be able to analyze it quickly and effectively. Having to run the same reports constantly grows tiresome quickly, so you start to throw quick spreadsheets together to keep track of the data you want in a way you can read. These spreadsheets that get thrown together can track all sorts of data depending on the day and the line of work you are in, but one of the most essential reports that a revenue manager will have to build is a pickup report and/or a revenue tracking sheet. Anyone using a decent PMS knows that you can easily get daily revenue reports or monthly reports that break down the numbers daily, so why build one in Excel?

Working with Data

The problem with most reports that you receive from a PMS is that you can’t do anything with the numbers. You can’t figure out quickly a lot of things, like how well Mondays do in comparison to Sunday nights without picking up a calculator and plugging away at it. Building a revenue tracking sheet allows you to easily develop the formulas you need to give you answers to the questions being asked by yourself, members of your team, or the ownership group. Developing a hotel pickup report allows you to prepare answers to other questions more firmly without a lot of guess work, such as:

• How much revenue has the hotel picked up for the summer months over the past few months?
• How much revenue is on the books for March, and how does that compare to a year ago at this time?
• How much revenue did we pickup within the past month or past week?

Pickup reports can be as simple or as complicated as you see fit. At the Xotels website, Patrick Landman suggests having a pickup report that can track how well the various segments (rate tiers, for example) are performing. A more complicated pickup report could be useful for a busy resort, but I tend to keep things simple for my own tastes.

Developing a Hotel Revenue Pickup Report

A pickup report is extremely useful in determining rate strategies and can help calm the fears of the owner who sees $0.00 on the books for a month down the road. With a properly filled out pickup report, you can tell when it’s appropriate to raise the rates slightly (i.e. during the month of April when people book the most rooms for June) or whether you need to target a certain month for some marketing campaigns because booking activity is relatively soft. I have been on the search for a decent pickup report that wasn’t too complicated to work with from Day 1, and still have yet to find something worthwhile to use. I have been slowly developing my own over the course of the year and thought I would share the bare-bones version of it to see if anyone is interested in using it.