Future of Revenue Management - Personalized Price

Prof. Jean-Pierre van der Rest, Ph.D.

How, to whom, when and mainly how much to sell are the basic questions we have been looking for, directly or indirectly, in the lecture by visiting professor Jean-Pierre van der Rust, Ph.D. from the famous Dutch Leiden University.

Pricing is a long-standing question that raises the debate today and will also evoke them in the future. Approaches that rely only on the cost of an proper surcharge are already in the hotel industry a legacy of the ancient past. The future of good pricing is in a personalized price. This individually created price for each customer combines far more elements than it might seem at first place. Thanks to utilization of a great amount of data which are available to consumers today, prices can be adjusted literally for each hotel guest. Along with the appropriate psychological elements, prices are then created to bring the maximum value added for hotels.

Correct pricing system is a complex process that relies on appropriate strategy, input settings for optimization, sales channels, psychology, and, of course, constant monitoring and evaluation of the market and consumer response. In connection with this approach, it is referred to as "Pricing 4.0" - an approach that uses a step-by-step process to optimize prices. Artificial intelligence, which plays a substantial role in this process, seeks to improve itself, providing flexible and ideal outcomes. It may sound too ideal, but it's not nearly that easy. Obviously, the ethical (and in some countries also the legal) aspect which plays a relatively important role, must not be forgotten in the framework of such price creation. Where can price discrimination go by using modern technology? This will be shown up in the coming years. But today we can say that pricing is becoming an important discipline which is combining knowledge from several areas.

 

Prof. Jean-Pierre van der Rest, Ph.D. is a dean at the Leiden University, one of Europe's leading universities, founded in 1575. Among his outstanding graduates are physicist Albert Einstein, economist Jan Tinberger and the US sixth president John Quincy Adams. Professor Rest worked for several years as research director at Hotelschool The Hague and received his doctorate from Oxford School of Hospitality Management. In his scientific work he focuses mainly on problematics of Revenue Management and psychological pricing.

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