Patterns in Hotel Revenue Management Forecasting Systems: Improved Sample Sizes, Frozen Intervals, Horizon Lengths, and Accuracy Measures

Research in hotel revenue management system design has not paid much attention to the demand forecasting side of the system. And the research that has examined forecasting has tended to focus on the comparison of specific forecaster methodologies, as opposed to prioritizing how a total system should be parameterized: how far in the future should projections be, how much data to use to update each specific parameter, which measure of forecast error to use, and how long to freeze each parameter/forecast before updating. This paper fills this prioritization void by utilizing a full-functionality hotel reservation system simulation validated by the revenue management staff of a major hotel chain as the basis for running screening experiments on an exhaustive set of forecaster parameters with regards to their impact on bottom-line system performance (average nightly net revenue, where net revenue refers to total room rate receipts minus an overbooking per person penalty that estimates the discounted lost sales of future revenues). A screening experiment is run for each general type of operating environment (demand intensity, degree of market segment differentiation) that a property might face. We find that only two parameters are significant: the final combined forecast horizon length and how long that final forecast is frozen before updating. We find that these two factors interact in a negative fashion to influence net revenue.