REVENUE MANAGEMENT

The teaching is part of the complementary teaching activities for second year students of the master's degree course in Intercultural Development of tourism systems; it takes place in the first period.
It provides the basis for the analysis of pricing models and capacity management with the aim to support the management of tourism businesses and in particular the managerial decisions relating to the sale of tourism products. Particular attention is paid to the hotel sector.

The teaching activities proposed during the lectures, together with the individual study, allow the student to acquire the ability to appropriately employ models for the development and control at the managerial level of the price and capacity management policies, also with reference to the possibilities offered by revenue management software modules for hotel management.

Expected results:

Knowledge and understanding
a.1) to understand the main strategies and tactics of revenue management
a.2) to know the main quantitative models for revenue management policies
a.3) to understand the different components of the management of a tourism company with a revenue management point of view

B) Application of knowledge and understanding:
b.1) to be able to evaluate possible forecasting techniques in the hotel sector
b.2) to be able to monitor pricing strategies and suggest changes to the strategies themselves

C) Judgment skills:
c.1) to recognize the congruence of pricing policy choices with the principles of revenue management
c.2) be able to evaluate the validity of commercial software for an hotel management with a revenue management point of view

The skills provided by the economic-business courses given in the first year of the master's degree course are given for acquired.

1. Revenue management: The art to provide the right service to the right customer at the right time for the right price.
2. The Revenue Management Levers: pricing, inventory management (overbooking, nesting), marketing, channels.
3. The Revenue Management Process: historical data collection, segmentation, forecasting, optimization, benchmarking.
4. Applications to hotels and other sectors.
5. Fairness in the management of price in tourism

Ravenna A., Pandolfi E.V., Revenue management - Gestione strategica del prezzo per l'ottimizzazione dei ricavi nell'impresa alberghiera, IPSOA, 2010.

Talluri K.T., Van Ryzin G.J., The theory and practice of revenue management, New York, Springer, 2005.

The evaluation takes place through:
a) a written exam (lasting no more than 60 minutes) containing 3 exercises (open answer) variants of exercises already solved in class, and 3 questions (open answer) of a theoretical nature.
b) an oral exam on the entire program with theoretical questions (without exercises). The oral examination requires the discussion of data collected monitoring by the student and concerning the sales prices of a flight and a hotel room (details are provided during the first lecture or, afterwards, via an email request to the teacher).
The final evaluation is obtained as the average of the results of the two exams.

The course consists of 30 hours of lectures, the student in his individual work is required to understand and assimilate the basic concepts of the theory, comparing the course notes with the recommended texts; the theoretical contents are always accompanied by examples, exercises drawn from concrete examples of pricing and some simulations (business games) in the classroom. Depending on the class size, a lecture in a computer lab on the use of forecasting techniques using a spreadsheet is foreseen.

Italian

Further information and materials related to the course, both regarding organizational aspects and didactic aspects, will be made available starting from the beginning of the course on the University e-learning platform (www.moodle.unive.it).

written and oral