Revenue Management Forecasting Aggregation Analysis Tool
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The RMFAA tool is designed to help hoteliers identify the best level of aggregation to use in their revenue management forecasts of room demand. Hotel revenue managers (or revenue management systems) typically forecast the number of arriving guests (i.e., demand), for each day of arrival, for each length of stay, and each rate class. In making these forecasts, you have four options. First, you can forecast the total number of arrivals for a day and then break that number into length-of-stay and rate classes using historical proportions (i.e., full aggregation). Second, you can forecast the total number of arrivals for a particular day in each rate class and then break that number into lengths-of-stay using historical proportions (i.e., aggregation by rate class only). Third, you can forecast the total number of arrivals for a given day in each length of stay and then break that number into rate classes using historical proportions (i.e., aggregation by length of stay only). Finally, you can develop independent forecasts of the total number of arrivals for a day for each length-of-stay and rate class (i.e., no aggregation). Based on the data you provide, the RMFAA tool determines which of these forecasting approaches works best for your property. To use the tool with something other than the sample data it contains, you’ll need to provide the historical numbers of arrivals, by day, by length of stay, and rate class. Ideally, you should use unconstrained demand information (i.e., requests) and have two or more years of data. Version 1.0.1, released on January 12, 2010, fixed several bugs in the initial version of the tool. To use the new version, you will need to do two things: 1) install the new application file, and 2) copy the data from the earlier version of the spreadsheet into the new version of the spreadsheet.