Revenue management for hotel rooms refers to the process of selling the right type of rooms to the right type of customers at the right price and at the right time through the right distribution channel. Focus in revenue management is on the management of demand and capacity. Customer relationship management is the process of managing the relationships with customers with a purpose to identify, retain and grow a company’s most valuable customers through various resources including but not limited to information technology, employees and service process.

These two business strategies have become increasingly more important for hospitality companies all around the world. The ultimate purpose of both strategies is to increase revenue through different approaches. It appears that the hospitality industry is lagging behind in the implementation of the integration strategy.

This integration process starts with the support, endorsement and understanding of hotel executive management. They should have a clear understanding of what this integration means and how it can help the hotel bottom line in the long run. There should not be any conflicts within different departments of the hotel organization in terms of defined goals, timelines and performance indicators of the integrated strategies. Appropriate IT structures should be in place to enable the integration to facilitate the identification and tracking of customers. Once these are achieved, the revenue management team should be in regular communication with the customer relationship management team. Both teams should define customer long-term value, compute it and segment their customers according to the value they represent to the hotel. Customer-oriented revenue management strategies for different segments identified should be developed.

The proposed integration will align the goals of revenue management and customer relationship management and decrease the conflicts within the hotel management. It should be noted that not all customers are equal and valuable customers should be identified. Hoteliers should develop different revenue management strategies depending on the value of the customers.