In a world where AI is constantly at the top of our minds and algorithms and data science are driving our business decisions, I have to pose the question: have we lost the art?

There’s no question that human interaction in sales and reception are key components of hospitality. Revenue management is one of the first aspects we feel we can relinquish to AI. And why not? AI can analyze hundreds of thousands of data points in no time and adjust pricing based on signals before a human could even export the data table to excel. When reading Evolving Dynamics: From Revenue Management to Revenue Strategy, the study guide for the HSMAI CRME certification, I came across a view that shocked me a little bit, so I’ll share it here.

“Dave Roberts, Cornell University professor and former SVP of Revenue Strategy and Solutions for Marriott International, is well-known for describing revenue management of the future as requiring a human, a computer, and a dog; the human’s job is to keep the dog fed and the dog’s job is to make sure the human doesn’t touch the computer.”

With all due respect to Professor Roberts, I hope that he is wrong. 

Revenue management is about more than pricing, and targets are about more than just revenue. Every hotel I have ever worked at or with in any capacity has had a different approach to filling rooms. They have all valued channels differently, approached marketing budgets differently, filled sales teams differently and evaluated their success metrics differently. So why then would we accept one algorithm to determine pricing for all these different hotels? Why reduce revenue management to a science, when all of the revenue managers I know are artists.

When asking revenue managers why they believe it is an art and not a science, here are some things that seasoned revenue managers who now form the Rate Yield team had to say:

“It’s the subtle art of surfing the wave of unpredictability, except that wave is on fire. You can use logic, rationality and data and end up creating chaos. Or you can adapt and create something like a Picasso.” 

- Adeline Le Cornec, Customer Success & Onboarding Specialist

10 years of experience in revenue management

“It’s the art of messaging your strategy internally to get buy-in. It’s the art of understanding the value of different clients. It’s the art of being stubborn with your market managers and understanding that they can help you. It’s the art of balance.” 

- Marc Bertrand, Founder & CEO

30 years of experience in revenue management

At Rate Yield our goal is not to reduce the input of revenue managers, but to empower them to design their strategy, adapt it, and focus on the most valuable areas of their role. Think of us as your palette and canvas. We can’t wait to see what you create.

In a world of rising costs and economic uncertainty, small hotels find themselves uniquely vulnerable. Unlike large hotels that can absorb cost increases across hundreds of rooms, independent and small properties must spread their fixed costs across a much smaller inventory. When energy prices spike or labour costs climb, the impact on the bottom line is felt almost immediately.

The challenge doesn't stop at fixed costs. For bed and breakfast operators and small full-service properties, variable costs add another layer of complexity. The rising cost of food, beverages and supplies means that a pricing strategy set at the start of the season can quickly become problematic. Without constant attention to what it actually costs to fill a room, small hoteliers risk being busy and unprofitable at the same time.

For small hotels, fewer staff means every team member is stretched across multiple responsibilities and there simply isn't enough time in the day to also monitor competitor pricing, track market demand shifts and manually adjust rates with the frequency the modern market demands. So how can small hotels manage rising costs, leaner teams and a volatile marketplace?

At Rate Yield, we've developed a Revenue Management System (RMS) that doesn't apply a one-size-fits-all approach. We recognize that a 6-room countryside B&B has fundamentally different needs than a 40-room urban boutique hotel, and our system can be configured to reflect that. Our algorithm looks at market dynamics and competitive pricing constantly, but what sets us apart is the ability to tailor the system to your property's specific cost structure and business goals.

For small hotels in particular, each room left empty has a larger impact on the bottom line, but a sold out hotel without proper pricing can also be a drain. Balancing the price at occupancy level becomes imperative and staying on top of available rooms and market trends in shorter booking windows can be the key that makes the difference.

An RMS also gives small hotel operators something priceless: time back in their day. By automating the ongoing task of rate management, your team is freed from the constant pressure of monitoring and adjusting pricing manually. That time can be reinvested in guest experience, marketing, maintenance, or simply running a smoother operation. In a small property where every team member already wears multiple hats, removing even one demanding task from the list makes a meaningful difference.

In an industry where margins are tighter than ever, the hotels that thrive will be those that work smarter and stay true to their philosophy. Rate Yield is built to help all hotels, big and small, do exactly that!

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Online Travel Agencies. I worked for a major OTA for 6 years before moving to Rate Yield RMS. In nearly all of my demos when I mention my career path I get a laugh or a comment. When I ask people what their goals are, I almost always hear that reducing OTA dependency is an objective. At Rate Yield, we understand where you are coming from and we understand OTAs.

Call them a necessary evil if you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that in today's world, they are necessary. Unless you are running at 100% occupancy 365 days a year from direct bookings and your ADR is always exactly where you want it to be for those 365 days, I believe there is some room for distribution. Even if it might cost you a commission to use the services. You may be looking at your share of bookings by channel and seeing that a bigger portion than you’d like is coming through OTAs. And you may be asking yourself how you can reduce this number. So let’s talk about it.

If you want to shift share away from OTAs to your own website, you will need to invest money and time in achieving this. Here are some things you would likely need:

• You’ll need a dedicated sales team to drive group sales or negotiated rates. Keep in mind that if you are negotiating rates that are lower than your OTA net rate, you may not be winning from this scenario. 
• You’ll need a marketing budget to guarantee placement on Google and metasearch sites.
• You’ll need a quality CRM to ensure you are connecting with guests who have stayed at your property and enticing them to come back and book directly with you.
• You’ll need a great website with all the information that a customer could be looking for and an easy to use booking engine.

1. OTAs have great campaigns and promotions. So when you are needing a boost in your bookings, and if it is relevant to your market, register for the campaigns. Target the need dates you have and include blackout dates where necessary. You can add limits to these campaigns so you aren’t discounting too many room nights or you can yield up your pricing to limit the impact. I have written a deep dive on mastering your campaigns here: https://www.rateyield.com/blogs/post/be-the-mastermind-of-your-black-friday-campaign.

2. OTAs display room types very well and make it easy to compare the advantages of higher room categories. As such, you may be upselling better through OTAs than other channels. You may consider offering your superior rooms at a more advantageous rate on your own website than on OTAs. This is also in accordance with contracts where you have agreed to offer the lowest rate available to OTAs, which is to say, your entry-level room.

3. OTAs bring heads in beds. Upselling them on site, encouraging them to spend in your restaurant or on ancillary revenues, is a huge opportunity for your hotel. Be sure that fees are listed clearly in your content, but don’t include them in your rate plans. Offering a parking or breakfast package on the OTAs is a good way to reduce the value of your ancillary products and also pay commission on them. If these offerings attract more customers to your hotel versus competition, use them when you need to in low season, and remove their availability in high season.

4. OTAs bring in a brand new audience that is looking to compare multiple hotels in a new destination. They should not be your source for repeat guests. Having proper procedures in place to obtain the guests email and add them to your CRM for your internal campaigns after departure is 100% within your rights.

OTAs are necessary, but they are only “evil” if you let them be. At Rate Yield we have designed an RMS that works for you with all of the necessities to maximize your revenues on all channels. Reach out today to learn more about our software and how our team can help!

Floor and ceiling rates are a staple of most revenue management systems but how they are used can vary greatly. At Rate Yield our pricing recommendation algorithm doesn’t look at the floor and ceiling price. Instead, they are used as last resort safety nets. In this article, I’d like to explain why we do it this way.

Back in the day, we had our low season and high season rate grid. I believe that this is where the Floor and Ceiling prices originated. Assume it is your low-demand period, what do you want to price at? Now assume it is the busiest day of the year, what do you want to price at? Today, with an RMS, we can use these two pricepoints to say, any other day of the year, measure demand against none and highest and price somewhere between these two numbers. I am sure that makes a lot of sense to a lot of people.

But… at Rate Yield we decided to ask the question: how do you know what someone would be willing to pay on your busiest day of the year? And if you don’t know, why should you limit your ceiling rate to what your bias tells you? 

This approach has been the root of the success for one of our clients, a seasonal property in Quebec. While they have been using Rate Yield for 6 years now, they consistently have seen growth in ADR beyond what they would have set for themselves if they had set a ceiling. For example, in July of 2025 the hotel saw ADR growth over 10% year on year. In the last 2 years, revenue growth for the property was 31%, and with less than 6 months of operation and a very limited demand period, it is not shocking that this growth is ADR driven.

Additionally, because our strategy configuration does not require hotels to aim for 100% occupancy, fluctuations in demand should not necessarily drive the rate towards the floor or ceiling. Instead, at Rate Yield, we focus on staying competitive in a dynamic market and having a pricing strategy that speaks to your hotel’s objectives and philosophy.

So when you set your floor and ceiling rates in Rate Yield, be sure to set your floor price as “X + $1” where X is the price you would lose your job for selling a room at that rate. And the ceiling rate is optional.

When I worked as a market manager for a major OTA in Montreal, I knew the importance of Grand Prix weekend to hitting my goals and targets. Just four nights in summer could represent a significant portion of our revenue, if handled correctly. We all know rates are going to be sky high, but the real opportunity for standing out is in restriction management.

For those who haven’t lived and breathed a Grand Prix weekend in Montreal, let me fill you in. Thursday night is when the groups arrive because the practice sessions take place on Friday. On Saturday there are qualifying sessions and the race takes place on Sunday. Naturally, the spectator attendance is higher on the weekend than the Friday, and people tend to want or need to get home for Monday. That being said, the corporate groups are usually booking a 4 night stay including Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

So picture this, all major hotels in Montreal have weekends closed out in June (or May since 2026) until the dates are made official. Once they are announced, the rates get put in place and a minimum 4 night stay restriction is placed on all 4 days. It’s fair, you want to protect your inventory for those die hard fans that are going to book immediately after the announcement is made, or for the corporate groups, or our loyal return guests.

Now, imagine we are 90 days from arrival and you still have 50% of your inventory to sell. Are you holding on to your minimum 4 night length of stay restriction? Are you removing it from Thursday and allowing anyone to book one night on Thursday? Are you opening up your Sundays to departures? And if you are, have you removed the restriction on your Sunday requiring more than a one night stay? Are your room types balanced so if someone does want to stay for 3 or 4 nights, do you have availability?  Same questions at 30 days prior to arrival. 

When I was at the OTA I would shop for different stay patterns on the website and see if there were any hotels available. If there weren’t, I would look at the inventory grids of hotels to see if there were rooms available but simply gate-kept by restrictions or unbalanced inventory, then I would notify my partners in case they wanted to make changes. You would be surprised to know how many hotels had a minimum 4 night stay restriction on their Friday night still active when I would call them on the Thursday before, and with a significant number of rooms left to sell.

Responsible restriction management is a crucial part of revenue optimization. This is one way that we see it come up in an urban market like Montreal with a few compression events per year. But in markets like Daytona Beach where they have 2 months of occupancy above 70% in March and July, restriction management can help optimize occupancy by ensuring there is availability for the search patterns people are looking for.

If you accept every reservation that comes in for 2 nights here and there, when people eventually call to reserve for 7 days, you may not have the rooms available. Rate Yield’s Smart Restrictions allow you to set minimum length of stay restrictions of 7 days and have them automatically removed when you reach the 90 day booking window, or have them reduced to 5 days, then 3 days, and so on and so forth. Rate Yield’s restrictions can help you reach your profitability goals by prioritizing longer lengths of stay, while opening up for shorter lengths of stay when your rates are higher.

Rate Yield is a revenue management software that was designed by revenue managers for revenue managers who enjoy revenue management! We empower you to make your own decisions and determine your own strategies and then let the system take care of implementing it for you. Reach out today for a demo of how we make this happen for clients!

Oftentimes I hear from smaller properties that they don’t need a revenue management system because of their size. While I understand that smaller properties try to keep costs low and they often feel that dynamic pricing isn’t as necessary, I believe that a revenue management system can have a return on investment for hotels of all sizes and I have math on my side to prove it!

As an example, let’s assume a 34 room property has an annual occupancy of 83% and an annual ADR of $189. If an RMS increases the ADR by 5%, the increase in revenue annually is $97,338. Now I know what you are going to say, I can just raise my price by 5% and get that same increase without incurring the costs. If you were to try that and increase rates across the board, you may not see the return you are looking for, because an annualized ADR and annualized occupancy rate experience variation throughout the year. 

By increasing rates by 5% across the board, you risk losing business to competitors in some months and  not compensating for that loss with a large enough increase in the high season. The decrease in occupancy could ultimately result in a decline in revenue year-on-year. An RMS is able to analyze current market dynamics to ensure rates are optimized for every single day of the year to remain competitive and to maximize revenue on days when demand is highest. This intricate balance between ADR and Occupancy is where an RMS can ultimately help you to maximize your revenue.

In the above example, the overall increase of rates by 5% results in a decrease in revenue of -2.28% year-on year. In the example with an RMS where each month sees its own fluctuations, ADR has increased by 5% overall and the revenue increase is 5.14% year-on-year. 

Additionally, and this is especially crucial for small hotels, you can save a significant amount of time. With a revenue management system in place you can be sure that your rates are optimized for the next 365 days and more, every day. The system will analyze the competitive pricing and capitalize on any anomalies or high demand dates. The system will send you reports so you can oversee it in your hotel’s image, without requiring you to spend a few hours a week doing manual adjustments. And while those hours can be quantified in terms of salaried hours saved, I prefer to qualify them as opportunity cost. Especially when it comes to small hotels, what else can you be doing with those hours and how would those tasks benefit the hotel.

Historically an RMS has been a huge investment, but that is no longer the case. Rate Yield is accessible for any budget and offers flexible month to month billing so you can be confident that the return is there for you without committing to a lengthy contract term or an upfront lump sum payment. Reach out today to see how Rate Yield can help you to yield more revenue!

It has been a tough year for our home market of Montreal. Every STR presentation I have seen throughout the year has been saying the same thing about the city. It is underperforming all major cities across Canada and growth is negative compared to last year. This is predominantly driven by reduced occupancy. 

Unfortunately, because of dependency on historical trends, reduced occupancy is interpreted as reduced demand and thereby met with conservative rate setting. The small rate increases were not enough to offset the reduced occupancy.

Rate Yield’s approach differs from legacy RMS in that we look at current market dynamics and set rates based off of market positioning, hotel priorities and hotel performance. We decided to look at the performance of our client hotels in Montreal to see how they fared in this tough year. We limited our analysis only to hotels who were live with Rate Yield throughout 2024 and 2025 to ensure that no growth could be attributed to the introduction of an RMS.

We are proud to share that our clients in Montreal have outperformed the market in revPAR growth in all but one month. The month in question, February, saw ADR growth of 7% for Rate Yield clients compared to 4.2% for the market, reflecting a desire to grow ADR over Occupancy when there is sufficient performance in the market in favour of profitability.

If Rate Yield clients revenue in 2025 was adjusted for market growth, the difference alone represents a return on investment of 33:1. 

With Rate Yield you aren’t just getting an RMS to optimize pricing in real time. You are getting a team of experts and the ability to fully define and own your strategy.

It’s the time of year again when everyone is planning their Black Friday deals and hotels are being contacted by their market managers of every OTA to offer a steep discount for a campaign that used to last one day but has extended from Black Friday to Cyber Monday to Boxing Day and beyond. So why should you participate in one of these deals which will help OTAs get traffic and drive business away from your direct channels? And if you do believe there is value in the visibility, then how can you ensure there is also value in the guest who books?

First let’s tackle the why of it. The major OTAs are investing a lot of money to market these campaigns. They have marketing budgets far beyond what an independent hotel could ever dream of having. So if they will be driving traffic to specific landing pages, as an independent hotel, it makes sense to try to be on that page. Also, people who have been considering booking a trip and are waiting for the deal are likely to prioritize hotels in a destination that are offering a deal. Personally, when I am shopping on Prime Day, I am going to filter for Prime Day deals. There may be a cheaper option of a similar product without a deal, but if I am going to purchase something on Prime Day, it needs to have a Prime Day Deal. And I doubt that I am alone in this thinking. OTAs have also done an incredible amount of research on what tagging and merchandising works best on their users to drive traffic to your hotel. Promotion details aside, it just makes sense to participate in campaigns where the OTAs are investing.

Now, let’s talk about how you can make it worthwhile for you. Booking 30 rooms at a 50% discount on a one night stay in your high season isn’t a great outcome of this campaign. So how can we be sure that if we decide to take advantage of this marketing opportunity, we are getting the kind of business we want from it?

Consideration 1: You can put a minimum stay restriction on your promotion so that it only applies to stays of 2 nights for more. But if you are in a seasonal market that is in low season, you may want to capitalize on the opportunity to get those room nights booked, even if it is just for one night. So protect your high season dates by making sure you have restrictions in place. It’s all well and good to have automated restrictions, but if your system is waiting for demand triggers to turn on a length of stay restriction, it might be too late. If you aren’t watching your future dates with precision, turn on the minimum stay for now and readjust after the promotion ends. 

Consideration 2: Make sure the promotion is also available on your direct channel. You don’t want to send all your business to OTAs. You should also promote it through your own newsletter and marketing channels.

Consideration 3: Since it’s available everywhere, and since the discount required is steep, you may consider yielding your rates slightly to compensate. Now don’t go crazy here, travelers (and algorithms) aren’t stupid and they will know if you yield up 25% and offer a 25% discount. 

Consideration 4: Consider your room types. You don’t have to offer the discount on all room types, so long as your call-to-action price is affected by the campaign. That means that you can offer the 30% discount on superior room categories without applying it to your base room which will have a lower impact on your ADR than applying the promotion to all rooms.

Consideration 5: Consider adding a booking limit. You can also protect your ADR by limiting the number of rooms you sell at the campaign rate to 2 or 3. This way you can maximize your visibility with the promotion without giving away too many rooms at one time.

Consideration 6: Don’t shy away from implementing parallel promotions! You can join the campaigns multiple times with different restrictions on each or simply create promotions that match the book & stay dates of the campaign with terms that are more satisfactory to you.

To sum up, it is possible to plan your promotions within a campaign to ensure they meet your hotel’s needs. You can take advantage of the visibility the OTAs get without overlooking your own goals. If you want to know how to adjust your strategy in Rate Yield to adapt to these ad hoc campaigns, reach out today!

We’re excited to announce that Rate Yield has officially launched a new API integration with StayNTouch PMS, further expanding our ability to deliver powerful, dynamic pricing and revenue management to even more hotels.

Our pilot property is already live on this integration and seeing the benefits firsthand. With real-time data exchange and streamlined automation, hotels using StayNTouch can now leverage Rate Yield’s real-time rate optimizations based on current market dynamics rather than historical data trends.

This milestone was made possible thanks to Matt Lusk from MaxREV Solutions, who selected Rate Yield for his client not only because of our robust features, but also because we are a proudly Canadian company. We’re thrilled to be partnering with Matt and supporting independent properties in staying competitive with tools tailored to their needs.

We’re now looking forward to onboarding more StayNTouch properties in the coming weeks. Whether you're seeking more frequent rate updates, deeper market insights, or just a more intuitive RMS experience, Rate Yield is here to help you unlock your full revenue potential.

If you’re a StayNTouch user and curious about how Rate Yield can elevate your pricing strategy, we’d love to show you what we can do.