Lindner Hotels Boosts Meetings & Events Profitability with Analytical Revenue Management

The Story

IDeaS is a foundational piece of Lindner Hotels’ revenue culture. For years, Lindner has leveraged IDeaS G3 RMS to manage and optimise room revenue. Now, the forward-looking hotel company is ready to expand its revenue management practices beyond the guest room.

Expenses for conferences and events continue to increase worldwide. Hotel and event managers therefore need a better understanding of group business today in order to seize revenue opportunities. IDeaS SmartSpace creates a platform for cooperation between revenue managers and sales managers. The powerful cloud-based standalone tool gives detailed insights into venue space demand. It seamlessly pulls data from other sales tools to work together to manage event space strategically so managers of both areas utilise ideal pricing scenarios for the event and conference business. Lindner rolled out SmartSpace in three of its hotels on an executive initiative, and another 10 IDeaS G3 RMS-equipped hotels will move later this year.

Event area is one of the strongest segments

“IDeaS SmartSpace brings analytical revenue-management thinking to our event space,” said Monika Sand, corporate revenue manager at Lindner. “In doing so, we are optimising our work processes, we can work more purposefully and define the corresponding key figures by which we measure the hotels and observe their progress towards sales goals. Now that we have a better view of demand, we can further expand our offerings, adapt them more ideally to our customers’ needs and, overall, sell the event area and our rooms more efficiently and increase sales.”

As a long-time customer, Lindner has relied on IDeaS revenue management solutions for more than ten years including the 27 hotels now leveraging IDeaS G3 RMS. G3 RMS provides the hotel group forecasts with greater accuracy and automated price decisions based on the room category, which automatically distributes the system three times daily to all connected channels.

“In many of our hotels, the event area is one of the strongest segments ever,” said Sand. “Last year we wanted to increase revenue in this very important area. So, we decided to bring in IDeaS to help enhance our revenue management culture, with which we have been successfully optimising our RevPAR for a long time in order to generate more targeted business and revenue. We can now have a total revenue strategy that allows us to get a better picture of the overall situation by incorporating event, hospitality and wellness into our revenue management strategy.”

In 2017, IDeaS Revenue Performance Insights (RPI) started providing Lindner’s revenue managers and management with detailed information on overall revenue performance. With the advanced SAS® visual analytics, the cloud-based IDeaS RPI solution provides the ability to visualise performance by property and market comparisons, significantly improving the strategic view.

Lindner handles the challenges of digitization in the hotel industry faster than others

The IDeaS G3 RMS and SmartSpace forecasts have helped shift the focus for revenue and sales managers significantly further into the future and not only focus on the daily business. It frees up more time each day to develop overarching strategies, while automated technology takes care of the details. With the use of SmartSpace, Lindner Hotels can manage its meetings and events offerings far better and sell them more profitably. This holistic revenue management strategy places Lindner as a leader among the German hotel groups. This allows Lindner to take on and implement the challenges of digitisation in the hotel industry more quickly than their competition.