Yield Management to Optimize Expected Revenues

Yield Management refers to a method of dynamically-pricing products such as airline seats and hotel rooms in such a way as to optimize revenues. While this technique is best known to the public from its application in the airline industry, it has a fact been employed in the hotel business since the early 1990s, managing room pricing strategies according to forecasts of supply and demand. However, these techniques are less well developed in the convention side of the business, especially in the case of opportunities that span multiple facilities. This project, in partnership with IGENO, a company which provides analytical management consulting & education to the retail, hospitality and tourism industries, will attempt to expand and transfer yield management theories to the particular case of a large tourism association by developing and testing various hypotheses and algorithms to dynamically forecast demand for the available resource. In addition, the intern will adapt the principles of yield management to the bulk sales models employed in the various convention booking scenarios and then develop, modify and test various pricing strategies against the developed mathematical models of supply and demand.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Laura Cowen

Student:

Zheng Sun

Partner:

IGENO

Discipline:

Statistics / Actuarial sciences

Sector:

Finance, insurance and business

University:

University of Victoria