How can I use room type rate strategies to get the most revenue from my casino resort?

For casino resorts room types have always been very gilded and guarded. There is a ton of demand at casino resorts traditionally, pre-pandemic, and that’s because they attract these high rollers, people who spend a tremendous amount of money, and there is a tendency to protect the value-add inventory to a point where you protect it too much. For example, you might have junior suites or some kind of premium suites and you may have completely removed those from your sell model because you want to keep them safe for your VIPs. You want to make sure that if a casino host needs to put the high roller in the junior suite on Thursday it is available for them.

But of course with the decreased demand, we need to put those suites on the rack and sell them, and then dynamically yield them. We can't just say the basic room is $99 and the junior suite is $199.

We have a tremendous opportunity to convert business here. We are seeing this in the Pulse Report: we are seeing people go to your website, we are seeing people look to book, we are seeing those people not convert. So you start asking yourself, ‘How can we get these people to convert?’ Market these value-adds and suddenly the guest is like ‘Oh my gosh, I never could have got a junior suite before when I went to the so and so casino and now I could!”

But if you have the basic room at $99 and the junior suite at $199 and it is just always like that and you are not taking advantage of a dynamic revenue program then you are going to suffer.

If you have a system that is looking at demand and can say $199 is too much on this day, there is just nobody booking the junior suite, maybe it should only be only $30 more on Thursday, maybe you can do $100 more on Friday and Saturday but not mid-week. That is the kind of thing you need to start looking at.