As hotels reopen, now is the time for new pricing models which take account of every inch of space and every second of time, overturning the traditional methods of measuring success. 

The pandemic has exposed hotels’ balance sheets and owners have realized that basing their business on revenue per available room ignores much of the hotel and makes it less efficient at a time when every piece of income counts.

Hotels are used to viewing a building as a collection of rooms with beds and nothing more. 

The events space, the F&B, the ballrooms are not accounted for when calculating RevPAR and, because of this, they don’t have to justify themselves, leaving a lot of dead space, leaking revenue. 

This is even more visible now, with many hotels only operating the bedrooms and this gives hotels the chance to break away from traditional measurements and vanity metrics like RevPAR and average daily rate (ADR) that do not accurately describe where value is created in our industry and instead move towards Total Revenue Per Available Space - or Available Guest. 

Even within the rooms, we need to change how we value a hotel room and how that time is used. 

Room use is divided up into sleeping, working and hygiene and there is a lot of time when the room is empty.

If the room is used overnight, hoteliers record this as 100% occupancy, but the true occupancy is much lower. 

Viewing the room by hourly use, you can see how it could also become a temporary office space or meeting room, maximising revenue. Taking the hotel as a whole where every square foot or metre is counted allows for a more holistic metric including all the other revenue streams and touch points, such as; upselling, food and beverage, spas, parking and meeting rooms, and creates a guest-centric view of revenue. 

Unnecessary distractions

Hotels are currently being distracted from these other sources of revenue by unnecessary admin, admin which is also a distraction from the experience. After months trapped within the same walls, guests have high expectations of their stays and the technology is there to create the memories which lead to a lifetime of loyalty, creating the perfect time to look again at your processes. 

Hotels need their guests to form memories and create value, but this doesn’t come from filling in forms. 

If you can automate those admin tasks, then you can focus on the value. 

And the value is having an interesting conversation which sticks in the memory. Those things are important. They create value in somebody's life. 

The only thing that you go to your grave with is a collection of memories and how you built them. 

The opportunities for hotels to build better relationships with guests are already well within their grasp. 

Hotels have somebody in their care for about two to three days, sometimes entire families for seven. 

And what do they do with it? They make sure that you fill out a form, they make sure that they ask you if you're allowed to have breakfast. 

And then they wait for the customer to decide if they want to rent a bike or use the spa. 

It’s the most uncreative way to run that business. If you give that same power to a tech company, having somebody on their website for 20 minutes without bouncing would be the greatest thing that had ever happened to them. 

If attention is a currency, then automation of manual tasks means that you can get on with utilising that currency to create real opportunities, through better experiences and thus greater promotion possibilities or building loyalty or trust for further recommendations. 

According to Mews’ research, just automating a standard payment flow can save 16 hours of time for every 1,000 transactions for your staff. 

Automatic payment processing cuts waiting time and allows for that valuable guest interaction, but the bigger prize is to make sure that the need for transactional authentication is entirely dispensed with. 

Hotel groups such as CitizenM are following in the footsteps of Soho House and experimenting with subscription models, something which could be married with better and more granular loyalty programmes which have been core to hotel strategy in recent years. 

We are used to subscriptions, through Netflix or Amazon Prime. How much would you pay for a monthly subscription to a hotel group? 

Then comes the question for hotels, though, about how can they make their services accessible and relevant not only on holidays and business trips? 

The great rethinking of our industry is afoot, the prize will be for those who can rethink their spaces and guest affinity in the most relevant way.