Revenue or Yield Management is the skill of forecasting accommodation demand to maximise your revenue and be prepared with staffing. Hoteliers have been doing this for donkey years and the single-unit vacation rental market has been looking in awe at revenue management trying to figure out how to apply such skills (and mathematical formulae) to the sector.

Traditionally, revenue management formulae base forecast on past and present data. Patrick Bosworth, CEO and a co-founder of Duetto, writes in an article entitled “Look Ahead, Not Back, to Forecast Demand” that..

[w]hile those sources of data are critical, they are also incredibly limiting. By utilizing only historical and current bookings, hoteliers may get a decent view of future demand for the next month or maybe two. But when very few reservations are on the books, it’s hard to predict much further out. Fifteen years ago, before we even had a name for online travel agencies, that was more than enough information to run a successful and profitable hotel.

Read the suggestions put forward by Bosworth in his article on Lodging Magazine.