IDeaS

IDeaS supplies revenue management to hospitality, publishing customer results alongside its product material and drawing on a long analytics heritage. It is among the most established names in hotel revenue management and competes largely on the quality of its forecasting.

Forecasting is genuinely the whole product in this category, whatever the interface looks like. A revenue system recommends a rate for a future date, that recommendation depends entirely on predicted demand, and everything else is presentation of a forecast that is either good or is not.

What makes hotel forecasting difficult is the number of things moving at once. Demand varies with the day of week, the season, local events, competitor rates, the booking window and how much has already been sold, and the interactions between those matter as much as the factors themselves, which is why this resisted spreadsheet modelling for so long.

The behavioural obstacle is at least as large as the technical one and is discussed less. A revenue manager who overrides the system whenever it suggests something surprising will get results no better than their own judgement, and the recommendations most worth following are precisely the counterintuitive ones. Adoption in this category is a management question rather than a software one. Published figures on the site were customer results rather than prices.