Monday 23 February 2009

Spot the yield/revenue management!

When I was a child, there was a very popular series of cheap books called "I spy". In each one there were about 30 to 50 items that one might see in a chosen situation. "I spy in London", "I spy in a hospital", "I spy on the railways" and so on. There were brief explanations of each item, and a point score alongside; common items scored 5 to 20 points, rarer ones might score 40 or 50. (One of the latter, I recall, was seeing a valley with river, road, railway and canal alongside each other.) There was also space to note where and when the item had been seen. The books were educational and fun; some facts were in them which I never encountered elsewhere in my education.

I am thinking that there should be a similar book for yield/revenue management. "I spy RM". Increasingly, RM enters our daily lives. The text books tell us that it was largely a product of the 1980's and airline management, but the roots of it go far further back, to hairdressers who charge different prices on different days of the week, and hotels which have weekend rates. So where can one spot RM today?
(1) Transport especially in the UK on flights and rail journeys, but there are cases of coach and bus travel;
(2) Hotels -- certainly if you Google for the topic, it is RM in hotels that comes out top, possibly because hotel management is diffused compared with the centralised management of airlines.
(3) Restaurants and other food and drink outlets
(4) Theatres and (slightly) cinemas
(5) Delivery of goods -- this encounter was what prompted me to blog today; we decided to order from a supermarket for home delivery and discovered that there were different prices for different two hour delivery slots. (We only decided to use the service because we had a £10 off voucher, which more than covered the deleivery charge at any time.)

Are there other, even rarer cases of RM?

In IAOR, the research papers are indexed under Yield Management, not RM. I have found that the expression Revenue Management is used by accountants to describe budgeting, so I prefer to use Yield.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Wonderful blog & good post.Its really helpful for me, awaiting for more new post. Keep Blogging!








Yield Management