ATLANTA—Capitalizing on a $200-million renovation, the Tropicana Las Vegas recently chose The Rainmaker Group’s GuestREV and GroupREV products, making it the first Las Vegas property to implement GroupREV in the city.
“We have a desire to constantly learn and drive both ADR and demand from all of our segments, and having a comprehensive system allows us to capitalize on those things at the same time,” said Gavin Mealiffe, VP of sales, Tropicana Las Vegas – a DoubleTree by Hilton hotel.
Mealiffe noted that the property looked at several options and held numerous meetings and demonstrations with all of them. He noted that “ease of use, reporting capability with existing systems, a group rooms component and, of course, a connection with the team that we would be working with” were the most important criteria for the property. In his opinion, the benefits of the Rainmaker platforms include “better visibility within all of our market segments; better reporting, which allows for more focused analytics; and, ultimately, better decisions about how to price our products to grow rate and market share.
“We believe in always trying to make the best decisions with the most accurate information possible, and a comprehensive revenue management system allows us to have a much wider view of the marketplace and our own internal hotel compression,” he continued. “Rainmaker provided a total package with regard to revenue management…both the single transaction room and the group solution. All of our market segments are married in one way or another, and being able to have visibility and collaboration into all of them at the same time is hugely valuable.”
That being said, group business will be a huge focus for the property. “We have seen massive growth in our group segment over the last 2.5 years and, with our recent expansion of our meeting space taking us to more than 100,000 sq. ft., it will continue to be a main focus,” said Mealiffe. “We strive to provide a great group experience. At 1,469 rooms at the Tropicana Las Vegas, we are one of the smaller hotels on The Strip, which is actually an advantage in the group segment. We can provide a more focused experience to our groups, and their networking opportunities are better than at most of the mega properties because the attendees see their peers more often.
“GroupREV allows us to make sure we are being competitive in the marketplace, and also pricing fairly for the great facilities and accommodations we offer,” he continued. “Having even more confidence in our pricing strategy with GroupREV allows our sales team to focus on the groups program and how their experience at the property can be better instead of wondering if the rate we have offered will be received well.”
While the Tropicana is just now implementing the system and hasn’t been able to see results yet, Jamie Pena, VP, revenue strategy & global distribution, Omni Hotels & Resorts, noted that the brand has been using GuestREV for years and GroupREV since its debut in 2012. (While GuestREV and GroupREV are often used together, Angie Dobney, Rainmaker’s VP of pricing and revenue management services, noted that hotels could use them separately as well.) Pena said that, as a midsized company, Omni is more group dependent than other brands. “We need to run higher than their share of group; it is always king for us,” she said. While she noted that improvements and increases could be attributed to many factors, “the brand has grown RevPAR index every year” since implementing GroupREV.
Dobney added that the company has seen an 8.4% increase in group room revenue across the board for properties that use this product, and conversion rate increased 11.5% “because we also understand what the likelihood is for groups [based on]size and segment, and what their propensity is to spend, and we base the optimal price on that.”
While Omni Hotels & Resorts had been working with Rainmaker with GuestREV, Pena noted it did its due diligence before deciding on a group platform. “Before we had GroupREV, we were doing group pricing manually,” she noted. “We were listing what rate we wanted to sell every day very manually, and it wasn’t dynamic to market segment or by group type and, frankly, we really weren’t very good at updating it. We wanted something that would be timely, something that related back to our transient-demand situation and something that would not require our sales leaders at the hotel to do a lot of manual work.”
Pena said that one of the reasons Omni chose Rainmaker was because it wasn’t an off-the-shelf solution. “In the end, they baked in a lot of the functionality and factors we think are really important when you price group business,” she explained, “so we developed it with them. They worked with us to make it a product we would have created ourselves if we had had the resources.” She noted that GroupREV is also web-based, which is also a huge benefit.
“It’s fast,” she said, “and we’ve got it hooked up with our reservations system and our sales system, so everything is automated to pull the data. It just puts a lot of information at the sales managers’ fingertips quickly.”
Dobney noted that a Rainmaker study found that the first responder to group leads gets the business 70% of the time. “You have to be able to have optimized pricing out there quickly to your customers, and to make sure that it’s easy for your sales team to use,” she said.
Another benefit, according to Dobney and Pena, is that the brand can track the sales of its employees. GroupREV offers three rates: the floor rate, the minimum you should sell; the optimal rate; and the ceiling rate. “We can look at trends by manager,” said Pena, noting that if one manager is always giving guests the floor rate, the employee can be trained to sell the optimal rate more often. HB