Competencies of revenue management executives and their challenges: An international research

Revenue executives play an essential role in hotels in order to reach their financial goals. Hotel industry realizes the effectiveness of revenue executives and hotels hire revenue executives under different titles such as director of revenue manager, revenue analyst, revenue executive. However, revenue managers face internal and external challenges. In addition to this, revenue managers complain about the lack of qualified candidates. There are few international studies about the revenue executives' challenges, the competencies that revenue executives need to have, and revenue management related courses which should be on the hospitality curriculum. In this context, this dissertation has four purposes. The first purpose is to indicate the revenue management executive challenges and their importance level. The second purpose is to understand the knowledge, skills, and competencies that revenue executives need to have. The third purpose of this study is to indicate the courses which are related to revenue management and understand the importance level of them. The fourth purpose is to compare the challenges of revenue managers who have formal tourism and hotel management degree and who do not have formal tourism and hotel management degree and find out if there are differences between them. The application area of this study is the revenue executives of hotels who work all around the globe. First, 14 revenue executives who work in international chain hotels were interviewed face to face. After interviewing with them, a survey was created. In the survey, there were questions about the challenges of revenue management executives, the competencies of revenue executives, and the courses which should be taught about hotel revenue management. The survey was sent to Hospitality Sales and Marketing International (HSMAI) members who work as revenue executives. SPSS 24 was used in order to analyze the responses. The most significant challenges considered by respondents are data integrity, owner pressure, the structure of the revenue management department, economic instability, and lack of qualified revenue managers. The most important competencies, which revenue executives should have, are analytical skills, decision-making skills, seeing the big picture, forecasting, and turning data into strategy. The most critical courses which should be on the curriculum of hospitality schools are data analytics, strategic management, pricing, statistics, and online distribution. The respondents who have tourism and hotel management degree consider that economic instability, data integrity, and lack of qualified revenue executives are the most challenging problems for them.