Yield management
Yield management is a variable pricing strategy, based on understanding, anticipating and influencing consumer behavior in order to maximize revenue or profits from a fixed, time-limited resource. As a specific, inventory-focused branch of revenue management, yield management involves strategic control of inventory to sell the right product to the right customer at the right time for the right price. This process can result in price discrimination, in which customers consuming identical goods or services are charged different prices. Yield management is a large revenue generator for several major industries; Robert Crandall, former chairman and CEO of American Airlines, gave yield management its name and has called it "the single most important technical development in transportation management since we entered deregulation."
Definition
Yield management has become part of mainstream business theory and practice over the last fifteen to twenty years. Whether an emerging discipline or a new management science, yield management is a set of yield maximization strategies and tactics to improve the profitability of certain businesses. It is complex because it involves several aspects of management control, including rate management, revenue streams management, and distribution channel management. Yield management is multidisciplinary because it blends elements of marketing, operations, and financial management into a highly successful new approach. Yield management strategists must frequently work with one or more other departments when designing and implementing yield management strategies.History
is generally regarded as the catalyst for yield management in the airline industry, but this tends to overlook the role of global distribution systems. It is arguable that the fixed pricing paradigm occurs as a result of decentralized consumption. With mass production, pricing became a centralized management activity and customer contact staff focused on customer service exclusively. Electronic commerce, of which the GDSs were the first wave, created an environment where large volumes of sales could be managed without large numbers of customer service staff. They also gave management staff direct access to price at time of consumption and rich data capture for future decision-making.On January 17, 1985, American Airlines launched Ultimate Super Saver fares in an effort to compete with low cost carrier People Express Airlines. Donald Burr, the CEO of People Express, is quoted as saying "We were a vibrant, profitable company from 1981 to 1985, and then we tipped right over into losing $50 million a month... We had been profitable from the day we started until American came at us with Ultimate Super Savers." in the book Revenue Management by Robert G. Cross, Chairman and CEO of Revenue Analytics. The yield management systems developed at American Airlines were recognized by the Edelman Prize committee of INFORMS for contributing $1.4 billion in a three-year period at the airline.
Yield management spread to other travel and transportation companies in the early 1990s. Notable was implementation of yield management at National Car Rental. In 1993, General Motors was forced to take a $744 million charge against earnings related to its ownership of National Car Rental. In response, National's program expanded the definition of yield management to include capacity management, pricing and reservations control. As a result of this program, General Motors was able to sell National Car Rental for an estimated $1.2 billion. Yield management gave way to the more general practice of revenue management. Whereas revenue management involves predicting consumer behavior by segmenting markets, forecasting demand, and optimizing prices for several different types of products, yield management refers specifically to maximizing revenue through inventory control. Some notable revenue management implementations include the NBC which credits its system with $200 million in improved ad sales from 1996 to 2000, the target pricing initiative at UPS, and revenue management at Texas Children's Hospital. Since 2000, much of the dynamic pricing, promotions management and dynamic packaging that underlie e commerce sites leverage revenue management techniques. In 2002 GMAC launched an early implementation of web based revenue management in the financial services industry.
There have also been high-profile failures and faux pas. Amazon.com was criticized for irrational price changes that resulted from a revenue management software bug. The Coca-Cola Company's plans for a dynamic pricing vending machine were put on hold as a result of negative consumer reactions. Revenue management is also blamed for much of the financial difficulty currently experienced by legacy carriers. The reliance of the major carriers on high fares in captive markets arguably created the conditions for low-cost carriers to thrive.
Use by industry
There are three essential conditions for yield management to be applicable:- That there is a fixed amount of resources available for sale.
- That the resources sold are perishable.
- That different customers are willing to pay a different price for using the same amount of resources.
Yield management is of especially high relevance in cases where the constant costs are relatively high compared to the variable costs. The less variable cost there is, the more the additional revenue earned will contribute to the overall profit. This is because it focuses on maximizing expected marginal revenue for a given operation and planning horizon. It optimizes resource utilization by ensuring inventory availability to customers with the highest expected net revenue contribution and extracting the greatest level of ‘willingness to pay’ from the entire customer base. Yield management practitioners typically claim 3% to 7% incremental revenue gains. In many industries this can equate to over 100% increase in profits.
Yield management has significantly altered the travel and hospitality industry since its inception in the mid-1980s. It requires analysts with detailed market knowledge and advanced computing systems who implement sophisticated mathematical techniques to analyze market behavior and capture revenue opportunities. It has evolved from the system airlines invented as a response to deregulation and quickly spread to hotels, car rental firms, cruise lines, media, telecommunications and energy to name a few. Its effectiveness in generating incremental revenues from an existing operation and customer base has made it particularly attractive to business leaders that prefer to generate return from revenue growth and enhanced capability rather than downsizing and cost cutting.
Airlines
In the passenger airline case, capacity is regarded as fixed because changing what aircraft flies a certain service based on the demand is the exception rather than the rule. When the aircraft departs, the unsold seats cannot generate any revenue and thus can be said to have perished, or have spoiled. Airlines use specialized software to monitor how seats are reserved and react accordingly. There are various inventory controls such as a nested inventory system. For example, airlines can offer discounts on low-demand flights, where the flight will likely not sell out. When there is excess demand, the seats can be sold at a higher price.Another way of capturing varying willingness to pay is market segmentation. A firm may repackage its basic inventory into different products to this end. In the passenger airline case this means implementing purchase restrictions, length of stay requirements and requiring fees for changing or canceling tickets.
The airline needs to keep a specific number of seats in reserve to cater to the probable demand for high-fare seats. This process can be managed by inventory controls or by managing the fare rules such as the AP restrictions. The price of each seat varies directly with the number of seats reserved, that is, the fewer seats that are reserved for a particular category, the lower the price of each seat. This will continue until the price of seat in the premium class equals that of those in the concession class. Depending on this, a floor price for the next seat to be sold is set.
Hotels and multi-family residences
Hotels use this system in largely the same way, to calculate the rates. Yield management is one of the most common pricing strategies used in the hotel industry to increase reservations and boost revenue.In the multi-family residential industry, revenue management software started to be used around 2001, with Archstone-Smith helping to develop the LRO Revenue Management System from Rainmaker. Another early system was the YieldStar Asset Optimization System from RealPage. By 2024 the systems had been developed into cloud-based platforms known as a Revenue Management Systems. These systems are widely used by hotels to help optimize their revenue, as they automate the booking system, dynamically pricing rooms based on real-time activity, thus increasing revenue and occupancy as well as providing improved forecasting. Some RMS software is bundled as a standalone system, but sometimes it comes as part of a larger Property Management System.