Chitra Randhawa is the Senior Regional Director of Sales, Asia Pacific at IDeaS. She is responsible for growing IDeaS’ revenue management business and enhancing the company’s leading brand reputation in the dynamic Asia Pacific hospitality sector.

With more than decades of experience, she has a record of growing businesses in the regional hospitality and travel sectors across a range of established and emerging markets in Asia Pacific including ANZ, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India.

Our team sat down with Chitra to find out more about IDeaS and the various revenue management solutions they provide.

Could you tell us a bit about your career so far?

I’ve been in the hospitality industry for the last thirty years, mainly with hotels for a long time in sales and marketing. I  started specializing in revenue management since the last six and a half years, and I’m really liking it as well.

Tell us more about IDeaS and the various revenue solutions you provide. How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?

We offer revenue management solutions for all types of hotels and sizes, transform the right data into clear and actionable insight, and assist our clients to price forecast and report efficiently.

What are the main challenges faced by your consumers in hospitality, and why is revenue management so important in overcoming them?

With the post pandemic situation, traveller behaviour will be very different. Hotels can leverage automation or artificial intelligence to drive revenue with better pricing and forecasting.

It’s hard to carry out budgeting and forecasting by using data manually, especially in the last two or three years during the COVID-19 period. With less manpower resources across the hospitality industry, revenue automation is the most cost-efficient way to drive revenue with greater profit.

Could you tell us about some of IDeaS’ key business highlights in the Asia Pacific region?

One of the things that we are seeing lately is hotels investing more and more in hotel technologies, including revenue management, to get ready for travel rebound. More hotels rethink their revenue strategies to achieve total revenue optimization. We are not looking at just room revenue, we are looking at non-room revenue too.

Maldives is one of our major markets with increasing demand in advancing hotel revenue strategies. Some of our recent wins over the last 12 months include Hyatt, the Swire hotels, Cora Cora Maldives, Millennium Hotels and Resorts and the Radisson Hotel Group etc.

What are the emerging technological trends when it comes to revenue management, especially in the hospitality industry?

Apart from just the typical revenue management solutions, we have now got Optix, RevPlan, consolidating hotel data to deliver total revenue optimizations. We also have channel forecasting, delivering pivotal insights into channel demands and costs.