The Uniqueness of Revenue Management Approaches in Nontraditional Settings: The Case of the Golf Industry

This study focuses on two demand and supply characteristics that may affect the transferability of revenue management (RM) practices from traditional (e.g., hotels) to nontraditional (e.g., golf, restaurants, entertainment venues) RM settings. Consumption within many nontraditional RM settings is largely discretionary in nature, with the potential to affect how demand and price should be managed across the booking horizon. Equally, operators are often challenged with a high degree of time-based inventory complexity, which may require that price and inventoried demand are managed at a greater level of granularity than traditional RM applications dictate. Using longitudinal golf reservations data, we found that superior revenue performance was associated with capturing a higher proportion of demand early in the booking horizon, rather than protecting inventory at higher prices for late bookers. Competitive price positioning in which price was higher than the competition during within-day peak-demand tee times also shaped revenue gains. Similarly, conversion management was found to be most critical during within-day peak demand periods. These findings suggest that traditional RM strategies may not apply in nontraditional RM settings where one or both of the demand and supply characteristics of interest is present. The implications of these findings for practitioners are explored