Yield Management
Yield Management is the practice of adjusting price and availability to earn the most from a fixed, perishable inventory. Rooms are the textbook case: a property has a set number of them, and tonight's unsold room is worth nothing tomorrow. There's no single formula for it. The discipline is a set of decisions made over and over: what to charge, which channels to sell through, when to open or close a rate, and which bookings to turn away in favor of better ones. The trade-off it manages is rate against volume. Selling out early at a low rate leaves money behind when demand keeps building, and holding rate too long leaves rooms empty on the night. RevPAR is the usual scoreboard, because it only improves when the combination of the two improves. In practice it runs on restrictions as much as on price. A minimum length of stay protects a peak date, closed-to-arrival rules protect a valuable stay pattern, and channel-level controls decide who sees which rate. Yield management and revenue management get used interchangeably, though revenue management is the broader term. Yield management is traditionally about rooms; revenue management covers total profitability across every revenue stream, which is where TRevPAR and GOPPAR come in.