A Vatel Lyon 2016 alumnus with the Revenue Management Specialization, and today the Head of  Revenue Manager for six hotels for the Grape Hospitality Group in Lille, Arnaud Marin tells us about his job.

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How would you define your position?

It’s hard to resume the Revenue Management job when you know the multitude and diversity of tasks that I carry out in a single day.

Let’s just say that it’s up to me to make figures give up the information they have so that they can predict the future and allow me to drew up the best strategies in performance each and every day, in terms of:

   - room occupancy rate,

   - average prices,

   - turnover in the hotels’ rooms division.

Two other levers that must be watched over and analyzed: distribution and e-reputation. The idea is to be able to determine and then, who to sell to and how.

As for e-reputation, stakes are really high when you see the ramp up of digital power.

A poor classification would definitely impact the hotel’s turnover.

What hotels in France, Holland and Belgium are you responsible for?

• The Mercure Lille Airport,
• The Novotel The Hague,
• The Ibis Liege Opera,
• The Novotel Antwerp,
• The Ibis Budget Antwerp Port, 
• The Ibis Styles Louvain-la-Neuve.

What are your main missions?

• Studying changes in reservations and monitoring hotel results
• Steering Revenue Management tools and defining the strategy to be applied
• Analyzing market share that competition has and carrying out price intelligence
• Studying upcoming events and calculating their yearly impact
• Drawing up estimated budgets for the rooms division activity

What qualities are required to be successful in a job like this?

• You have to really love working with figures and analyzing them
• An unlimited professional curiosity: the economy, geopolitics, tourism, new technologies, international business, the hospitality industry...
• You have to love challenges and be able to assess what you’ve done

What do you like the best about this job?

• Being at the heart of strategic decisions
• Each month we turn the counters back to zero and there are new challenges
• The diversity required
• The ultimate goal is complete customer satisfaction

What did you do before this job?

I was doing my final internship as the Revenue Manager at the Pullman Brussels Centre Midi where I rolled out a Revenue Management policy on seminar rooms.

What do you see yourself doing in the near future?

Since September 2016, I’ve been in charge of six of the 85 hotels that Grape Hospitality has in their portfolio. That equals 850 rooms, and this figure will rise to 1,400 in 2017 as I’ll have five new hotels to manage.