How Cross-Team Strategies Fuel Revenue Growth in Hospitality
Revenue management has always been a blend of strategy, creativity, and collaboration — a balance that few understand as deeply as Vlatka Barcan. With experience at citizenM and as Group Director of Revenue at Sircle Collection, Vlatka now works as a consultant, helping hospitality businesses optimize performance and boost profitability. With a career defined by both data-driven decision-making and innovative thinking, she brings a fresh perspective to the challenges of revenue optimization.
Vlatka’s insights show some of the biggest trends shaping revenue management today, the ongoing challenges with system integration, and how embracing innovation has led to measurable success.
Vlatka, revenue management has always been about balancing art and science. Can you share a defining moment in your career when you realized just how much intuition still plays a role, even in an era of advanced technology?
While we, of course, base our strategic decisions on data, sometimes intuition and years of experience make the biggest impact when making revenue decisions. I see this more often when fast and Ad Hoc decisions need to be made. Ten years of music school, hobbies such as making candles and painting spike creativity in my daily work. I noticed this for the first time during my Revenue consulting days in New York City, where storytelling and branding played a vital role to stand out from the competition. Since then, I have implemented many creative promotions in collaboration with Marketing and E-commerce Teams, where we use data driven decisions as a base for creative, personalized, CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) focused campaigns.
The hospitality industry is evolving rapidly - what’s a recent trend or shift that you think is genuinely transformative for revenue optimization, and how have you personally embraced it in your work?
Highly collaborative approach is the key to success. Some years ago, Sales and Revenue Teams finally found common grounds when it comes to base business such as corporate and group strategies. The trend we see in the last years has expanded towards one Commercial Team approach. We work together and make sure to have the same KPIs in order to avoid conflicts. We learn from retro sessions on common actions and goals, which is resulting in continuous growth and learnings. Another example of a recent shift is more collaboration with the Finance Team. Budget process looks quite different nowadays, where we already work together throughout the process and design the Topline goals that will make sense on the bottom line. We align and adjust our Revenue actions towards more profitable outcomes.
When you think back to the early days of your career, what was the biggest challenge in revenue management then, and how does it compare to the challenges you face today with tools like automation and AI at your fingertips?
Years ago Revenue experts used Excel for decision making, which was very manual, while now we have Revenue Softwares that allow more automation. Unfortunately most systems still only use ML (Machine Learning) and not AI (Artificial Intelligence). While Revenue systems are successfully utilizing constructs such as If-Then-Else, the expert input is still needed. Automation and system utilization is our main focus, which transformed the role of Revenue Managers in the industry, but there is still a long way to go. Another challenge that we are facing nowadays is many system options that don’t always integrate with each other. This makes data centralization and utilization another big focus of our Revenue Team.
We often hear about the promise of new technology. Can you share an example of how adopting a recent innovation has changed the way you approach revenue strategy and made an impact on your results?
In my last revenue and profitability audit assignment, I noticed low ROI of company’s upsell tool. I started comparing cost vs. sales and saw a lot of revenue opportunities. There were differences on how the Operations Team was using and utilizing the tool between different hotels within company’s portfolio of hotels. We started a project of reintroducing the tool with retraining, adding more upsell features, setting KPIs, incentives and aligning them across all regions. Together with help and commitment of the Operations Team, the system champions per hotel were assigned. As the end outcome, we were able to increase ROI and overall upsell revenue. This is just one example of how collaboration between different Teams resulted in an increase of Topline Revenues.
On another note, in my everyday life I am implementing different AI tools for all kinds of revenue projects. Whether it is help with presentations, revenue calculations, innovative ideas, problem solving or just simply improving a task, AI became my to go to tool. Whoever is not on board with utilizing available AI technology is missing out on huge opportunities.