Revitup.Direct Blog

---

An interview with Anagnostis Theocharis, Head of Revenue Management at RevitUp.Direct 

A hotel invests in a site, in photos, in advertising — and then loses the booking at the last, cheapest step of the journey. Ahead of the 6th Revenue Masterclass, we spoke with Anagnostis Theocharis about what decides the booking after the click: price, availability, and the small, everyday decisions of Revenue Management.

A hotel invests in a site, in photos, in advertising. Where is the booking ultimately lost? 

Let’s say everything went well up to that point. The visitor found the hotel, the site loaded fast, they chose a room and entered dates. At that moment they decide based on four things: the price, the availability, the booking terms, and the offer, if there is one. None of the four is solved by the site or the advertising. It’s the job of revenue. 

In seasonal hotels this counts double, because you don’t have three hundred and sixty-five days to fix your mistakes. You have a hundred and eighty. A weak week in May you don’t get back in August — August is already full. And it’s precisely those in-between months that decide whether the year was good or just exhausting. 

The most frustrating part is that at this point you’ve already paid for everything. The advertising, the site, your team’s work. 

Let’s go to price. What do you mean when you say the hotelier doesn’t see their own price? 

I mean it literally. 

The hotelier sees their prices from the inside. From their system, from the extranets, from the excel file they built in February. The customer sees them from the outside, all together, on the same screen. It’s not the same picture. 

It’s happened to us many times to open a phone in a meeting and search for the hotel for a random weekend. The owner sees their own rate third or fourth in line, more expensive than others. A pause follows, and then always the same phrase: “I never gave a rate like that anywhere.” And they’re telling the truth. 

This year, at one hotel: a double for mid-June, 268 euros on their own site, 229 for the same room on a platform they’d never heard of. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a contract rate given in December to a wholesaler, to be sold inside a package with a flight. Somewhere along the way it came out of the package and was sold on its own. 

I don’t blame anyone; these partners sell what they bought. The problem is ours: we pay for advertising to bring people to the site and then show them the worst price on the market. 

And here I want to take a step back, because that’s where the root is. The problem rarely starts in June. It starts in November and December, when you build the rate sheet and decide what to give to whom. How far below your public rate the wholesale goes, what each partner gets, who has rights to which period, where you set a limit and where you don’t. That’s your pricing policy, and it’s not a file. It’s a decision about who sells what, at what price and when. 

If the base is clean, the mistakes during the year are small and fixed in a day. If it’s murky, if you’ve given different things to different people with no logic connecting them, then it will chase you all season. And worst of all: you won’t even know where to start the correction, because every time you drop the price somewhere to balance things, you break something else. 

And none of this is visible from the inside. There’s no alert, no report telling you “today you’re the third cheapest on your own room.” You only see it if someone sits and checks it, across all channels, on different dates each time. It’s one of the checks we run systematically at the hotels we’ve taken on. Someone has to go in and look, channel by channel. How often depends on the hotel, on how many channels and contracts it has. But I’ll be honest: it’s one of those things that take discipline, because they never look urgent. Until they become urgent. 

And something few have noticed. In the past the big platforms bound you contractually not to sell cheaper elsewhere. With the changes in European legislation, that has been abolished. It sounds good, and it is. But it also means no one else is watching it on your behalf anymore. 

And availability? 

It’s the quietest loss, because it leaves no trace.

The visitor enters dates and nothing shows up. Not because you’re full, but because there’s a restriction that was set at some point for some reason, and the reason has stopped applying. 

Last year, at a hotel we’d just taken on, we found a seven-night minimum stay active for the whole of October. 

At peak it makes perfect sense. When you know you’ll fill up, you can choose who to take in, and a seven-night minimum does exactly that — it filters. But in October you don’t choose. You take whatever demand there is. There, the same filter simply cuts people off, and cuts them off silently. You never see the ones you cut. 

A similar problem at larger properties, with rooms held for a tour operator: they didn’t sell, and they come back very late. We’ve seen dozens released ten days before arrival. Ten days out you don’t sell at the price you’d have got with two months’ notice. You sell whatever you can. 

In both cases the visitor sees no error message. They see a blank, read it as “full,” and leave. That booking will never appear in any report of yours, because you don’t measure what didn’t happen. You see a May that went so-so and look for the explanation in demand, in flights, in the competitor next door. The explanation was a field on a screen. 

The same goes for booking terms. If, to someone booking eight months out, you offer only prepaid with no right to cancel, a portion of those people will go where they can change their mind. Even at a higher price. 

Offers are the hotelier’s most common tool. When do they turn against them? 

I’ll say something that isn’t popular: most of the offers I see are given to people who would have booked anyway. 

Take early booking. I want to be precise here, because we use it and consider it one of the most useful tools we have. The question isn’t whether you’ll do it. It’s whether you’ll leave it stagnant. 

The logic is tiered. You start with a strong discount, say 20%, to build a first base of bookings. Once the period reaches a certain occupancy level, say 30%, you reduce it. It climbs further, you reduce it again or cut it. That way the price builds upward as the period approaches, and you gave the discount only to those who genuinely needed it: the first ones, back when you had nothing on the books. 

What I often see, though, is the same percentage from December to April, the same for every period. The same 20% on a week in August that’s already full and on a week in May that hasn’t moved. In the first you’re giving money away. In the second even 20% isn’t enough, because there the problem isn’t the price. 

The difference between the two isn’t the offer. It’s who’s watching it and how often they adjust it. 

The other extreme is September. You see October isn’t filling, the anxiety sets in, and within ten days prices drop everywhere. I understand it completely — you know you’re closing in a few weeks. But roughly the same people come, at a lower average rate, and everyone ends the season worse off than if no one had moved. 

And to be fair to everyone, our side can do the same. When you see a period lagging, the offer is the easiest move and brings a quick result, so it even looks right. The question you must always ask is the same: what would have happened if I hadn’t done it. 

How much of a role does data play in your pricing decisions? 

In practice, data doesn’t make the decision. People make it, and usually not just one. 

Price is one of the few topics in a hotel that everyone has an opinion on, from the owner to the reception desk that hears what guests say. And each opinion rests on something real, on what each person saw from their position. But when there are no shared numbers on the table, the discussion is decided by whoever insists the most. 

Data does two things there. It defines what we’re discussing, because most price discussions are held about the wrong periods — about August, which has already been decided, instead of the three weeks that need a decision now. And it lowers the level: with instinct you decide by months, with data by dates and room types. A hotel doesn’t lose June; it loses twelve specific days of June that the average hides. 

All of this, though, assumes something very practical: seeing the picture the moment you need it, not two days later. Data rarely goes missing from a hotel; the time to gather it goes missing. When a simple picture requires opening four systems and building an excel, you’ll do it once a month. And then you’re not deciding with data, you’re deciding with its history. 

The difference between a hotel that does revenue management and one that just sets prices usually isn’t knowledge. It’s how fast it sees. 

When you take on a new hotel, what’s the first thing you look at in its numbers? 

Not occupancy, not turnover, and not the bottom line. The hotelier knows those better than we do; they know very well what was left at the end of the year. 

What’s usually missing isn’t the number. It’s where it came from. Which booking, which channel, which period, which decision back in February. So that’s what we look at first: how much each channel and each period actually left, after commission, discount and cancellations come out. 

Last year we had a case like that. A hotel closed the season with occupancy slightly better than the previous year and a worse result. The owner knew it. They couldn’t explain it. 

When we opened it up, it was mainly one thing. They’d given a larger share of their rooms to contracts, at a lower price, because contracts give certainty early and certainty is a big temptation in winter. But when summer demand came and the market was bearing better rates, they had no rooms left to sell. They’d sold their August in December. 

That shows up neither in occupancy nor in turnover. Two bookings for the same amount may have nothing to do with each other, but in the total they count the same. 

And there’s the matter of time. You see the bottom line in November, when nothing changes anymore. If you see the same things in June, by channel and by period, it’s not information. It’s a decision. 

On 16 October, at the 6th Revenue Masterclass, what do you want the hotelier to walk away having understood? 

That “Lookers to Bookers” doesn’t stop at the click. 

The person who reached your price is the most expensive visitor you have at that moment, because you’ve already paid everything to bring them there. The last part of the journey is both the cheapest to fix and the one people pay the least attention to. 

I’d also like them to leave with the sense that this part isn’t a technical matter for specialists. It’s small, everyday decisions. 

And the season helps. By mid-October most are closing or getting ready to. The contracts for 2027 have already been signed, so a large part of next year is locked. What’s left in your hands is the rooms you’ll sell yourself, and that’s set up now. 

If I had to ask for just one thing, it would be this: open your phone and search for your own hotel like a customer. Whatever you see there is what the people you pay to advertise to see too. 

The day has many talks and quite different perspectives. If someone leaves having kept one thing and applies it on Monday, it paid off. That’s why we do it every year.

How occupancy can hide the real result is something we break down in our article on ADR vs occupancy.

💡 Do you see your own rate the way your customer sees it? At RevitUp.Direct we monitor price, availability and distribution across every channel, with integrated Revenue Management. 👉 Request a channel check

The 6th Revenue Masterclass will take place on Friday, October 16, 2026, at Candia Maris, in Crete. Reserve your spot with free registration here.