HEDNAVOICES
Opinion
Hotels optimized the price. Why not the partnership?
The industry spent forty years teaching one number to move on its own. Every other commercial decision still moves at the speed of a meeting — and the fix starts with structured opportunity data.
Jeremy Mahoney
Director North America, Agoda · Secretary, HEDNA Board
Free for everyone — members and non-members alike. No form, no login.
Two commercial decisions. Two very different speeds.
Rate
0
Reviews since you opened this page, at the pace a modern RMS works — inside rules the hotel set once.
counting…
Everything else
1
Channel mix, segment deals, promotions and partnership terms — reviewed last quarter, over coffee, off a slide deck.
unchanged
Why read it
We automated the rate, not the commercial system around it
Revenue management is a genuine success story. It is also a strangely narrow one. Modern systems surface rate recommendations continuously; HotelTechReport's 2026 buyer's guide puts the typical RevPAR lift at 15–20%.
Everything next door to that number is still decided by phone call. Which channels are open. Which segments get a discount. Whether to activate an opaque rate, a package, a member deal. The full breadth of what a channel can do gets deployed through a fraction of its capability, because deploying any of it requires a person on each side to notice, propose, agree and configure.
The next unlock for hoteliers isn't a smarter price — it's structured opportunity data.
Jeremy Mahoney
What you'll take away
A specific, buildable ask
Not "optimize everything" — a shared taxonomy for sellers to expose segment-level demand signals in a form hotel systems can read. Narrow enough that a room of people could define it.
Why it hasn't happened
The easy answer is monetization. The real one is attribution: expose an opportunity and you can't be sure you capture the booking it creates. Any workable standard has to solve that too.
The counterarguments, not just the case
Where the relationship model still wins, why need dates are hotel-specific, and why the revenue manager staying in control is a design constraint rather than a caveat.
Eight named perspectives
From Cornell, IDeaS, Sabre, Booking.com, Omni Hotels & Resorts, PTG Consulting and TRevPAR Insights — including the points where they disagreed with the author.
With thanks
Eight voices, one argument
Eight people gave their time and their perspectives to this piece — across revenue management, hotel commercial leadership, connectivity, consulting and the seller side. It is a better and more useful article for their contributions, and for the points on which they saw it differently.
Sherri Kimes · Cornell University
Stephen Hambleton · IDeaS
Chinmai Sharma · Sabre
Eddy Veldhuizen · Booking.com
Miki Gulati · Omni Hotels & Resorts
Kathleen Cullen · PTG Consulting
Olaf Belgraver · Booking.com
Anisha Yadav · TRevPAR Insights
Quotes are the contributors' own and do not represent their employers or HEDNA.
Continue the conversation
Let's define demand-opportunity data before someone defines it for us.
The industry has solved harder definition problems than this one, and it has solved them in the open. The pieces are built. What's missing is an agreement about what a demand signal is — and a way for both sides to see what it produced.
HEDNA Lisbon
15–17 September 2026 · Come and discuss it in person.
Download the piece (PDF)
Free for everyone — members and non-members alike.
Views are the author's own and do not represent HEDNA or its members. HEDNA publishes a range of perspectives.