Chasing Revenue: The Birth of Revenue Management

Revenue management is like any other management practice. It involves making pricing and inventory decisions based on assembled data coming from a variety of sources. The name revenue management was coined by Robert G. Cross, the founder of Aeronomics, Talus, and Revenue Analytics (no relation to the author).

Ravi Mehrotra, a young computer engineer who wanted to start his own company, was another believer in revenue management. He'd go on to create the largest revenue management software company in the world. Both Robert Cross and Ravi Mehrotra built revenue management systems.

It would be left to Gregory Cross and a few others to take the concepts of revenue management, which were originally focused on the airline industry and use them to revolutionize the hotel industry. Along the way he would discover it was more than just technology and algorithms. What they were building in the 1990's was a new way of looking at the business.

In this book, Cross documents the difficulty to reimagine hotel pricing and decision making in the last decade of the twentieth century. It was a time when the Internet was young and unruly and no one had ever heard of "big data."

The book also serves as a crash course of what it takes to succeed in the hospitality industry and how to get your ideas heard as you rise up the ranks.

Gregory Cross is the founder and creator of Hilton Hotels Corporation's revenue management discipline. A hospitality veteran of thirty-eight years, he was also the first senior vice president of revenue management for Hyatt Hotels Corporation. In 2015, he was the inaugural recipient of the Vanguard Award for Lifetime Achievement in Revenue Management from the Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International for his significant contributions to the field of pricing and revenue optimization in the hospitality industry. He retired in 2018 and lives with his wife, Jill, in La Quinta, California.