Data driven pricing strategies for hotels during the COVID-19 pandemic

Pandemics such as COVID-19 can challenge many of the very well-established strategies of revenue management. The purpose of this paper is to subject the four widely used strategies of revenue management in the hotel industry into an empirical analysis for their suitability at the time of crisis. The data driven approach to modelling has been adopted in this research based on the real-life data obtained from the property management system of nine of the 5-star hotels in Qatar. The results indicate that four of these hypotheses are supported. This revelation has been the basis for drawing implications to the finance and marketing managers of hotels to enhance customer satisfaction and maximise hotel revenue during the COVID-19 or any such pandemic. The results are based on real-life data and have the foundation of well-established pricing strategies in use at the hotels.