The real opportunity in price optimisation

Should hospitality copy the airlines and Ubers of the world, flexing prices by the hour depending on demand? Some argue it is the future. Others warn of customer backlash.

But here is the truth. We are debating the wrong thing. While we argue about the theory of dynamic pricing, millions of pounds are being left on the table because we cannot execute the basics at scale. The real opportunity is not in copying airlines. It is in fixing the clunky processes that stop us getting the most out of pricing strategies we already use today.

Price optimisation is not about reacting to demand in real time. It is about making smarter, data driven choices on the levers we already pull, such as menus, price bands, event strategies, bundles, offers and discounts.

The problem is not that operators lack ideas. It is that execution is slow, manual and fragmented. Optimisation is about giving teams the ability to design, deploy, test and measure these strategies seamlessly, rather than wrestling them through forms, approvals and manual programming.

Consider event menus. They are one of the oldest and most effective levers in the book, a focused offer, run at a higher price point, with costs under tighter control. Christmas menus, Valentine’s offers, sports finals, they work.

The issue is scale. Rolling out event menus across hundreds of sites is painfully manual. Operations submit forms, Finance signs off, Marketing produces collateral, IT reprogrammes all the platforms. By the time the menus go live, the opportunity may already have passed. In many cases, they never make it to the floor at all.

It is not the strategy that fails. It is the execution. Technology can change this. Define an event menu once, automatically deploy it whenever an event of a certain size is taking place within a defined radius of a site, and measure the results. No bottlenecks. No missed opportunities.

Now look at price bands. Most operators use only two or three. Not because that is ideal, but because anything more is frankly unmanageable.

The result is blunt segmentation. A city centre flagship and a suburban site are often lumped into the same band, despite obvious differences in customer profile and willingness to pay. That leaves significant margin uncaptured.

With smarter tools, operators could run more granular, data led price bands without adding complexity for Operations or Finance. Pricing could reflect real market conditions, precise, profitable and easy to manage.

Dynamic pricing may grab headlines, but the real upside lies in getting the basics right. Smarter optimisation allows operators to:

• Deploy strategies faster, with less admin
• Tailor pricing more precisely to local markets
• Test and refine approaches systematically
• Unlock margin growth without risking consumer trust

This is value that can be captured today, no hype required.

The real question is not whether hospitality should copy airlines. The real question is why so much value is still being lost because our processes make even simple pricing strategies unscalable.

The good news is this is not a theoretical problem. The tools now exist to make pricing strategies faster, more precise and easier to execute across an entire estate. Operators who embrace them will capture margin that is currently being left on the table.

So let us stop arguing about the wrong thing. The opportunity is not in some distant future of surge pricing. It is here, in the strategies we already know work, if only we choose to equip ourselves to execute them properly.