Europe on yield management - what is your take on the issue?

In the first place, other than national rail companies discounts for advance purchase (>3 days), I have seen no evidence that this is happening. BTW, American airlines do this and they are losing money and going bankrupt at an astronomical rate.

Well I will take a stab at this, although not 100 % clear on issue. I do alot of research when booking my own air and hotel, and I know I pay less because of it,, i prebook hotels well in advance and know I am getting cheaper rates( as same hotel i booked one year in feb, but had to rebook later for different date at less notice rates were higher). I have no problem with it. Train tickets prebooked in advance for trips outside Paris,, well , you can get good discounts, i paid 25 euros for a return ticket to Rouen booked in advance, at station, same day ticket would have been 45( lady in line in front of me paid that for walk up) , do I think thats unfair,, heck no. If you want to travel seat of your pants fine, you may come out ahead sometimes,,, and sometimes you will not, thats up to you to decide what you value more , your freedom to make last minute choices, or the assurance you are getting a good rate and a known date.

I have noticed the trend on the last two or three trips. British rail went to it in a big way when most of the rail system was privatized several years ago. And for that reason that British rail is the highest rail system. It is really a function of the local population's reactions to this style of pricing. While we tourists may think we are important, the vast majority of rail riders in Europe are the locals. The old days of European travel of the 50s, 60s are gone. The young ones will never know the difference and the gray hairs can only lament about days gone by. I will miss it because we travel slow with few definite plans. But we will adjust as is necessary.

I certainly don't think it is 'wrong', but it can certainly be annoying having to spend so much time checking reservations all the time to see current pricing. And, there are just as many times that the pricing goes down as the time gets closer... I just rented cars in 3 locations in the US the past few weeks and on every occasion I booked well in advance to be sure I had a car, and then constantly look at the current rates and I cancelled all 3 and rebooked each at a savings of over $350.
I also own two condos in a tourist location with a short summer rental season and I can tell you the person who handles the rentals for us puts out the highest price well in advance, then watches the rest of the rentals in town and if she still has some open they are either higher prices or last minute deals.(depends on how tired she is) I just booked a hotel in Paris for next week that I wanted to stay at, but it was too expensive, and now the room type I wanted was 44%off, plus a nice additional discount for AAA. It ended up being cheaper than the lower end hotel I had, but I certainly don't see anything 'wrong' about it... kind of like a bowl of soup can be one price at lunch and a different price at dinner.

Andre L., This is the first I've heard of "yield management" and the practice of charging hotel or rail customers a higher rate depending on when they book. This sounds similar to the concept used by budget airlines with a "sliding scale" where the price increases as the flight fills up. I'll have to give this some thought before I offer an opinion on it.

I don't think it would change the way I make my travel plans as I always book accommodations in small, family -owned B+Bs well inadvance, but my experience with "yield managenment" (our sales office calls it "revenue management") was that prices (in this case, for show tickets) rose too quickly, so that advertised prices were available for only a short time, and then rose considerably, resulting in angry indignation and accusations of false advertising among our patrons, very slow sales, which in turn resulted in a bewildering array of discounts just to fill the seats. I did feel it was wrong to advertise ticket prices at, say, $40. in a mailer, but by the time they get it and decide to buy tickets those same seats are now jacked up to $70. So while I personally do like to plan early, there will always be times when that's not possible, and I dislike being charged more due to circumstances that may be out of my control. If I knew in advance that a place I chose to stay in practised this, I would, out of principle, choose somewhere else to go.

Deutsche Bahn has been doing this as long as I've been familiar with them. Nothing new here. It has little affect on regular riders, most of whom seem to have Bahn Cards- as I do, because I don't have the luxury of planning trips far in advanced. In cities, I usually stay at business-class hotels, and I haven't seen a large difference in price between booking early and last minute. However, I have seen this practice in the Alps during the ski season, especially if you commit to several days. PS- Does anyone else beside me find the picture on the top of the page of Mr. Steves as "Rudolph" a little disturbing?

Although the Bahn offers lower prices for advance purchase, I have never seen them lower the price close to travel time, like airlines do, if there are a lot of tickets remaining. We often get posters who ask if the price will go down as travel time approaches. No! As for accommodations, I don't know if booking websites offer lower prices for last minute bookings, but the places I book don't. They just offer low prices to begin with.

A little goofy perhaps but not disturbing in anyway. IMO, completely consistent with his TV personality. Of course, we may have different definitions of disturbing.

Yes, American Airlines uses yield management. They now refer to it as revenue management and it has served them well for many years. There are several reasons American is losing money but this is not one of them. Their salaries are much higher than other carriers who declared bankruptcy
after 9-11.

Imagine you have a hotel with 100 rooms. All of them have to be cleaned when occupied and at check-out. You need laundry done, as well as breakfast made, dishes done, and of course a front desk clerk on call 24 hours a day. Everyone wants to be paid on time and they all want to know when they will be working. So, to make your schedules, and order food on a timely basis, you want to know when your hotel will be full. Though you would like to offer the same price all year round, and just have walk-ins, you know this isn't a very efficient way to do business. Important is to have the hotel be occupied as much and as often as possible. This makes your scheduling easier, and your employees happier. The majority of your guests feel like they got a bargain, and they are happier too. Where are the bad points in this scenario? High Occupancy is what it is all about in hotel property management and the more your hotel is out there and on more websites, the happier everyone is. Full occupancy means you can actually offer lower rates. The websites make reservations in dozens of languages for you too. Imagine if you had to try and write emails in 10 languages? If you just have a mom and pop operation with 5 rooms, that you are cleaning your self, or have a neighbor come in and clean once in a while and you make the breakfast yourself, then you really don't care as much if it is full or not. You might pay the town tourist bureau a commission to list your property though and that is enough for a small operation. It is a fallacy to think the tourist bureaus list properties for free. They charge a commision just like HRS, Expedia, Booking.com and all the others.

"It is a fallacy to think the tourist bureaus list properties for free. They charge a commision just like HRS, Expedia, Booking.com and all the others." Jo, you live in Germany and are employed in the "hospitality" industry. I would expect you to know better. What you says is the fallacy. A few towns have "in house" booking agencies which do charge a commission, but most towns don't, and these agencies represent a fraction of the rentals in town, only those that charge enough extra to pay for the agency's commission. They don't include the rental's URL or email because they want to force you to book through them at a profit. However, the vast majority of towns in Germany give a list of accommodations in their town, along with URLs and email, so you can contact the places directly. That would make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to charge a commission "just like HRS, et al". Whether these listings are paid for by the Kur tax, the town's promotional budget or by subscription by the individual properties, they don't charge a commission. The fact that they include the email address so you can contact the place on you own shows that they don't charge a commission. I recently contacted the proprietor of a place where I stayed in 2008 about this exact question. His town's website has a booking service (which is uncommon for German towns). For that, he would have to pay over €600 per year and a 15% commission (I just rechecked his email, it's 15%) for each booking. So he doesn't participate. Just being shown on a listing of accommodations costs him €74 per year. In the case of this town, apparently a lot of proprietors feel the way my friend does. The town's booking website shows 5 places that can be booked, but there are 30 places total on the list of accommodations.

I am not in the hotel business anymore, but I have close friends though, who have a pension with 7 rooms. Now, why would you find 600 euro per year and a 10% commision to be a bad deal? Let's see, that averages out to 50 euro per month, and if your rooms are selling for 35 euro per night, that is a whopping 3.50 euro commission. All of which I can write off of my taxes at the end of the year, by the way, as a marketing expense. So, for a minimal advertising expense my little pension goes from having a 25-30 % occupancy to a 60-75 % occupancy. Anyone not doing this either doesn't want to have that much business in the first place, or they just don't know very much about marketing. Some of these folks have houses that have been in the family for several generations, they are paid off and having 1 or 2 occupied rooms a night is plenty for them. Having any more is just more work for them, with the laundry and cleaning. Thus, they don't want to market their property. It certainly isn't because it is too expensive or a bad deal.

"Anyone not doing this either doesn't want to have that much business in the first place, or they just don't know very much about marketing." Or maybe most Europeans just don't depend on these high price booking website, so they do just fine without them. I quote from my acquaintance, "To be a member of the booking circle in our case, we have to pay about € 54 each month for the website and additional a booking fee of 15%, So we are not a member." I've looked at so many towns in Germany, and I almost always find the same thing. Half to two thirds of the properties in the town are only listed on the town website, not on one of the booking websites, and the ones that are on the booking websites are the more expensive ones. So if you don't go first to the town's website, you are limiting your options and probably paying more. I was very disappointed recently to find that Munich has gone over to the dark side, that HRS now handles their bookings, but fortunately, the small hotel where I like to stay is not on booking websites and has not raised their rates.

But paying a commission or paying for a listing has naught to do with yield management, the OP.

Spur of the moment, last-minute planning looks less and less attractive. As I said to a friend who likes to find lodging after arriving in a town, "You will probably find a place to stay, but you will most likely pay more than you want to." The only times I've found last-minute lodgings in the past few years, they were places that didn't have much advance-purchase business. If you go to a TI, they will probably have the more expensive lodgings available. As the internet is used more by the smaller places, that last-minute deal may not be so available. When I have no definite plan for part of my trip, I will call ahead a day or two to find a hotel. At least I will have a place to stay. I'm too old for the excitement of finding "something" after I arrive in town.

Part of the OP was the statement, "The general implication is that the budget impact of planning vs. not planning will only be greater as hoteliers need to rack up prices on-spot", to which I replied that I wasn't sure if booking websites practice yield management, i.e., jack up prices, but the places I book on town websites don't. In resorts, accommodations will often have high and low season prices but that is fixed for every year. As for Swan's comments on last minute accommodations, in 2001 I had a trip that included several potential genealogy contact that didn't pan out. As a result, I arrived at a town in the Black Forest a day earlier than planned. I had reservations for the next night, and I could have just checked in there, but I wanted to see how last minute accommodations worked out, so I went to the Tourist Information Office. They directed me to a nearby hotel, which was perfectly OK. No worse than where I stayed the next night, but no better, either. However it did cost somewhat more, not a lot, and it was farther from the station then the next night's accommodation. My next night's pension had available rooms for less, but the TI Office put me where they wanted me to go. This was in March, not a busy season. That's when it occurred to me, in higher demand times, there are a lot of Germans and other Europeans out there that understand the system and are finding the best places. If they find a really desirable one, they don't say "This is too good, I'll save it for a last minute bookers", they take it. What you get are what others, for some reason, didn't want.

I said earlier that I didn't know if the booking websites were practicing "yield management" or not. I keep a rather extensive spreadsheet on the prices of accommodations. I have listed places where I have stayed, what I paid at the time, what they now charge, and whether or not they are listed on booking websites, if yes what they charge, and if not what I would have paid on a booking website using the same criteria that I used on the town website. About a month ago, I reviewed the information, including a small town where I stayed in Bavaria. At that time, the booking website had about the same price as shown on the town website for the property. I just looked at the same booking website and, although the price on the property's own website has not changed, the booking website now charges about €10 more. So, I think the booking websites are practicing "yield management"

Dear Dad; Do we have to wait 'til you're old?