How can historical pricing yield substantial growth in revenue per available room?
History teachers, as a rule, have a penchant for relating current events to incidences or situations in the distant past that share similar characteristics. This is their way of illustrating that history is the best teacher, the best guide for observing and interpreting the world as it is today. This is a sound principle, for the most part. But with all due respect to history teachers everywhere, this principle does not hold up in terms of hotel room pricing. In this case, history is not necessarily the best guide. Historical pricing, in terms of hotel room pricing strategy, is a process by which the asking rate of a room is set for a particular period of time. The historical aspect is revealed by the determining factors used to set the rates; when engaging in historical pricing, hotels will look at occupancy and rate from an analogous period- whether last year, last month, or last season- and set a rate for the concurrent period accordingly. Because many hotels operate in cyclical or
