How do you think RM professionals have handled critical issues – customer rate resistance, contract renegotiations, competition or price wars – over the past year or so?
Nayan Peshkar: The field has been spread in terms of how RM professionals handled these issues. Different hotel companies took different approaches to the economic situations seen in the recent past. Rate resistance and contract re-negotiations were the unfortunate hallmarks of the corporate transient business segments in the previous year. Rate re-negotiations in key cities were rife in the airline crew market too. Generally, I believe that competitive benchmarking has finally gotten its fair share of focus from hoteliers – external pricing pressures were just as important as internal demand levels when it came to setting business strategy. Price wars were bound to occur, though here we can see a clear division in the approach RM professionals took – One line of thought was that rate stability provided a better opportunity for a healthy GOP and this relied on the premise that the downturn would be short lived. Another line of thought was simply that short term gains in terms of occupa
