Can revenue management be integrated with customer relationship management?

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to understand how and to what extent Hong Kong hotels have integrated customer relationship management (CRM) into their revenue management (RM) practices at individual customer level. Method: Semi-structured interviews were used to gather information from experienced interviewees holding hotel RM- and marketing-related executive positions. In total, 11 revenue and 9 marketing executives were interviewed in 2016-2017 over a period of 13 weeks. The data were transcribed and then Nvivo was used for data organization and analysis. Findings: The hotels do not systematically segment customers by value because of restraints on the RM systems’ capabilities and the industry’s conventional segmentations. The revenue and marketing executives’ attitudes toward integration, IT system infrastructure support to enable integration, loyalty and membership programs as a means for integration and executive management level support for integration influence the hotel’s potential for RM and CRM integration. Research Limitations/implications: Only the perspectives of revenue and marketing executives were considered. Incorporating the insights of different parties may achieve a more comprehensive result. In addition, because it seems that there is no systematic RM and CRM integration within the Hong Kong hotel industry, relevant decision-makers’ opinions toward the practice may change once they evaluate the performance of the pioneering practitioner. Originality: This study reveals what has been done in practice to integrate RM and CRM compared with the theoretical approach, proposes an integration framework and discusses the potential for further development together with the challenges to integration.