The Spread of Yield Management Practices : The Need for Systematic Approaches

Yield management has always been considered a teclinique for large companies, whether these be airlines, railroad, car rental or hotel companies. Its application to the small and medium sized businesses that characterise the tourism industry in many countries, Italy in the first place, has never been totally excluded, but its implementation and subsequent actuation has always been considered too expensive for this type of business. In recent years all this has been changing. Technology and research have opened up new possibilities for its application at costs, and following methods, that are acceptable even to those who cannot access sophisticated statistics or mathematics instruments. The evolution and the rapid changes in the reference scenarios both of the demand and the offer, have done the rest. It has become clear that to compete in a market as vast as the tourism one, one must apply the principles and techniques of marketing to produce and deliver a service that can satisfy the needs of the client better than the competition. In the same way, however, a deeper knowledge of the processes of the clienteles choice, acquisition and consumption permits the formulation of increasingly accurate forecasts of their behaviour and an understanding of the significance and importance that each client segment attaches to the purchase and consumption of a particular service. In this way the application of the yield management technique has assumed a new and more important position as well as a greater and constant spread.