Vacancy rates in the travel and hospitality industry are filled with peaks and valleys. There are times of almost insatiable demand, and other times when you seemingly can’t give your product away. Hoteliers across the industry grapple with this, although depending on geography, time of year, or day of the week, the challenges can be as unique as the properties and locations themselves.

For instance, natural demand patterns for an urban hotel may be business-oriented, which means high occupancy from Monday through Friday, and low occupancy on weekends. For leisure destinations, it’s usually mid-week that poses the greatest challenge. Tropical beach destinations and mountain resorts both thrive in the winter, and tend to struggle in the summer. While autumn might be a peak-season money-maker in fall foliage locations, it is typically a “shoulder period” struggle for many – especially those affected by “Hurricane Season”. Destinations that rely on family travel ebb and flow with the school calendar. You get the idea.

This spikiness in demand patterns, together with fairly fixed capacity (and “perishable inventory”), has always been a challenge in the travel industry. It is no wonder that the science of revenue management was largely forged ...