Revenue management: What lies ahead?

Revenue management is well-positioned to expand and make innovative contributions in several areas. Expanding educational efforts to include those who are not knowledgeable about revenue management, or who have limited understanding of the discipline will be critical to making this a reality. This will be particularly important in three areas that hold strong promise: (1) Broadening the base of revenue management applications through the use of relatively simple decision support tools or other low-technology methods. (2) Using performance measures to increase the accountability of those responsible for pricing and inventory control decisions and also to provide credible estimates of the returns firms receive from their investments in revenue management. (3) Expanding revenue management into areas that are traditionally considered marketing responsibilities. In particular, greater integration of revenue management with personalised marketing techniques could revolutionise how a variety of goods are sold through electronic distribution channels.