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Today, the global hospitality industry is facing (almost) unprecedented market dynamics, compounded by ongoing social, political, and economic instability. Around the world, hoteliers are wondering how to protect their properties’ bottom lines amid ongoing instability and softening travel demand.

It’s a good question, but remember this… as an industry, we have survived equally (or even more) challenging market dynamics than this, just in the last five years. COVID taught us many important lessons about how to survive (and even thrive) amid weakened market conditions, which can be applied today to ensure your property emerges on the other side of this challenge stronger and more profitable than ever.

Here are six tried-and-tested revenue management strategies that will protect your long-term profitability, no matter how the market changes over the coming months.

Shorten your forecasting horizon to optimise for more bookings

Obviously, it’s almost impossible to make accurate, long-term predictions when the market demand that shapes it is unstable; in volatile markets (like today’s), a better solution is to shorten your forecasting horizon and make pricing decisions based on real-time data rather than on longer-range projections that can’t be trusted. To enable more accurate predictions, hoteliers should evaluate the booking curve daily within a 14- to 30-day operational window and track the 60-to 90-day booking window weekly.

Daily, monitor your pickup, comparing how many rooms were booked yesterday vs. the same day of the week one week ago, two weeks ago, and four weeks ago; this is an early signal that demand is shifting. Alongside pickup, monitor your on-the-books occupancy and ADR for the next 14 days, channel mix (direct vs. OTA share), and watch for any unusual cancellation activity. A good revenue manager should spend about 15 minutes on these checks every morning to ensure that rooms are priced as strategically as possible.

In your weekly checks on the booking pace for the 30-to-90-day window, identify whether demand is pulling forward, pushing back, or staying flat compared to your same time last year position. On a weekly basis, you should also reassess your segment mix to identify the most profitable segments, review forward-looking STR or market data, and review whether your length-of-stay restrictions or non-refundable rate splits still make sense.

While these shifts will take a bit more time for your revenue management team to implement, a confident decision based on solid short-term data will yield a much stronger ROI than a proactive decision based on hopes and prayers.

BONUS TIP: When the booking window shortens, free up your most valuable inventory: the rooms that guests book most frequently. Offer guests already booked in these rooms an upgrade to the room types selling more slowly (often the more expensive rooms and suites), enabling your property to accept more last-minute bookings, maximising revenue opportunities and offering valuable incentives to reduce cancellation rates.

Use facts to guide your pricing decisions

Competitive rate monitoring can carry a hidden risk in volatile markets: when the properties you’re benchmarking against are discounting due to uncertainty or fear, they can trigger a cascade effect across the entire comp set, setting off a race to the bottom.

Rather than prioritising competitive analysis as the basis for a pricing decision in a volatile market, ground your rate decisions in your own live booking data, real-time demand signals by segment, and broader market indicators, such as total market data (not individual properties), airline route cancellations and capacity changes, travel advisories, and your own booking curve segmented by guest type. Monitoring your own segment demand is especially important because it allows you to prioritise the most profitable segments, as demand doesn’t always soften uniformly in a given period.

Here’s a real-life example: leading up to Eurovision 2025 in Basel, Switzerland, many hoteliers saw headlines predicting very high demand, assumed that their comp set’s high rates and five-night minimums were good strategic revenue management decisions, and followed suit. In reality, though, demand was lower than many hoteliers expected, especially early in the weeklong event.

Despite this, some properties made the decision to stick with high rates and five-night minimum stays, only to see bookings stall; others stayed flexible, adjusting availability based on the actual demand, shortening restrictions and letting the market lead the way – and it was these properties that truly profited from the event, earning 86.9% average occupancy and 94.2% Saturday peak with rates above CHF 300.

Be conservative with costs, not with your commercial strategy

When demand weakens, revenue managers should evaluate their commercial spend based on impact rather than cost to protect high-value commercial strategies and activities.

The first and most important commercial cost to protect is revenue management, as it offers the highest leverage per dollar spent. This means protecting both your revenue management team and your RMS, because together they form the foundation of every commercial decision your property makes.

Today, your RMS is key to your property’s ongoing success, as the cost of leaving revenue on the table compounds when demand is scarce. If you were to cut your RMS to decrease your operational spend, your revenue management team would be forced to handle all tasks manually, severely undermining your pricing accuracy and decreasing profit margins. More importantly, it would be impossible for your team to develop new, innovative ways to drive demand from the more profitable segments, further undermining your profitability in both the short and long term.

The second commercial cost to protect is your direct booking infrastructure (i.e., your website, booking engine, metasearch presence, etc.). In a soft market, every booking you can shift away from a 15-25% OTA commission is margin captured. Cutting costs on these items undercuts future margins, not eliminates present costs.

The third commercial cost to protect is your most efficient acquisition channels. If your branded paid search is generating direct bookings at a cost per booking below the blended OTA commission, that is revenue infrastructure, not marketing spend.

Beyond your commercial costs, the most important operational cost to protect is fixed labour capacity that supports the guest experience. Cutting front desk hours, F&B service quality, or housekeeping standards during a downturn will negatively impact your reviews, repeat bookings, and ancillary spend, which compound once the downturn ends. Instead of looking at your staff as costs, focus on driving ancillary revenue through them to maximise your ROI.

If you need to cut costs somewhere, start with the broad-reach top-of-funnel brand campaigns where attribution is weak, agency retainers without clear performance accountability, and trade-show or event spend that isn’t tied to specific group revenue. All three are the easiest to defer without immediate revenue impact.

Maximise profits in a soft market by sharpening your segmentation strategy

The hotels that emerge from downturns in the strongest position are those that took advantage of slower periods to build a more strategic, intentional demand-generation strategy. To accurately reassess your sales and marketing strategies for future success, ask yourself the following questions:

Which segments are most likely to drive profitable demand going forward?

Which channels carry costs that erode net revenue at scale?

Which guest types generate repeat visits and advocacy that compound over time?

Once you’ve answered these questions, update your revenue management segmentation strategy to target the most profitable segments – and continue to re-evaluate and update your strategy as segment demand and costs shift.

Let’s look at a real-life example of how this tip can help your property thrive despite a major shift in traditional demand patterns: in 2025, tariffs and political tensions between the US and Canada led many Canadians to boycott travel to the US. Canadian hoteliers who recognised this shift in the segment early and pivoted to prioritise domestic and regional demand saw RevPAR gains; in fact, Canadian RevPAR in 2025 was up 4.2% year-over-year, likely due to the pivot towards domestic demand, which offset international disruption.

Evaluate groups on total revenue contribution, not room rate

In a weakened group market, many hoteliers instinctively protect ADR to protect revenues; ironically, this decision can often negatively impact profitability because room rate is often the least complete measure of a group’s overall value. A group that books meeting space, commits to an F&B minimum, and fills shoulder nights can generate significantly more net revenue than a higher-rated group with no ancillary spend.

To protect your overall profitability (not just the room rate) in a weakened market, always evaluate each inquiry based on its total revenue contribution before making a rate decision. Group rates should always be priced dynamically based on real-time occupancy forecasts and booking pace. Finally, keep option windows short: holding inventory for tentative business that may never close is one of the quickest ways to lose transient revenue.

In a downturn, the properties that capture the recovery fastest are the ones that never stopped pricing accurately

Properties that have maintained pricing discipline throughout unstable periods are faster to identify the recovery inflection point, faster to increase rates, and better positioned to capture higher-value demand before the market fully reprices.

This isn’t just a theory: a 2023 study analysed 2,500 hotels throughout the COVID pandemic and found that the properties that raised rates during the downturn showed significantly greater RevPAR penetration than those that discounted.

As you can see, the hoteliers who come out of volatile markets strongest are the ones who prioritise strategy over action and have the clarity to make deliberate decisions only when they have accurate data signals to support them.

In moments of uncertainty, remind yourself that, like in the past, the market will recover. The most important question is whether your pricing strategy will be in good enough shape to capitalise on it when the time comes. The actions you take today will answer that question.