Are Revenue Managers a kind of surfer?

I like metaphors and oxymorons, Touristologists! I can’t help it! They allow me to represent complex systems in an easier way and, as you know, I strongly believe that Tourism is a complex system.
So, I will try to go deeper into the day-to-day battlefield of a Revenue Manager with a metaphor. Are Revenue Managers a kind of surfer?
If you remember, in this post we saw this visual representation:

Here we see that we have to select the right customer based on the price that they are willing to pay, the ancillary services they might buy, the margin we get, the length of stay…. Also we have to look for new opportunities answering the following questions: To whom? With What? When? and Where?
Furthermore, The Revenue Manager has to be ready to detect the time when a specific customer, group or a segment is ready to book. This “time to book” moment is similar to the detection of the beginning of a good wave for a surfer. For customers related to a congress it can be three months in advance, for a couple looking for a romantic getaway it can be a fortnight. Of course, these data are only examples, nothing better than real data for the specific hotel that we are dealing with. Data from the Property Management System (PMS), the Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), Loyalty Program, Mobile application, WebSite, Others websites using webscraping, you-name-it!!! All these data and the tools to transform it into knowledge sometimes are called “Big Data”.
Then, we have to follow the wave and see the number of reservations that we are getting every day, every week….that is one of the definitions of “Pick-up”. We can see if the wave is growing or not. We can see if the wave of our competitors is growing or not, thanks to web-scraping techniques.
So, just like surfers, Revenue Managers study waves and decide which one to surf or not. I want to highlight a big difference. First Class Revenue Managers can try to control the movement of the waves and usually they are successful. Regular Revenue Managers are more like surfers, they just adapt to the waves. What kind of Revenue Manager do you want to be?
It is like Economists trying to control the movement of the GNP

If we move up too much we end up with inflation, if we move down too much we end up with high unemployment. Economists want to avoid that and for that reason we use monetary and fiscal policy. As Schumpeter said, it is impossible NOT to have waves (Communists with a planned economy tried it but, so far, without success). In the same way, Revenue Managers try to have a more stabilized wave. If the number of bookings is high you can have an opportunity cost problem (maybe you have to sell your services at lower prices). If the number of bookings is low you can end up NOT selling some of your services (and as you know, if it doesn’t sell today… it’s lost for ever!) So, you try to control the wavelength of each of your waves ( remember they represent a segment, a specific customer or a group). In Revenue Management literature this is usually called “the booking pace”
Let’s see the new visual representation, shall we? 

Another difference that I wish to highlight…Regular Revenue Managers are like surfers. No waves no movements, BUT first class Revenue Managers are able to create new waves! They have information about their customers and segments (the big data that we mentioned above) they have the knowledge, the attitude, the courage to try to seduce the customers. They are Touristologists with the Revenue manager’s hat on. For them, to create or customize an offer in order to seduce a specific segment using the right chain of value (Does 1,2,3 theory ring a bell for you?) is their thing! They are, definitely, the best minds working in the best sector ever!