I am glad to report that the remaining speakers at the recent Eye for Travel CRM conference in San Fransisco improved significantly from the first panel, (my prior blog entry). Eye for Travel still doesn’t get some of the basics of running a conference in 2007 (free WiFi, plugs for laptops, active blog), but despite these short comings, the Eye for Travel CRM conference was very valuable.

My biggest “aha” moment came at the end of day one with the session entitled “Discover how integrating CRM with Pricing and RM can maximize revenue” (Session Four on Day 1). My readers will recall my frequent theme concerning true dynamic packaging – hooking into existing revenue management systems (RM) on the back-end and CRM systems on the front end to deliver content that maximizes revenue for the supplier while targeting the company’s best customers. This theme was at the heart of this session. Here’s some highlights:

• Rom Hendler, VP of Strategic Marketing at The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino gave an excellent review of how difficult it is to identify who is the best customer. He showed various ways to measure the profitability of a given customer (frequency, amount of purchases, etc..) demonstrating that defining the best customer is not a simple measure of revenue generated by the guest
• Dave Pelter , VP of Supplier Development & Pricing at Farecast showed how their technology is the next evolution in meta-search. Farecast provides the consumer the ability to target low prices through their predictive fare logic challenging traditional RM systems
• Cameron Davies, Sr. Manager, Customer Centric Revenue Management, Walt Disney Hotels and Resorts showed how understanding consumer demand and requirements should be part of a comprehensive revenue management strategy

This and other sessions that featured airlines (Delta, British Airways, JetBlue, Southwest, Alaska & American), hoteliers (Best Western, Starwood, Fairmont) and OTAs (Travelocity, Expedia) provided a wealth of insight into various segment’s efforts to capture loyalty and provide a common personalized approach to the customer at every touch point.