Search results

To determine conditions under which a hotel in Barbados can benefit from the use of revenue management.

Monte Carlo simulation is used to compare a first‐come first‐served approach for accepting booking requests to a bid price approach. Comparisons are made using different assumptions about upgrading, downgrading and overbooking.

When demand intensity is high, the bid price method yields higher revenue than the first‐come first‐served method. If demand intensity is low, but some necessary resources are scarce and the hotel practises upgrading and downgrading, then the bid price approach can also lead to improved revenue. No evidence was found to suggest that overbooking or downgrading costs affect the relative performances of the two approaches if these costs are taken into consideration.

This research was conducted for one type of hotel using a particular sample period and the conclusions will not necessarily be true for other sample periods and other types of hotels.

The results show that hotels, which practise upgrading, downgrading and overbooking, should consider adopting a revenue management approach, when allocating their scarce resources among competing market segments.

Existing linear programming models of the revenue management problem are extended here to allow for upgrading and downgrading, when one resource is substituted for another in a package, and to allow for overbooking, when the hotel cannot honour a booking because of the unavailability of some resource. This formulation emphasizes the efficient allocation of all of the hotel's scarce resources.

Current issues of Publishers' Weekly are reporting serious shortages of paper, binders board, cloth, and other essential book manufacturing materials. Let us assure you these shortages are very real and quite severe.

THE Conservative Government elected on June 18th last has lost no time in putting into practice its avowed principle of reducing direct taxation. Late in July it flew a kite through an inspired leak showing that it intended to save millions on education, one small part of which would be £10 million, purporting to be “saved” by making readers pay for books borrowed through public libraries. First indications of this were in a story included in The Guardian, Daily Telegraph and other papers, and as this story was not denied by the Government, the Library Association thought it proper to issue a press statement immediately, with the message that the Association was totally opposed to the introduction of such charges.

SEPTEMBER finds the summer irrevocably over, although there will still be one or two very beautiful months in the English autumn remaining. It is usually the time when the older librarian thinks of conferences, and today he realizes regretfully that these have receded into what already seems a remote past. This month as we write we have to repeat the expectation we have expressed every month since May that before these words appear in print the threatened lightning attack on the life of England will have been made by the Nazis. It is becoming so customary, however, that one can only suggest that so far as circumstances allow we proceed with our normal work. The circumstances may make this difficult but they should be faced. One thing stands out: that in public libraries, at anyrate, the demands made by readers have gradually returned to their usual level and in some places have risen above it. This does not always mean that the figures are as high as they were, because in many of the great cities and towns a part of the population, including a very large number of the children, have been evacuated. In spite of the pressure on the population as a whole, it would seem that head for head more books are being read now than at any previous time.

At a recent inquest upon the body of a woman who was alleged to have died as the result of taking certain drugs for an improper purpose, one of the witnesses described himself as “an analyst and manufacturing chemist,” but when asked by the coroner what qualifications he had, he replied : “I have no qualifications whatever. What I know I learned from my father, who was a well‐known ‘F.C.S.’” Comment on the “F.C.S.” is needless.

MR. R. A. Butler's remark about doubling our living standards within the next twenty‐five years has a secure place in contemporary political obiter dicta. It suffers from being the kind of comment that is remembered long after any qualifying context has been forgotten.

OUR articles are a return to an old theme. That two such writers consider the old problem of the central cataloguing of books worthy of ventilation at this time seems at first a paradox. But one of them recalls to us that planning in war‐time, even if that war is in its early Stage, for the inevitable peace, is a legitimate employment. When the figures are Studied which are submitted as sufficient for running an office where every new book could be catalogued adequately, and cards of the entries issued, we are surprised that we have never been able to bring so obvious a reform about. It would be interesting, and it might be chastening, to discover how much the total library service spends on the cataloguing of new books. When the Library Association has completed its war‐plans it might be persuaded to set up an enquiry into the subject. Meanwhile we hope our readers will send us their impressions of these articles.