Demand & Forecasting
Pick-up Tracking: The Daily Discipline That Separates Good Revenue Managers from Great Ones
Pick-up is where revenue strategy meets reality. Every morning, the gap between where you are and where you should be at this point in the booking window tells you exactly what to do next.
4 min read
Pick-up tracking means measuring how many new reservations have landed for a future date since the last observation point — typically day-over-day or week-over-week. The real power comes from comparing current pick-up pace against the same period last year and against your forecast.
If you're running behind pace for a date you expected to sell well, you have a window to act — adjust rate, push a campaign, open a restricted channel. If you're running ahead, you have justification to yield up.
Most revenue managers track pick-up manually, pulling PMS data each morning and comparing it to a spreadsheet built on last year's actuals. It works until it doesn't — when the spreadsheet is wrong, the comparison is stale, or the date range you need isn't the one you built.