Transient price setting in the era of automated systems – the ‘hands-on’ Hotel General Manager lives on!

Hotel pricing discussions seem to be increasingly dominated by automated revenue management and pricing systems without considering human interaction. Using grounded theory, this paper foregrounds the voice of 20 managers and exposes the complexities and realities of their involvement in price decision-making. A hybrid price decision-making process was discovered where the hotel general manager remains in control despite automation, due to their modus operandi to control the performance of their hotel by using their local market and customer knowledge in the pricing process. This indicates that for revenue management at hotel unit level, there is an often-unseen gap between theory and practice.