Originally Posted by ExtrAAordinaire
Usually, Revenue Management consists of two separate groups: Pricing and Yield Management. Pricing actually sets the fares, enumerates specific fare rules, etc. Yield Management is responsible for managing the seat inventory of each flight, e.g., determining how many seats to make available in each class, how many FF seats to allocate, etc.
Pricing is really the more complex of the two. It involves this complicated and very challenging set of steps.
1. Find out what price your competitors are charging.
2. Charge the same thing.
3. If you don't have any competitors on the route, charge 2x what your customers are willing to pay.
Seriously, rev mgmt does not have anything to do with upgrade policy or processing, but they absolutely have to do with determining availability for all fare buckets, including those for upgrades and awards. It is their job to estimate how many seats can be sold in each fare class and hold back from certain buckets in order to maximize revenue, or release some inventory over time if the flight is selling slowly.
Or in the case of BizFirst, just hold back until 72 hours passes to your ticked off paying customers can sit in the back while you fill BF with your buddies and other non-revs.