Hotel Inventory Control under Customer Choice Behavior

摘要

It is important to study customer choice behavior in Revenue Management. Some researches concentrated on classical models to discuss “buy-up” and “buy-down” effects, some studied the passengers’ origin and destination simulator to understand customer choice behavior, and some used discrete choice model to describe customer purchasing behavior. In this paper, we analyze a hotel inventory control at each time based on customer choice behavior. That’s to say the control problem becomes to decide which subset of fare class to offer at each point of time, in which the buyers’ choice behavior is considered. In order to forecast customer purchasing behavior, we utilize consumer preferences to classify customers based on real hotel data about their paid room prices and other expenses, and get the probabilities of different segments’ willing to pay for their room and other consumption such as food, entertainment. And then we integrate the purchasing probability into Bellman’s equation to solve a discrete dynamic programming problem.