Tarandeep Singh serves as the Senior Director of Revenue Management for the IHG Hotels and Resorts (IHG), where he oversees more than 200 properties across three regions: South West Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. His responsibilities encompass collaborating with diverse stakeholders and partners to fine-tune each property's operations for commercial success and to prepare these establishments to navigate the challenges facing the hospitality industry today.

With more than 25 years of experience in the hospitality business, Mr. Singh's passion for the business has never waned, and part of it comes from working in a company that "goes all out to deliver truly memorable guest experiences while striving to make a positive difference in the world around us," he says.

"At IHG we call it: True Hospitality for Good," he adds.

Mr. Singh says working in the hospitality industry is a constant source of inspiration for "continuous learning and growth." "No two days are the same," he says.

"Our ambition at IHG is to deliver industry-leading growth in our scale, enterprise platform, and performance, doing so sustainably for all stakeholders, including our hotel owners, guests, and society."

Read our exclusive interview with Mr. Singh and about the strategies he uses to deliver long-term success to IHG.

1. You’ve been in the hospitality business for more than 25 years, what keeps you motivated? What makes it an exciting career for you?

My passion for this field has been a driving force behind my motivation throughout the years. It stems from my passion for crafting extraordinary experiences, the dynamic nature of the field, and an opportunity to have an impact on the lives of others.

The foundation of my career is set in my commitment to creating exceptional experiences for our guests and at the same time ensuring that our hotels can optimize top and bottom-line performance by applying fundamentals of Commercial Strategy & Revenue Management. 

The one thing that keeps me going is the dynamic nature of the hospitality industry. No two days are the same, and each new day presents unique challenges and opportunities. From managing diverse teams to adapting to ever-evolving market trends, the fast-paced nature of this industry keeps me on my toes and fuels my passion for continuous learning and growth.

2. As the Senior Director of Revenue Management for one of the biggest hospitality companies in the world, could you talk about what your responsibilities are? What makes IHG the best in the world and what makes it unique in the hospitality industry?

As part of my role, I lead the Revenue Management strategy for the South West Asia, Middle East & Africa region that covers around 200 hotels across 8 brands. I am primarily responsible for planning and supporting the delivery of a profitable top-line commercial performance. The role involves partnerships with wider stakeholders to establish robust strategies with clear measures and action plans. As an RM leader, I have looked at developing key process changes, pivoting, and building a system-agnostic RM team to increase productivity, and efficiency and to support teams with revenue-generating and optimizing initiatives. My role requires me to actively engage with the franchisee and manage the hotel community throughout the region to enhance the overall performance of our hotels. 

IHG offers a welcoming culture of warmth, honesty, and a passion for providing True Hospitality. It prides itself on letting your personality and passions shine, recognizing the individual contribution you make, and supporting your ambition to learn and create your own career path. Being a very people-centric organization and one of the leading hotel companies in the world, it goes all out to deliver truly memorable guest experiences while striving to make a positive difference in the world around us. At IHG we call it: True Hospitality for Good.  Being at IHG enables, enriches, and empowers us to go further and that makes the company unique in the business. Our ambition at IHG is to deliver industry-leading growth in our scale, enterprise platform, and performance, doing so sustainably for all stakeholders, including our hotel owners, guests, and society.

3. In a post-pandemic world, what do you see are the major trends for hotel and restaurant operators to drive their business to success?

How do you stay updated on industry trends and best practices in revenue management, and how do you ensure that your team remains knowledgeable and up-to-date as well?

If one thing that the pandemic has taught us all is agility. Market trends remain very sensitive to various factors. While some key markets have seen a strong business rebound, others have taken time to go back to the pre-pandemic benchmark. With talks of recession for some of the key developed markets across the globe, hoteliers are still taking caution in the way they manage their daily operations. 

For hotels and restaurants to ensure that they are successful in their business, I believe they must ensure that they are ahead of the game, looking at key data trends, analyzing performance on a regular basis, taking steps to optimize their efficiencies but at the same time investing both in their product and people which are the key reasons for why the guest will choose our hotel or restaurant.

We rely heavily on various industry reports that give us insights on not only what has happened in the last month but also looking at a lot of forward-looking data points to understand how we can take the necessary strategic steps for commercial success. We also work very closely with various tourism bodies and airlines to understand how this can impact our business. For restaurants, we rely heavily on our current data trends that help us to understand our pockets of opportunities and at the same time what can be done to get more footfalls for our restaurants. 

4. How do you measure the performance of your revenue management team, and what key metrics do you use to evaluate their success?

Our revenue management team members have clearly defined KPIs that help them to define their success based on various factors. We analyze our performance based on how the hotels are delivering versus the defined budget which helps us to measure top-line performance efficiencies. We also measure our performance versus the comp set and the market in general which helps us understand if we are gaining the fair share or not. Our loyalty program and channels delivery play a critical role in the business success of our hotels, and we measure the same on a regular basis to understand how our hotels are delivering and what steps can be taken by our revenue management team to maximize loyalty and enterprise contribution for our hotels. 

On the food and beverage side, apart from looking at the total revenue deliverables for our restaurants, we also measure key drivers that have helped to achieve the final number. These include data points like average check performance, occupancy in our outlets, in-house capture ratio, and upsell overall profitability of the restaurants.

5. How has the TableCheck platform helped your restaurant operations, particularly TableCheck Insight?

TableCheck platform has helped us to bring in the right business insights for our business. The subscriber hotels today can access key data points of their food and beverage business with a very simple click on the BI platform. 

Hotels now continue to review their performance on a regular basis, analyzing the necessary data points and using them to build the right strategy to optimize their performance through efforts across pricing, revenue management, sales efforts, food and beverage marketing, optimizing operations and also looking at areas to optimize bottom line profitability.

RELATED: How to use restaurant data and analytics to power your business

6. What improvements would you like to see on the TableCheck platform? Could you identify potential collaborative initiatives that would enhance our partnership?

Collaboration with our hotels to understand their daily pain points, things that they would like to see in the business insights and how would you like to see them are some of the key questions that we look at answering together. We have been able to work on some of the key dashboards that we have evolved based on the insights and feedback from our hotels. 

Another area of collaboration will be a proactive approach to reaching out to our hotel teams to help them understand the key data points of the business and how they can use some of the key dashboards for making an informed decision.

7. For those who would like to follow in your footsteps, what advice will you give them?

My advice will be to first understand what is it that you want to achieve, what are the key outputs and how you want to define success. There are plenty of BI tools available in the industry, however, specifically for food and beverage you need a partner that understands this business, is open to collaboration, and has a strong team that helps to integrate with your hotels, onboard them, and continuously engage with them to ensure that they understand their product and are the “Superusers” of the platform. Most importantly please ensure that you have clean data to begin with.

8. In your own words, what’s the meaning of hospitality?

Hospitality is to warmly welcome all our guests to our hotels and provide them with excellent services, comfort, and a positive experience during their stay. It involves attentiveness, friendliness, and a genuine desire to make our guests feel valued, Respected, and appreciated throughout their booking journey and beyond. 

Based on the hat that I wear; commercial and revenue management has the fine job of balancing the financial aspects of the business with the commitment to provide exceptional guest services and that is what hospitality means for me.

TableCheck helps Hotel and Enterprise F&B clients like IHG to deliver world-class dining experiences to guests while powering their business with data analytics to optimize their F&B revenue.