For years, hotel Revenue Management has been based on a clear and seemingly solid principle: analysing what has already been booked to decide what to do next.
OTB, pickup, occupancy and ADR have become the industry’s standard KPIs — essential tools for reading performance and adjusting strategy.
Today, however, this approach is no longer sufficient.
The market has become more volatile, booking windows change rapidly, and traveller behaviour no longer follows linear patterns. In this context, the real competitive advantage is not reacting better to historical data, but anticipating future demand.
This is exactly where Future Demand comes into play: the new strategic KPI for Revenue Managers.
What Future Demand is (and why it differs from traditional KPIs)
Future Demand represents booking intent that has not yet converted into sales. It does not describe what has already happened; it captures what the market is about to do.
It is based on real, measurable signals that emerge before the booking takes place: searches performed on the hotel website, check-in dates being searched, desired length of stay, source markets, search lead time, and day-by-day variations in demand.
Unlike OTB and pickup — which by definition describe past events — Future Demand captures interest while there is still time to act.
In practical terms, if many users are searching today for August 15th, the market is clearly communicating something before bookings start to materialise.
Why OTB and pickup are no longer enough
OTB and pickup remain fundamental indicators, but they have a structural limitation: they only work after the guest has already booked. This means they capture demand too late and fail to show interest that has not yet converted into sales.
As a result, they do not explain why certain dates are underperforming, they do not help anticipate sudden changes, and they do not allow Revenue Managers to distinguish between a pricing issue and a timing or availability problem.
A concrete example makes this clear: a hotel may show low pickup on a specific date while, at the same time, website searches for that date are growing rapidly.
Without Future Demand, the Revenue Manager sees only the symptom — few bookings — but not the cause, which may be an out-of-market price or a restriction misaligned with user behaviour.
How Future Demand improves pricing decisions
Understanding future demand fundamentally changes how pricing decisions are made. It allows hotels to anticipate price increases before pickup makes them obvious, avoid unnecessary discounts on dates that are already heating up, and intervene early on periods with high demand but low conversion.
Future Demand also makes it possible to align pricing and restrictions — such as LOS, CTA and CTD — with real traveller behaviour, ensuring decisions are consistent with what the market is actually asking for.
In this sense, Future Demand becomes a true leading indicator for dynamic pricing, distribution strategies and inventory management.
The role of Optimand in reading Future Demand
Optimand is designed to measure and make Future Demand actionable by integrating data that traditionally lives in separate silos. The platform connects web analytics, booking engine behaviour, aggregated destination data, compset rates and PMS analytics into a single, coherent view.
Thanks to this integrated approach, Revenue Managers can understand which dates are most searched today, how demand is evolving compared to yesterday or the same period last year, which markets are driving growth, and whether the hotel is outperforming or underperforming the destination.
This kind of anticipatory insight is not available in traditional RMS solutions, which rely almost exclusively on already consolidated data.
Conclusion: Revenue Management is changing
The future of Revenue Management is not about analysing the past more accurately, but about interpreting the future before it shows up in sales figures.
Future Demand becomes the KPI that anticipates pickup, guides pricing, improves margins and reduces reactive decision-making.
Revenue Managers who adopt this approach do not chase the market.
