Correspondence: Laurie Garrow, Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 790 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, Georgia 30322-0355, USA

¹is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. Her research interests include travel behaviour modelling and development of advanced discrete choice models. She currently serves as Vice Chair of the Aviation Applications Group of INFORMS and Co-Chair of the AGIFORS Scheduling and Strategic Planning Group. Before joining the faculty, she worked for 5 years in the research and development revenue management group for United Airlines and for 1 year in customer science at Mercer Management Consulting.

²is the Steven A. Denning Professor of Technology and Management in the College of Management and is the coordinator for the Pricing and Revenue Management Initiative at Georgia Tech. He served as Co-Chair of the conference featured in this article. He serves as a board member for the Pricing and Revenue Management subdivision of INFORMS and has consulted with a number of companies on price optimization. Two of his papers have won best paper awards at the national Production and Operations Management conferences and his research has been supported by the National Science Foundation. Before joining the faculty, he worked for 5 years as an engineer and inventory manager at IBM.

Received 4 December 2008; Revised 4 December 2008; Published online 16 January 2009.

Abstract

On 11–12 November 2008, the Fourth Annual Revenue Management and Price Optimisation Conference was held at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The conference explored different business strategies that a wide cross-section of companies are using to manage the current economic downturn. Several common messages emerged from the discussions including: the increased importance of revenue management forecasts and monitoring activity; the increased need for open dialog among revenue managers with their sales and marketing colleagues and the critical role of targeted discounts to help avoid prices from spiralling downward. This paper summarises key discussions that emerged from the conference and highlights the experiences of three companies portrayed in keynote addresses given by Mark Shafer, Senior Vice President of Revenue and Profit Management at Disney; Dave Roberts, Senior Vice President of Global Revenue Management at Marriott and Brad Thompson, Chief Pricing Leader at GE Corporate.