To say my career has been unconventional would be an understatement. I’ve held positions and performed work in operations, sales, marketing, HR, Lean Six Sigma, FP&A, and experience management. There was even a time when I was a regular keynote speaker on the customer experience (CX) conference circuit. Why am I mentioning all of this?
Not to pat myself on the back, but rather to set the stage for the premise I’m about to lay down. You see, across all business disciplines, effort matters. I’m not talking about leaders and the led putting in maximum effort to drive desired results. I’m talking about the importance of leaders deliberately, actively, and continuously doing the work of reducing the effort required for people to do what they want or need to do.
Which brings me to today’s blog article…
There’s a hidden tax in every pricing decision on the seller’s side and every search on the buyer’s side. This tax is effort. For revenue and yield leaders, it shows up in wasteful but “required” work while sitting at the desk (that ought to be designed out), approval bottlenecks, and manual overrides. For travelers, it’s all the endless browser tabs, opaque fees, and a website’s poorly designed user experience (UX) that makes booking feel like an obstacle course.
Strip out the friction and everyone wins. Faster, smarter pricing on the supply side. Simpler, more confident choices on the demand side. Same market, same rooms, but less waste all around.
Revenue Management Leaders, Cut Effort to Raise Yield
If you manage revenue, know that you’re managing time-to-price. The longer it takes you to lock onto demand signals, publish prices, and validate results, the more yield you’ll leave on the table. If you think back to your high school physics class and recall drag coefficient, that’s what effort is in the yield loop.
So, what can you do?
2. Design for low-effort autonomy.Give your engine guardrails (e.g., upper and lower bounds, comp set banding, elasticity limits) and let it operate in that railed lane. Calibrate your models, not in the back end. Integrate micro-experiments into your workflow so that each price-publish event teaches your system something useful; experiments like step-change tests, variations of upgrade offers, and length-of-stay nudges. When your team can spend their time framing strategies instead of babysitting prices, your yield curve gets smoother, and you can manipulate its amplitude better.
3. Replace Meetings with Pre-CommitsIf weekly pricing meetings are a part of your management cadence, consider replacing them with monthly policy reviews. But decide thresholds and tactics in advance, then hold your team and your entire system accountable to the rules. You’ll cut hours of performative discussion while also removing the temptation for your team to “hand fly” during turbulence instead of maintaining course and letting the autopilot do its work.
4. Make effort visibleAdd “effort” as a metric in revenue management reviews. When I was a CX leader, I added an effort-focused quant question and a linked open-ended question to customer surveys. The responses were used to identify ways to reduce customer effort. And the results were powerful. Reducing effort for your team will drive better results. Focus on things like time-to-publish, touches per price change, overrides per day, and percent of prices set autonomously within your railed lanes.
And watch your attributions. Leaders tend to commit the fundamental attribution error by blaming their team for slow moves or missed opportunities that were actually caused by clunky tools or poorly conceived policies. Shift from “who slipped” to “what made this hard”, and your team’s performance will improve. So will your RevPAR.
Want a practical lens on simplifying revenue management through autonomy and Lean thinking?
Apply Lean Principles to Autonomous Pricing in Revenue Management by Ben Scholl is a good primer.
Effort Matters
The research about effort is pretty blunt. Reducing effort is more predictive of loyalty than adding delight. When your customers and employees don’t have to struggle to do what they want or need to do, repeat business and positive word-of-mouth will follow. Guaranteed. That’s the main finding behind the Customer Effort Score work popularized by the good folks at Harvard Business Review. It’s worth a read if you haven’t seen it.
For revenue management teams, the same logic applies. A team that can publish, learn, iterate, and integrate without friction will outperform teams that rely on “saving the day” with overrides. Timely and effective overrides might make people feel like heroes, but it’s the low-effort systems that will print money.
A Simple Playbook
1. Publish once, learn always with micro-experiments, and automate so your team doesn’t chase.
2. Collapse your stack by having fewer systems, fewer approvals, and fewer spreadsheets. Integrate what matters (inventory, demand signals, comp set data) and replace spreadsheets with clear SOX-compatible processes.
3. Guardrail instead of a green light. Replace ad-hoc approvals with codified ranges.
4. Make effort a KPI.
Luxe Pricing delivers low-effort ops with a solution that’s built to reduce team effort without sacrificing control.