Average booking curves draw exponential functions

Abstract

The booking curve time series in perishable asset industries, including hotels, has been studied to manage a demand-supply condition or revenue management (RM). However, due to changing times, e.g., economy and technology, many RM practitioners have put their efforts into catching on to peoples’ booking pattern shifts, representing macroscopic changes in booking curves. We investigate macroscopic aspects of booking curves with actual sales data across six properties in the hotel and car-rental industries for two years, considering the difference in the economic environment characterized before and during the COVID-19 epidemic. We explain a new cross-industry and cross-economic-environment universal statistical law: average booking curves draw exponential functions (the ABCDEF law). We provide a basis for the ABCDEF law from three perspectives; data validation, modeling in the statistical physics framework, and empirical justification for the causality of the model. The ABCDEF law derives informative statistics to quantitatively measure peoples’ buying behavior even in time or society changes, which is expected to contribute to management in various industries.