Analytics for hotels : demand prediction and decision optimization

Abstract

The thesis presents the work with a hotel company, as an example of how machine learning techniques can be applied to improve demand predictions and help a hotel property to make better decisions on its pricing and capacity allocation strategies. To solve the decision optimization problem, we first build a random forest model to predict demand under given prices, and then plug the predictions into a mixed integer program to optimize the prices and capacity allocation decisions. We present in the numerical results that our demand forecast model can provide accurate demand predictions, and with optimized decisions, the hotel is able to obtain a significant increase in revenue compared to its historical policies.