7.6.2025
When Dax Cross co-founded Revenue Analytics in 2005 alongside his father and brother, he was building on a deep legacy of innovation in the field of revenue management. Two decades later, his company is not only a recognized leader in AI-powered pricing optimization but is now expanding its global footprint with last month’s acquisition of Climber, a fast-growing RMS provider with a stronghold in Europe and Latin America. Climber brings to the table a self-learning pricing engine, seamless PMS integrations, and a track record of helping boutique and regional hotel brands automate pricing decisions and unlock incremental revenue. With this acquisition, Revenue Analytics broadens its portfolio, while reinforcing its commitment to intelligent, scalable solutions that drive measurable business impact.
In this Spotlight Interview, Dax reflects on the company’s evolution, from its early days building custom systems for hospitality giants like Marriott and IHG, to the launch of its new platform N2Pricing Commercial Suite, a powerful expansion of its industry-leading Revenue Management System (RMS), and now its emergence as a global force in hotel revenue optimization. He also shares insights into the changing landscape of hotel pricing, the future of AI-powered analytics, and why storytelling, transparency, and strategic empowerment are becoming the new cornerstones of effective revenue leadership.
What inspired you to co-found Revenue Analytics back in 2005, and how has your vision for the company evolved over the past two decades?
My father was an early pioneer of the Revenue Management (RM) space. He started the RM function at Delta and later founded a company that built the first RM systems in hospitality for companies like Hilton and Marriott. He literally wrote the book on the discipline.
My brother, Zach, and I grew up with his former company, which he sold in 2000. We developed a passion for RM and caught the entrepreneurship bug. In 2005, we thought there was a lot more opportunity for RM to have an impact, so we convinced our father to come out of retirement and co-found Revenue Analytics with us.
Our vision for the company has indeed evolved over the years. For our first 10-12 years, we built custom Pricing & RM systems for clients like IHG, Marriott, Maersk, Toyota, and NBC Universal. Then we saw the opportunity to package our experience and expertise into Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings that would be more broadly available in the industries where we had the most experience, like hospitality.
We launched our N2Pricing Revenue Management System for hotels in 2020. The pandemic was tough timing for launching an RMS, but it gave us the opportunity to package our proven RM analytics behind a modern, intuitive user interface with an above-property workflow.
What do you see as the single biggest shift in hotel revenue management since you first entered the field?
The biggest shift is the shift in focus from setting Length-of-Stay (LOS) restrictions and controls to optimizing pricing. This started about 15 years ago, and we were at the forefront. We partnered with IHG to deliver the first ever price optimization capability for an RMS. Since that time, price optimization has become a key feature of any RMS, and many RMSs today do not even optimize LOS restrictions.
I recently wrote a whitepaper about the opportunity that hoteliers have to drive RevPAR uplift and guest experience by re-focusing on optimizing LOS restrictions.
You’ve worked with giants like Marriott and IHG. What have these partnerships taught you about delivering measurable impact at scale?
Enterprise customers like those are keenly focused on the business case for investing in RM capabilities. So, we had to iterate and hone our analytics engines to ensure that they would have a measurable impact that would justify the investment. One reason our customers today trust our analytics is because they know that they have evolved over many years and been proven at scale with large brands with hotels of all types.
What do you consider to be the most common mistake hotels still make when it comes to pricing strategy?
The most common mistake is using an “open pricing” strategy that leaves all rates available regardless of demand conditions. This strategy misses out on the revenue opportunities available from optimizing LOS restrictions. Using restrictions to ensure that, for example, you sell the last available room to a guest staying for three nights rather than a 1-night guest, represents one of my father’s “Core Concepts of Revenue Management” from his book: Core Concept #4: “Save your products for your most valuable customers.” You can find much more details on this issue in the whitepaper I mentioned above.
How has Revenue Analytics been able to maintain its edge in a space that’s increasingly crowded with AI and data players?
Our philosophy is that AI must have the right data, and be guided by human experts. That’s the only way to create the transparency and trust required for true automation. At Revenue Analytics, we’re fortunate to have a team of RM subject matter experts who guide our analytics and software to ensure that our products like N2Pricing are trusted by users.
The new AI Report Generator within the N2Pricing Commercial Suite is already gaining attention. What specific challenges were you hoping to solve with this tool?
Revenue Managers are constantly bombarded with questions about past and future hotel performance from a variety of stakeholders. They need better tools to answer questions efficiently and to proactively share insights with those stakeholders. N2Pricing’s AI Report Generator seeks to serve that purpose.
How do you balance the speed and power of AI with the nuance and experience of human revenue managers?
N2Pricing’s AI Report Generator gives Revenue Managers a quick first draft of insights and allows the Revenue Manager to make changes and edits based on their experience. It is part of our broader philosophy of helping Revenue Managers automate repetitive, tactical work and free up time to think and communicate strategically.
What role do you think generative AI will play in revenue management over the next 3–5 years?
I think we will see generative AI converge with typical Business Intelligence and reporting in a way that facilitates Revenue Managers meeting the needs of all stakeholders who ask about hotel performance.
How do the new Health Scorecard and Extended Stay Rate Management features address long-standing industry gaps?
For years, one of the most persistent gaps in Revenue Management Systems has been the lack of visibility into how users interact with the system and how those interactions impact performance. Leaders have had limited insight into whether users are applying recommendations, updating demand forecasts when new events emerge, or managing rate plan and room type differentials strategically. The Health Scorecard closes that gap by bringing much-needed transparency and accountability. It allows organizations to assess usage, identify areas for coaching, and ultimately drive stronger RMS adoption and ROI.
Meanwhile, the Extended Stay Rate Management feature responds to a different, but equally urgent, need. As the extended stay segment continues to grow, hotels are increasingly recognizing that these weeks-long stays require a fundamentally different pricing approach. Traditional tools are often built for short-term, nightly rate decisions and don’t give Revenue Managers the flexibility or insights they need to set rates effectively for longer stays. This new capability allows them to approach extended stay pricing with the nuance and strategy it requires, helping them capture value in a segment that’s becoming a critical driver of revenue.
The Commercial Suite aims to elevate how teams communicate insights. Why is this “storytelling” aspect of data becoming so essential?
Storytelling is important because people tend to remember stories far better than facts and figures or a clever turn of phrase. So, storytelling is essential to aligning a team around insights and ensuring that appropriate action is taken.
In your experience, what distinguishes high-performing revenue teams from the rest — is it technology, training, culture, or something else?
Certainly, it starts with hiring the right talent. Then developing that talent through training and mentorship. But technology plays an important role as well, and can often be a change agent to increase a team’s overall performance. We have seen that a talented team can get frustrated by being mired in the weeds of repetitive, tactical work. That can lead to burnout and turnover. Giving your team the right technology to elevate their work to a more strategic level can drive stronger performance from the team.
How should hotel operators be thinking about ROI when evaluating modern revenue management platforms?
The ROI of investing in RM capabilities is well-established at this point. At Revenue Analytics, we have measured RevPAR uplift from new RM systems for multiple enterprise hospitality chains. We help our customers understand the business case for any investment in RM capabilities, generally targeting a 5-10x ROI in the first year. Few other investments a hotel can make could offer that strong of an ROI.
What industries outside of hospitality do you think are doing pricing exceptionally well, and what lessons can hospitality leaders learn from them?
When it comes to setting transient retail rates, few industries are as sophisticated and dynamic as hospitality. Cruise lines are similar, and they often take similar approaches to hotels. But on negotiated pricing like Group pricing decisions or setting corporate/negotiated rates, hotels can learn from industries that are more sophisticated in B2B pricing. For example, UPS has long been known to use sophisticated analytics in setting negotiated rates, measuring willingness to pay based on prior negotiations and/or similar customers, and influencing future price quotes based on that past data. We designed N2Pricing’s Group pricing module to take a similar approach to B2B pricing best practices from other industries with which we work.
Revenue Analytics recently acquired Climber, a Portugal-based RMS company. What does this acquisition mean for your company’s growth and global strategy?
Climber is a fast-growing RMS serving boutique, independent, and regional hotel chains across Europe, the Americas, and Brazil. By bringing Climber into the Revenue Analytics family, we’re expanding our product portfolio and accelerating our global reach in key international markets.
Their talented team brings deep local knowledge and innovative energy, and we’re excited to leverage our combined strengths to serve a broader range of hotel partners worldwide. Together, we will a serve a portfolio of over 10,000 hotels across the globe. It’s a big step toward realizing our vision of delivering impactful, data-driven solutions to hotel operators of all sizes, wherever they are.
Are there any specific capabilities or sectors you’re especially excited about expanding into next?
We’re particularly excited about providing a broader set of commercial capabilities to hotel revenue managers. N2Pricing, like most RMSs, is primarily focused on driving rooms revenue through better pricing and inventory decisions. There are opportunities to expand into other commercial decisions, like demand creation, optimizing the hotel’s mix of business, and the pricing of ancillary products and services. Ultimately, we can bring analytics and automation to total hotel Revenue Management.
What excites you most about the current moment in pricing science and revenue optimization, particularly in the context of the hospitality industry?
The universal focus on AI capabilities is helping people to look for more opportunities to automate decisions. In many industries, including hospitality, the pricing science behind dynamic, automated pricing is proven. The focus on AI can drive even greater adoption of RM technology.