Paying for the future? Cross-season pre-sale product launch strategy in hotels

Traditional hotels face persistent seasonal demand imbalance, with weak off-peak demand and constrained peak-season capacity. Drawing on Contingency Theory, this study examines cross-season pre-sale as a context-dependent hotel revenue management configuration and investigates how different configurations (i.e., no pre-sale, self-run pre-sale, and platform-based pre-sale) fit varying operating conditions. Results show that cross-season pre-sale does not universally outperform conventional practices; its value depends on the balance among incremental demand, impacts on existing demand, and implementation costs. Moreover, neither self-run nor platform-based pre-sale always dominates, as their relative effectiveness depends on the trade-off between platform-enabled market reach and channel costs. The study identifies boundary conditions for effective cross-season demand coordination and offers practical guidance for configuration choice.