GREGORY CROSS

Gregory Cross

Gregory Cross is the founder and creator of Hilton Hotels’ revenue management discipline.   Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin in 1955, Cross worked in the hospitality industry for thirty-eight years.  A graduate of St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, Cross studied literary arts and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree before moving to Los Angeles to try his hand at both novels and screenplays.  After submitting scripts to Ron Howard, Tony Bill and other producers he became acquainted with through personal contacts, Cross wrote a novel and tried to become published using a different format.  Commercially unsuccessful at both narrative fiction and dramatic playwriting, Cross drifted into the hotel business to earn a living.  He first worked as a desk clerk/switchboard operator at the Normandie-Wilshire hotel and the Gaylord Hotel, just west of downtown Los Angeles.  At the age of twenty-four he joined the Los Angeles Hilton as a mail clerk to make a dollar an hour more than he had previously earned at independent hotels.  Sensing he had found his calling, Cross stayed with Hilton for the next twenty-nine years.  He was steadily promoted through hotels in Pasadena and Irvine, California and finally to the Hilton Chicago, where he first became acquainted with the concepts of yield management.  Yield management was an airline industry term for a process of making pricing and inventory management decisions from data that had not been previously available until the personal computer was introduced to the work place.  The name of the process evolved from yield management to revenue management as the concepts crossed over into the hotel industry.  Cross became the first manager at Hilton to successfully harness the potential of predictive algorithms and data-drive decision-making.  Thereby contributing to major changes to the way hotels priced and sold their products to the public.  Rewarded for his achievements, Cross became the first senior vice president of revenue management for Hilton Hotels Corporation.  In that role, he oversaw the transition of hotel sales to digital distribution and what would become eCommerce.  After leaving Hilton in 2009, Cross worked briefly for Live Nation Entertainment where he attempted to bring dynamic pricing and revenue management to the concert industry.  But that short-lived assignment was interrupted by an offer from Hyatt Hotels Corporation to return to the hospitality industry one more time.  As Hyatt’s first senior vice president of revenue management, Cross again brought the benefits of improved data and market mix strategy to a new audience.  He retired in 2018 at the age of sixty-two, only to turn his attention back to his first love of writing.  Chasing Revenue – The Birth of Revenue Management, published by Archway Publishing in August of 2021 is Cross’ narrative memoir that recalls his rocky road to establish a new way of making business decisions inside an industry that didn’t really want to change.  The book is also a crash course on how to survive in the cut-throat world of large corporations.

Chasing Revenue is available for purchase online at  Archway, from Barnes & Noble and on Amazon.

Download PDF version of Gregory Cross’ Biography