Hotel sales is a vast subject with many challenges, but not every hotel sale strategy needs to be a struggle.
A hotel upselling strategy results in more revenue from each guest - especially existing guests.
Boutique hotels have a great rapport with their guests and generally know them well.
There are a broad range of options to keep them satisfied with upsells.
By leveraging this and a few key cross-selling & upselling strategies throughout your sales process, you can improve sales and your hotel service, better utilize your property’s amenities, build a deeper relationship with guests, enhance your brand reputation and boost hotel revenue.
What Is Boutique Hotel Upselling?
Hotel upselling is offering your guests the opportunity to move to a higher price point to make their stay, meeting, or event better.
This means motivating your guest to spend more on their current product consideration for instance, upgrading their choice of room.
Cross-selling offers add-on services complement the original purchase, such as a spa package or special dinner.
Although different, the two terms are often used interchangeably and for ease, we will use upsell to cover both techniques.
In this article you'll find out how to incorporate them into your hotel sales process.
1. Identify the right guests
First you should know that not every guest will be a good fit for upselling.
If you want to identify the right guests, you need to answer this question:
What are the benefits of the additional product or service to a guest’s overall goals?
Take a look at your property management system to target your most likely upselling guests. The first step would be to look for:
- Guests who have spent money on upgrades in the past.
- Guests who have his specific type of behavior.
Identifying previous transactions will give you a great idea of which products or services to suggest to which guests.
Once you offer something which is tailored to a customer’s needs and wants, they see the value in the enhancement and are more likely to purchase.
For example, you could upsell a honeymoon couple the penthouse suite and also cross-sell them a limousine ride with champagne.
2. Cover targeted upsells on your hotel website
Feature your upselling offers throughout your website so that guests who are browsing your site are more likely to find something which resonates.
Please these offers near other services which are related.
Some examples of popular services which can use for upselling include:
- Room upgrades: Pick specific options which convert best
- Packages: create Diverse packages of amenities based on different types of guest segmentation.
- Food and beverage: Think about breakfast, awesome cocktail offers or a dinner for two.
- In room catering: It should include what your typical guest enjoys - a bottle of wine, desserts or a premium minibar offering.
- Activities: In-house such as in-room spa or pampering day or in partnership with local local third parties.
3. Enhance the purchase process at the final step
Offering relevant products and services at the final booking stage on your website is a great upselling technique.
Your guest has already decided to book your hotel. They may be willing to spend a bit more for an experience in correlation with their personalization and demographic.
Your offers should correlate with the type of guests who use your property. For instance, if your hotel is located in a city look at:
- business travelers who rent a car - the best option for enhancement could be parking.
- F&B - offering a tasting menu tour of local restaurants or gourmet afternoon tea with a theatre ticket. Or in a country house hotel:
- Clay pigeon shooting
- Fishing
4. Check-in is a great upsell opportunity
The best times to upsell are pre-stay or at check-in. Your sales and reception staff should be proactive and knowledgeable about offering the guests upgrade options.
Pre-stay emails are particularly effective for this.
These offers may consist of:
- rooms with special features – e.g. better views, a kitchenette, lounge area or a king size bath.
- exclusive dining
- exclusive spa packages
- property services which resonate with that particular guest
5. Identify trends and keep testing to upsell
Take advantage of your CRM to integrate upselling into different parts of your sales circle.
It will help you to find valuable guest data and a history off their interaction with your property.
When you successfully upsell to a few customers, you will begin to develop a better understanding of what customers benefit most from your different offerings
Use A/B testing to offer two different extras to alternate guests and see which converts best.
Consider different upselling offers for different guest segments.
In time you will find the offers which provide the best guest experience and most revenue for your property.