How can hotels drive additional revenue through upsells?

What are upsells?

Upsells are, simply put, offering your guests additional benefits to enhance their stay or trip. It involves making the guest invest more time on their current offering, such as upgrading their choice of room & meal plan, including a pickup service from the airport, etc. Upsells have many benefits for hotels. It increases revenue & profit, improves customer satisfaction and allows for greater use of the hotel’s amenities.
 

How to leverage upsells?

Have you noticed that, while booking a flight on an airline, say Delta Airlines, passengers are always encouraged to book their meals, seat preference, check-in and, sometimes, even hotels?

The key phrase here is to know your target customers. Today, guests prefer eating at the same hotel they are staying at. The best way to leverage this is to create packages that provide room nights and meals included. Consequently, we advise you to change your menus.

If you run a hotel at a city-center business hotel and most of your guests are solo travelers then you could revamp your in-room dining menus. First, compile a list of the most popular dining dishes and then tailor the menu in such a way that it suits the single traveler. For instance, instead of a whole pizza, a single slice coupled with garlic bread sticks and a soft drink would do the trick.

Majority of guests today decide where they want to stay online and here we believe, the following strategies can help your hotel drive more upsells at various touchpoints of their booking journey:

• At the time of booking, it is a good idea to showcase add-ons such as dining, spa, a culinary class or any other amenity that your hotel provides.

• Send these add-ons in your booking confirmation vouchers to upsell via email.

• Even if your customers have booked through an online travel agent (OTA), mailers could be sent to enable them to make more purchases.

The Simplotel Advantage

Hotels need a booking engine that provides such add-ons, does re-marketing, can integrate with your property management system (PMS) & other software, and is seamless with the website. And this is what Simplotel’s Hotel Ecommerce (a high-conversion website & booking engine solution) provides.