Selling beyond beds: How hoteliers can increase profitability through loyalty

Hotels and resorts have so much more to offer to their guests than just rooms with beds in them. Nowadays guests are looking for a truly unique and memorable experience. The common ground for these two assumptions is the total revenue per available room (REVPAR). This hotel revenue management performance metric looks at the total value of the booking, inclusive of any add-ons and cross-sells like dinner, in-room amenities, parking or SPA treatments for example. Cross-selling involves selling ancillary products or services, such as a spa treatment or a local tour, on top of their room and it all adds to the bottom line of a hotel's profit.

Allow your guests to easily build their truly bespoke stay themselves

The key advantage of hoteliers fueling their direct booking strategy against OTAs is the ability to offer ancillary revenue-generating components via the hotel’s website. Offering them a variety of customizable add-ons during the booking process presents a real value-add since they can individually tailor their stay to their unique wishes. 

Profitroom customers have seen a significant increase in revenue since they tied in ancillary services into their direct booking strategy.

‘After just four weeks we saw the highest ever sales of our packages/ experiences and drastically reduced our level of B&Bs at the same time. Despite the short timeframe, our direct business has already risen by over twenty percent to over 60 percent.’

Adam Reeves - Chief Executive Officer The Robert Parker Hotel Collection

Here are our top 5 tips on how you can incentivise your guests to book direct and increase ancillary revenue:

1. Make your offers visible to potential guests: first steps first - make sure that your packages can actually be found easily by your guests on both your website and via targeted online promotion. 
2. Tailored marketing: use the benefits of advanced guest segmentation in order to reach your guests with direct mailing campaigns including offers that are relevant to them.
3. Selling beyond beds: provide your guests with a unique experience by giving them a choice of what ancillary services they want to add to their stay. Monitor the performance of certain amenities per segment to optimise the marketing efforts for your different segments. 
4. Dynamic packaging: guests are willing to spend more when being presented with a variety of choices. Make sure to offer them the possibility to create their very own bespoke package, for example including additional add-ons (e.g. extra bed or bottle of champagne), shuttle transport, activities with local providers or pet fees.
5. Keep up the conversation with your customers: customer loyalty only happens over time. Make sure you engage them in a dialogue along their journey with you across all touchpoints. Suggest additional services/upsells before their stay, let your staff inform them about other in-house services that might be suitable during their check-in or while they are visiting your dining facility. Ask for their feedback post-stay and remind them to come back every once in a while with targeted mailing campaigns.

An advanced booking platform, such as our Profitroom Booking Engine 360, will enable hoteliers to achieve the greatest possible increase in sales per room. 

‘We receive a lot of generic enquiries for our website from people that are looking for something a bit more unique. Profitroom’s 'personalised offers' functionality allows us to tailor and personalise the stay proposals that we send while reducing the amount of calls and emails and making the team more efficient.’ 

Richard Amlot, Reservations Manager at Port Lympne

Simplify your hotel operations and supercharge your direct bookings now.