Before and after you automate upsell in your hotel
MyStay editorial staff
5 minute read
Changing traveler preferences
The current feedback from the hospitality industry is that the expectations of travelers have increased significantly post-pandemic.
The guests expect everything, that was available plus an increased level of value, safety, service and experience on top of that nowadays. There is a need for efficient solutions and elimination of friction in order to satisfy their needs.
There is also an increased need for hotels to operate as efficiently as possible while cutting all unnecessary costs and finding ways to make money, while offering an excellent service and experience for their guests.
When looking into options of making additional non-room revenue, the logical push will be towards hotel services, amenities, third party offers and upgrades.
The question is how thoughtfully are hotel managers optimizing what guests want to pay for and how they can turn that into incremental revenue.
According to the most recent Oracle and Skift study, 49.0 percent of executives “strongly agreed” that “special amenities and upgrades are critical to our revenue strategy.” By comparison, only about 23.2 percent of hoteliers in the 2021 survey shared such an enthusiastic response.
Most notably, about 18 percent of hoteliers believe that more than half of their revenue will come from ancillary sources other than the room rate, in comparison to just over 11 percent in the previous year.
What is the problem with old-school upsell?
Most of the hotels are currently not very active in their upsell since it requires extra time and extra effort. Proper upsell requires a certain level of skills and training of the staff, however a lot of the hotels have no budget and no space to do so. On top of that, many of the hotel managers feel like they have nothing additional to sell. For that we have actually prepared a separate guide – you can read it here.
This old type of upsell requires proactive approach mostly on the side of the guest and creates very limited space for the staff for upselling during the stay as they are limited by the in-person interactions. There is also a lack of statistics of guest behavior during the stay.
Guests can also get easily annoyed by the staff pushing offers and there are usually not enough interactions between them and the staff for a meaningful upsell to begin with.
Hotel managers have to manually prepare offers, makes sure they are up to date, prepare design, print and distribute them, make sure all rooms have up-to-date materials. If there are any changes necessary, the process has to be done again- meaning additional time and money spent.
If the guests are interested they have to call the reception, or go to the front desk, ask more questions, book the service. Therefore, many of them get put off by the inconvenient process and lack of information.
Additional questions can also stall the front desk if there are other guests waiting for a check-in or a check-out.
What does an all automated upsell solve for you?
The switch to an automated upsell provides a 24/7 access to all information and a smart catalogue with personalized offers. It allows for a non-intrusive way of selling additional services, and guests do actually highly appreciate the extra level of comfort and thoughtfulness on the side of the hotel.
This also means no more going around rooms and distributing materials, no more manual updating, no more useless printing and paper waste.
MyStay combines the power of Web App upsell with QR codes and In-room tablets.
It is up to the hotel manager can pick and choose whichever approach fits their hotel the best. All three features, the combination of two of them or just one.
The hotel prepares the basic content (special deals, offers, services) in 30 minutes. Pre-made MyStay templates are also available and they can help significantly – the hotel can either use only those, or edit them, or start completely anew. Custom branding is available, too.
The hotel staff can then distribute the QR codes and tablets wherever they like within their facilities. At the reception area, in the lobby, at the restaurant and/or in the rooms.
Once this is done, the guests can use the tablets or scan the QR code 24/7 during their stay. The guests can find all their information online, they can book any offer or service they like anytime, anywhere.
It is the perfect solution to stay in touch with guests 24/7 and reach them with upsell offers without staff involvement.
