6 Best Cross-selling and Upselling Techniques for Hotels
Are you looking to boost average spend per guest in your hotel?
Does your property have difficulty selling additional services despite your proactive strategies?
Mastering upselling and cross-selling techniques in the hotel industry is an important element in optimising the use of on-property services and maximising your bottom line. Without a good upselling strategy, hotels can face underutilised services, low guest satisfaction and reduced revenue.
Difference Between Upselling and Cross-selling in Hotels
Upselling in hotels is selling the upgraded version of services your guests originally purchased, be it a better view, late check-out, breakfast offer or switching from a regular stay to premium packages while Cross-selling refers to selling an additional service or product, along with already purchased services on property. To put it simply, cross-selling enriches a purchase that the customer is already using with off-property services.
In addition to improving your hotel occupancy rate, both upselling and cross-selling activities can add a significant contribution to your revenue maximisation strategy. They help boost average spend per guest, and incremental revenue per room.
Examples of Upselling in Hotels
Room upgrades are the classic examples of upselling in the hotel industry. Upselling may include early check-in, late check-out, amenity and special packages, personalised concierge services (such as guided tours, etc.), add-on breakfast, dinner or premium dining experiences.
Example of Cross-selling in Hotels
Cross-selling in hotels is a diverse and effective strategy. It encompasses a wide range of activities, from connecting guests to taxi services, spa and wellness services, ticketing for local attractions, to restaurant and bar recommendations.
6 Best Cross-Selling and Upselling Techniques for Hotels
1. Use On-site Visuals to Captivate Your Audience
Some might say it’s a bit too out there, but we’re certain it’s also a timeless and foolproof tactic. Humans love nice visuals that excite their cerebral cortex. We know a nice picture of a breakfast set can make us drool, and a swimming pool makes us crave a dive. Let’s start there.
Use graphic posters in your hotel to advertise your breakfast deals, specialty cocktails, or amenity packages and captivate your audience.
Communication is the key to getting your message across. Find out how you can improve your hotel guest communications.
2. Partner Up with Local Services and Businesses
Partnering with local businesses and service providers can hugely benefit your business in the long run. It can work either by strengthening ties with neighbouring businesses and services or gaining commissions and incentives from them. By aligning with green and sustainable suppliers, not only does your business improve its standing within the community, but it also integrates cross-selling into its operations.
3. Design your communication touch points
Understanding the communication touchpoints throughout the guest journey is pivotal for delivering tailored services and maximizing opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. By mapping out various moments in the guest experience, hoteliers can strategically leverage these touchpoints to promote additional offerings. Not only does this enhance upselling strategies, but it also plays a crucial role in optimizing hotel guest communications and overall guest experience.
For example, pet-friendly rooms or family suites shall be suggested to the family travellers before the booking, list of spa treatments and activities during stay and late check-out a day before the checkout.
4. Monitor the Upsell strategy
Monitoring the strategy according to the seasonal needs and trends is a must for hoteliers. Upselling in hotels is a long term game of increasing average spend per guest. To play the long game, hotels need to identify guest’s needs and quickly adapt their tactics to the services they are selling to their customers without compromising the integrity of hotel guest communications.
Having a fulfilment dashboard where you can track purchases, and cross-sell and upsell orders to evaluate how well your sales tactics are performing is extremely important.
5. Anticipate your guest needs with AI
How to anticipate your guest’s needs in your hotel? Glad you asked.
Traditionally, upselling and cross-selling techniques in hotels were used by the front desk staff who know the general likes and dislikes of their incoming guests. All of their hotel upselling tactics have to get across in a short period of time when they come into contact with guests. Even with such sales tactics executed by professionals, the results can be a hit-or-miss depending on how guests are feeling at the moment.
It is now possible to anticipate your guests’ needs simply by using new AI technologies. The ability of AI to collect and analyse large amounts of CRM data is particularly useful here. Runnr.ai’s conversational AI can analyse guest preferences and sentiment to predict whether the customer is in the mood for an upgrade or an additional service. This intelligent approach to upselling is called Smart Upsells.
At various points in the customer journey, the AI chatbot asks if the guest would like to hear about additional offers and if ‘yes’, the chatbot carefully pushes upsells for breakfast, parking or dinner.
6. Bring the upgrade button to their fingertips
Pretty much what it says on the tin! Ensuring that your guests can reach the concierge quickly and easily is an important element to consider when developing a hotel upselling strategy. Think of all the potential revenue lost due to a poor interface or a lengthy call to the front desk. It all can be remedied if hoteliers can streamline a guest communication channel that is available at all times.
Runnr.ai offers a virtual concierge that integrates seamlessly with Whatsapp – eliminating the need to download an extra app or call the front office to place orders, requests, and upgrade to a premium stay. This provides tremendous value to the guests as they can easily reach services, and to hoteliers as they increase guest satisfaction and eliminate the workload at the front desk. In a way, it reduces the upselling workload for the front desk, but creates better relationships with the guests, and turns them into loyal customers.