Hoteliers love their room types and think that their guests do too. But the fact is that standard rooms are the most popular room type booked by guests. If people love premium room types so much, why are there so few of them and so few premium bookings? The fact is that most people don’t love interesting room types – they love the lowest cost room available.
For most consumers, finding a hotel comes down to searching a destination for the best priced room that passes the brand preference or loyalty filter. This activity is done via a search engine like Google, an OTA, or, if loyalty is involved, a brand site. Yes, there are many other sites and resources for consumers to choose from, but they all come down to the same experience: a list of room types ordered by price.
Over the last 12 months, many hotels have discovered the innovation of Automated Upselling. But, if we are honest, a lot of those same hotels were quite skeptical about any kind of upselling solution. So why is that? Historically upselling software solutions haven’t been great. Among a long list of issues, configuration was complex, pricing required daily manual updates, and upsells couldn’t be 100% guaranteed.
There may have been a time where revenue management was a sort of day-to-day, "let s just change rates and put minimum stay restrictions on" kind of activity. We are now operating in a new era. For competitive hotels, old school revenue management has given way to the stewardship of a holistic commercial strategy. In that light, we were interested in understanding the role of upselling in “new school” revenue management, so we reached out to some industry experts.
Customer satisfaction has always played an integral role in the success of any business, but none more than those within service-based industries. The success of any hotel hinges on its ability to curate memorable guest experiences and lasting customer satisfaction. Customer relationship management (CRM) software was designed specifically to help support and achieve such guest satisfaction goals.