The Ultimate Guide to Upselling in Hotels

Up-selling, as the name suggests, is a technique with which hotel chains aim to offer and convince their customers to opt for relevant enhanced services with higher pricing in order to up their profits. The phenomenon essentially involves influencing customers to advance on their current product considerations and upselling the hotel rooms  

A smaller, high-end, boutique property in the mid-Atlantic region, having less than 150 rooms implemented a new upselling program to their hotel. Within a year, they were able to raise their revenues from $20,000 to $120,000 just by selling upgraded rooms and services to their guests.

Knowing your customer and understanding their needs is crucial to begin upselling your property to them. Increased profits being one of the most significant and intended gains of upselling, there are a variety of other benefits that come along with it:

Your guests would happily spend more on improving their experience at your hotel, that's one sure shot upselling technique in a hotel. Experiences are what will make their stay with your hotel worthwhile so you should strategically plan the things that you want to upsell. Consider introducing package deals with multiple services or products bundled together, for instance, a room upgrade with food or drinks along with a late check out facility.

Some of the features that work well for upselling include:

Now that you know what features you want to enhance to convince your customers to buy your upsells, the next essential step is to devise an action plan for it.

While you are all set to explore the upselling techniques in a hotel, you must take into account the concept of cross-selling as well so as not to confuse the two. Both are often used interchangeably but serve different purposes.

While effective upselling encourages customers to purchase a comparably higher-end version of a product or service in question, cross-selling invites customers to buy the other related or complementary items that your hotel has to offer.

For example, a guest has agreed to upgrade their room to an enhanced one with an additional price. Now as a part of your hotel selling strategy and as a cross-sell, you can ask them if they'd like a box of assorted cookies and chocolates or a bottle of champagne to enjoy in their hot tub. They are most likely to spend more at the moment if you time the cross-sell correctly.

With all this information now at your disposal, it's time for you to level up your hotel room selling technique. Make way for better profits to flow in, while your guests enjoy a memorable stay at your property.