upselling
Digital Upselling: Go Where the Margins Are!
ROOMDEX | March 24, 2021
By Jos Schaap - ROOMDEX Due to the ongoing pandemic, hotels have lost several months’ worth of business. The reopening and rebound period are slower than initially expected and occupancy levels will take time to recover to pre-crisis levels. As a consequence, it’s critical to make the most of every booking to maximize average spend and revenue. Digital upselling can be a quick and easy way to both improve your guests’ experience while simultaneously giving your revenue that much needed boost. What to sell? This question may appear to be basic but not every upsell…sells. For many hoteliers, the reality is that typically upsel...
How to Upsell 101: Too Much Choice Can Lead to No Choice
ROOMDEX | February 23, 2021
By Jos Schaap Shouldn’t lots of choices be good for customers? If you ask most people whether they like having a choice, the answer will be yes. How can options possibly be a bad thing? Anyone who has worked in hotel marketing has, at one time or another, been asked to fit numerous offers into one email. Pre-arrival emails, in particular, are crammed to the hilt with hotel information and upsell choices. We call it the shotgun approach. Having a lot of choices is great — until it’s not. Many people argue that more choices equal more conversions. Rationally speaking, the more choices you offer your customers, the more sales you ...
The Hotelier’s Wishlist for Santa
Jos Schaap | December 22, 2020
By Jos Schaap – CEO & Co-Founder at ROOMDEX Another year is winding up and looking back, I can say with confidence that when we all returned from the holidays last January no one could have foretold the year we were about to face. As the year rolled on, we clung onto the idea that a return to some sort of normality was just around the corner. However, flight, occupancy and visitation numbers continue to be devastatingly below norms. But with a vaccine in its very early stages of a role out, there are many reasons to be cautiously optimistic as we look to 2021. It is expected that travel will begin on its path to normalcy in Q2 an...
Hotel Sales Habitudes for the Long Ride to a Slow Recovery
Doug Kennedy | October 15, 2020
By Doug Kennedy Now that we are beyond six months into this pandemic era, most hotel salespeople and their leaders have come to accept that it is going to be a long, slow ride to a full recovery. For those of us who have experienced loss, the emotions may have felt similar to moving through what grief counselors call the “Five Stages of Grief.” Although losing a loved one or going through a divorce is of course much worse than suffering a career disruption, the salespeople I speak with about this analogy seem to agree that their emotions have followed similar patterns. First, denial and waiting for something miraculous to happen to ...
Break the “Unwritten Rules of Upselling”
Jos Schaap | May 21, 2020
By Jos Schaap – CEO at ROOMDEX We are now in the midst of a pandemic, the likes of which few alive today have ever experienced. COVID-19 has spread to every corner of the globe, causing health care and economic devastation. The hospitality ecosystem has been particularly hobbled, with hotels being one of the hardest-hit sectors. Due to travel and social distancing restrictions, the movement of people has come to a standstill in much of the world as countries close their borders to visitors. A recent Pew study found that by April, over 90% of the world's population – a staggering 7.1 billion people - lived in countries with some meas...
To Outsource Your Call Center, Or Not – Part 1
Travel Outlook Hotel Reservations Call Center Services | March 17, 2020
Four Ways Hotels Lose Revenue by Handling Reservations Calls In-House Hotels are missing out on booking revenue by undervaluing their voice reservations channel. Hiring an outsourced call center is sometimes seen as a luxury compared with the cost of handling calls in-house. But this can prove a false economy; a professional voice team can significantly drive reservations and boost ADR (Average Daily Rate), more than compensating for the financial outlay. So how do hotels lose revenue when they handle their reservations calls in-house? 1. Calls are missed The most obvious way revenue is lost is that calls get missed. A busy front ...
Using Gamification to Sell Guestroom Upgrades
Larry Mogelonsky | December 6, 2017
By Larry Mogelonsky, MBA, P. Eng. (www.hotelmogel.com) Selling room upgrades is a vital tactic for generating incremental revenue and filling unused inventory. Most websites that I've visited attempt to outline the advantages of better rooms, be it through size, view, bed type, floor level, amenities or a combination of these elements. But once the consumer purchases a specific room type, how do you entice them to spend a little extra to get something even better than what they've already confirmed? While there's the age-old approach of prompting them either through a pre-arrival email or phone call, or once they are physically at the f...
Measuring and Incentivizing Front Desk and Reservations Upselling
Doug Kennedy | September 20, 2017
By Doug Kennedy Chances are that like most hoteliers this time of year you are busy formulating your financial game plan for 2018. If so, I'm pretty sure your owners or asset managers are looking for more revenue, as all owners seem to do every year. With occupancies performing well in most markets, unless you are planning to build more hotel rooms the only way to squeeze out more revenue is to increase ADR. Implementing a front desk and reservations upselling program, or improving the one already in place, can help your hotel achieve its revenue goals. Of course one component of a successful upselling program is training your frontline...
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