Dear hoteliers,
As you already know, providing targeted and personalized offers to your guests (before and during their stay) improves the guest experience and increases TRevPAR.
In addition, it generates additional revenue, allowing the hotel to capture a larger portion of the guest’s travel spend.
OTAs are an excellent example of this phenomenon, and have mastered the art of selling more to travelers.
How do they do it? Here are 5 keys to increase your upsells and TRevPAR in just a few minutes a day.
1. Automation
The first step to increasing your TRevPAR is to automate the sending of additional offers to your customers.
The goal?
⇒ Save time on repetitive tasks and automate additional revenue generation.
How?
⇒ By connecting your PMS and CRM to set up targeted mailings.
And in practical terms, what does that look like?
⇒ When a customer books a room, the room is registered in the PMS, and the information is transmitted to the CRM (or Customer Relationship Management tool).
The CRM then sends customers an e-mail with special offers (breakfast, upgrade, lovebox, parking space, shuttle, adapter…) adapted to their segmentation. For example, a “Lovebox” will not be sent to a corporate client who travels alone, and an adapter will only be offered to foreigners with different plugs than yours.
Personalized messages promoting your additional services are therefore automatically sent, taking into account your customer target, throughout their journey.
This automation gives your staff more time to focus on your customers at the moment.
2. Segmentation
If spamming your customers risks annoying them, and reduces your chances to increase your sales volume, there is however a way to communicate without “harassing” your customers. Humanize and personalize your communication by using your segmentation to send relevant offers, which will answer what we call, for lack of a better term, a “real potential need”.
According to a Google Traveler survey, 36% (more than 1 in 3!) of travelers “would pay more for more personalized information and experiences.” When you start creating your segments, you should target both behaviors and events. This allows you to use booking details as well as past customer experience to accurately personalize your upsells.
Some examples:
- Nationality ;
- Number of people in the room (single, couple, family);
- Interaction during previous stays;
- Weekday or weekend stay (leisure or corporate).
Keep the location of your facility in mind during the upselling process, as this also affects the types of offers guests prefer.
3. Personalization
Offering products based on your target customer is also a way to improve the customer experience. Think of it more as surgical precision rather than scattered randomness.
In short: relevance is the goal here!
The first step is to find the distinguishing points to set up the different customer lists.
For example, two fairly obvious and easy to determine segments: corporate travelers vs. leisure travelers.
Distinguish also between customers traveling alone, as a couple, with family, with friends, their nationality and their age.
As for the regulars, note their consumption preferences.
The objective is to meet their needs before they even state them!
The second step will be to promote your products in an efficient way, it is not enough to simply place props on a screen and cross your fingers. You need to write an enticing offer, choose a dynamic image, price the product well, and send it at the right time. Show the customer that you understand their needs, humanize the offer, and write it in such a way that the person receiving it believes they are the only one receiving it.
If an additional product or service is promoted effectively, many customers will not hesitate to spend a little more.
Sell the benefits of each product and show them what/how it will enhance their stay.
Then, through automation, the product will sell itself, consistently and automatically, and your TRevPAR will feel it!
4. Loyalty
Most brands offer a loyalty program: points, vouchers, discounts, 10 bought one free, etc.
However, a hotelier sells a service that most customers do not use ultra regularly.
The benefits offered must therefore have an immediate effect so that the customer’s feeling is positive.
A 10% coupon on a trip that may never happen does not ensure loyalty.
However, coupled with customer recognition, it’s a different story.
Knowing the history of a customer, his preferences and consumption habits, and acting accordingly, proposing offers adapted to his needs, will ensure customer recognition and will have a wow effect that will invite him much more to come back (even more if he receives a price offer 🙂 )
It’s almost a superpower: a way to guess and answer a customer’s needs without him expressing them, it’s a soft way to build loyalty by rewarding customers with ever more personalized offers.
5. Data collection and exploitation
What services do you offer to your customers?
The question should be asked in reverse:
Which customer segments are buying which services?
Collecting and analyzing additional sales is necessary to improve TRevPAR.
You need to imagine that the whole process is a perpetual test and thus you can improve segmentation, offer personalization and improve your upsell conversion rate (additional sales) continuously.
5. In conclusion: how to increase your TRevPAR?
Let’s sum it up :
- Automate your mailings,
- Segment your customer base,
- Improve this segmentation by looking at your customers’ needs,
- Set up a loyalty program and keep track of your customers’ consumption habits
- Once all this is in place, analyze what works, what doesn’t work, for whom, modify the offers accordingly, and start again.
If you can understand what engages your guests, you’re bound to get better performance, and thus increase your revenue
