Automated Upselling vs. Traditional Upselling

Upselling types and how technology innovation is painting a new way in the hospitality industry.

The classic picture: Guest is checking in and the receptionist promotes breakfast or room upgrade at a reduced or special rate. Guest finds this a brilliant idea or suggestion and happily agrees to have the charge added to the guest account. Sounds familiar? This is essentially front desk upselling example: To encourage guests to buy more expensive services, upgrades, or other add-ons to generate more revenue. We’ve all have experienced it as guests and many of us have applied different sales techniques in order to convince the guest to accept the Upselling Offer.

What is upselling?

“Persuading a customer to buy something additional or more expensive”

Traditional Upselling

If a staff member encourages a customer who just bought a new phone to get a protective case at the same time, that's a cross-selling. Upselling occurs when you increase a customer's value by encouraging them to add on services or purchase a more expensive model.

Traditional Upselling is a common practice in the hospitality industry.

Why is it the least efficient way of Upselling?

1. It is very challenging to get your team to upsell in the first place, if they are not in on the business deal. If you want them to be motivated and successful in Upselling, they need to get a fair share of the additional revenue. Without an incentive your Upselling strategies fail right at the start.

2. Furthermore, no everyone is a natural “Upseller” as it does not come easy to every character to push for further sales. Considering guests satisfaction in being overly faced with “sales talk” is another hurdle to consider.

3. From the revenue perspective, our room product that is sold in advance as the room reservation is made and a certain time period passes before the guest arrives. Using this time frame wisely might lead to increases revenue by selling additional services such as transport, activities or F&B offers. Here the key is to understand each guest profile and what would drive them to book other services in advance, there is no point in offering a vast range of services of which none fit the guests need and interest.

4. Once the guest is with us it becomes an operational obstacle to upsell in advance, as the notice period shortens and in the past communication with guests reached it limits in order to expand that opportunity window.

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Automated Upselling is creating a way to resolve these issues for our industry, so we are able to increase the profit chances through Upselling.

Automated Upselling

Helping us to optimizing Upselling, new automations that use algorithms to analyze data from multiple sources in order to execute processes previously dependent on hoteliers to do manually.

Automated Upselling tools determine e.g., upselling availability (room categories, etc.), dynamically set pricing then present the offer, and concludes the transaction of the upsell. Here is an example on how it works: Guests can purchase an upgrade in advance with a guarantee it will be available. Even more important the automated tool sends the right offer to the right person at the right price.

The automation has three key features:

1) Inventory Usage Forecasting

2) Yielded Pricing

3) PMS Integration

This will support hoteliers to drive forward a more reliable revenue month after month and leading into a fixed revenue increment facilitating higher profits.

You would like to read more, visit: https://www.hospitalitynet.org/explainer/4107855.html