3 Ways to Streamline Upselling Across Your Entire Hotel Chain

Once it’s in place, an automated upselling system brings countless advantages, like a more personalised guest experience, increased revenue and a more efficient workflow. Achieving these results at a single property may feel relatively straightforward. But how can you replicate them at all hotels across your chain or brand?

1. Facilitate System Adoption

The easier you make it for teams at your brand’s hotels to begin using your new system, the more likely they are to do so. Your upselling platform’s support is crucial in this early phase, so be sure they can provide the help you require. Ask them for guidance on how to best go about your chain-wide roll-out since they’ve probably done the same for other clients in the past. Listening to their advice and benefitting from their experience will get you through this process swiftly and with the least number of hiccups.

Once you’ve set up your new upselling solution at all your properties, it’s time to support your teams with the implementation. Create standard operating procedures (SOPs) for upselling, which they can follow in day-to-day operations. Introduce these guidelines during live training sessions where staff can ask their questions, make suggestions and get feedback. Your regional team needs to be especially supportive and available during this time to ensure everyone gets started on the right foot. Once you’ve laid this foundation for your on-site teams, it’ll be easy for them to make upselling part of their everyday operations.

Creating a fundamental set of offers for all hotels to start with, is the last step to helping your properties hit the ground running with upselling. This saves them time on coming up with deals and shortens their time to revenue. Of course, you can still give them the option to add hotel-specific deals as appropriate. This could be a culturally relevant or a location-inspired offer.

2. Ensure Consistent Branding

Your branding must be consistent throughout the guest journey to create a smooth, memorable experience. This should begin with your online presence (e.g., your website and social media) and continue throughout your guest’s stay.
Upselling can play a big role in creating the intended guest experience. It allows you to offer brand-specific deals that reflect your narrative and style at all hotels. This ensures that all properties have a similar offering, and your guests know what to expect, no matter which location they’re staying at.

For the best result, supply your hotels with images and copy to promote their deals according to brand standards. This has two advantages. First, you ensure style guidelines are respected. Second, you save your on-site teams time and resources with this ready-to-use promotional material.

Keep this consistency and efficiency going throughout the year by standardising even your seasonal offers. This saves your hotels time again because they can use the deals your head office suggests, instead of coming up with their own.

Naturally, if some properties have creative ideas that align with your brand, give them a shot. They could add a unique, locally inspired touch that guests may appreciate. And if these offers do well, they could even become part of your brand-wide seasonal deals the following year.

3. Test and Optimise

Being able to test your upsell offers on a large scale is a big benefit of using an upselling solution across your entire chain. It allows you to quickly assess the levels of interest in a specific offer across many hotels, providing valuable insight into the wants and needs of guests. You can also test several versions of the same deal (e.g., with a slightly different copy or images) to see which one performs best. The results will be in quickly if you run your A/B tests chain-wide. As a result, you’ll find and roll out the optimal version faster, thus increasing this deal’s conversion rate and revenue at all properties.

While this is demanding, developing, testing and optimising deals is essential to a successful upselling program. It also keeps things fresh for your regulars and allows you to discover new offers that enhance the guest experience and boost your ancillary revenue.

Take it a Step Further With Brand-wide Remote Upsell Management

Following the steps outlined above will make your group-wide upselling program more successful. However, implementing these points can be challenging if each property is responsible for its upselling program. In that case, you will always depend on busy operations teams taking time to implement the latest deal or test its newest version.

Remote upsell management is one way to address this. It allows you to access and manage every property’s upselling dashboard from your head office, giving you full control over offers at all properties. This is a step in the right direction, but depending on the number of hotels you’re overseeing, it can be too time-consuming to do all of this manually. Therefore, the best solution is to find an upselling platform that allows you to complete all the mentioned steps remotely and at scale. Capabilities should include bulk editing and add upsell deals as well as brand-wide and property-specific performance insights.

Having all this in one place drastically cuts down on manual work both during the initial roll-out of your upselling solution and down the road. It also ensures offers are up to date and perfectly branded at all hotels, and you quickly see where additional optimisation is needed.
That clears the path towards a streamlined upselling program that will reward you with raving reviews and boosted revenue. And isn’t that why you got started with upselling in the first place?

Now you know the most important things to consider when rolling out automated upselling at your brand. Tick all of them off, and you’re on the way to streamlined, on-brand upselling throughout your chain.