Hotel revenue is the income your business earns from selling rooms or other products and services to guests.
NB: This is an article from Little Hotelier, one of our Expert Partners
While revenue is mostly generated from selling your rooms, you can also collect revenue from your amenities such as a bar, restaurant, gym, or spa. You can also sell local products or run classes to give your revenue a boost.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and stay up to date
Strategies to increase hotel revenue
There are a lot of strategies that can be used to increase hotel revenue – but it’s important to be focused and committed to the plans you make.
Some strategies you could apply include:
- Optimising revenue management and price your rooms to your advantage
- Endeavouring to boost your occupancy rates
- Focusing on enticing guests to make additional purchases on their booking
- Creating a number of ancillary revenue streams
- Enhancing your reputation and recognition
- Cutting down on costs to save money
- Incentivising guests to lengthen their stay
And more! So let’s look at some of the best ways you can make the above strategies work…
15 best ways to increase hotel revenue
1. Drive direct bookings
Direct bookings mean you don’t have to pay commission fees to an online travel agent, saving you up to 20% on each booking. Of course, you must maintain rate parity (the same rate on your website as on the OTA) but try making booking direct a more attractive method by offering guests value-added services.
For example, they could get a free bottle of wine when they book directly via your website. You can use a tactic known as the Billboard Effect to link your website to your OTA profiles, convincing guests to check you out.
2. Connect additional channels
If you find on some days or weeks your occupancy is lower than you’d like, and not enough revenue is coming in as a result, you may not be reaching a big enough audience. If you connect to five or more OTAs, you dramatically increase your ability to sell all your rooms at all times.
Booking.com, Expedia, and Airbnb will cover most bases but there are others that cater to particular types of channels – such as luxury travel provider Mr and Mrs Smith.
The best part is that if you use a channel manager, connecting extra channels doesn’t take any extra time or effort.
