A family booking a five-night summer stay will not evaluate offers the same way as a solo business traveller arriving late in the evening. A guest reserving a suite behaves differently from someone booking the entry-level room. A couple celebrating an occasion responds differently from a guest booking purely on convenience.
NB: This is an article from GuestCentric
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These distinctions seem obvious operationally. Hotels see them every day. Yet many online booking journeys still treat guest intent as largely interchangeable when presenting an over-sized menu of generic add-on products. Yet research from Oracle Hospitality and Skift found that 74% of travellers now expect hotels to deliver more relevant and tailored offers, rather than generic promotions shown to everyone.
A late checkout offer may feel highly relevant to one guest and completely unnecessary to another. An experience package may perform well during leisure-heavy demand periods but poorly during corporate travel windows. Breakfast may convert differently depending on stay duration, occupancy pressure, or room category.
When every guest receives the same offers, hotels inevitably create a barrier between what they are trying to upsell and what guests actually value at that moment. Over time, guests begin to tune the offers out altogether due to irrelevance.
Why Static Upselling Underperforms
Booking behavior has become significantly more variable over the last several years. Consumer expectations now evolve faster. Booking windows shift more abruptly. Traveller intent changes according to economic conditions, trip purpose, world events, seasons, and demand volatility.
All of this puts static upselling out of step with how consumers shop online today. That mismatch also shows up in performance. The Skift booking data found that only 3% of guests purchased add-ons, with ancillaries representing just 0.1% of hotel revenue on average – highlighting how poorly generic offer menus typically perform.
An unnecessary sea of options can also lead to decision paralysis and in many cases abandonment. At GuestCentric, we observed this behaviour while performing usability tests leading up to the launch of our latest booking engine in 2025. Presenting too many unrelated offers made it harder for guests to complete bookings smoothly. In many cases, fewer but more relevant offers performed better than showing everything available.
The reality nowadays is that hotels are not just competing with their peers and intermediaries, but also with ecommerce experiences that have trained consumers to expect contextual relevance at every step online. Think about shopping on Amazon, where product discovery is shaped by purchase history, browsing behaviour, and predictive signals rather than fixed assumptions.
