Have you ever bought chocolate or chewing gum in a grocery store at the checkout? Sure you have, and so have your clients when buying a room in your online store or website. However, only a low percentage of hotels offer extras to their clients to purchase on top of the room. They are the exception.
NB: This is an article from mirai, one of our Expert Partners
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The rest may have beautiful online stores but with empty checkout lanes that prevent any incremental sale from happening. What was your decision? Was it consciously made?
In our experience, offering or not extras is another chapter of the battle between sales and operations. We’ll cover in this post why hotels should offer extras, some best practices on how to market them and finally some tips on how to streamline your operations.
Eight reasons why hotels should offer extras on their booking engine
- Increase your revenue. On average, extras increase 1.71% your average ticket value. Why would you conform with $100 when you can get $101.7
- Increase your profit even more. Extras tend to have very high margins so that increment in revenue becomes an even higher increase in profit down the bottom line.
- Differentiate your hotel from others. Details make the difference. Seduce your clients with something different that they will not find with your competitors.
- Make your value proposition of booking direct unique. Extras give more attractiveness to your direct channel compared to the OTAs, helping you generate a unique experience that would never have it somewhere else.
- Grow your loyal customer base. Offering exclusive extras or discounts only to your loyalty clients helps you build a stronger relationship with your clients and makes your loyalty program more attractive.
- Increase your customer satisfaction and review ratings. Guests are grateful when you facilitate things they, otherwise, would have had to find and buy somewhere else.
- Improve the performance of your campaigns. Bringing traffic to your website is expensive and every dollar you can increase your monetization will consequently increase the return (ROAS) of your campaigns.
- Prevent OTAs from stealing away your clients. OTAs, such as Booking.com and Expedia, already offer extras or ancillary services on top of the room to their users. You don’t see a dollar of this incremental revenue.
Ten best practices to market your extras
Once you are committed to offering extras, the next question is identifying what to offer and how to market it in the most successful way. Here are some best practices.
- Cover the basics. Start with simple but high demanded things or services. Ask your own receptionists what your guests demand when they check in. Bikes to rent, city tour tickets or something to eat at night. You have all that information already in your hotel.
- Be imaginative. Once your basics are done, think of some alternatives to surprise your guests. Something he or she does not expect but would love. Some examples would be a romantic dinner, wine tasting or outdoor activities.
- Inspire from what other hotels do. It does not need to be in your hometown but anywhere in the world. Extras pretty much work the same all around the world.
