Providing your guests with a comfortable place to stay and with an opportunity to get away from it all is one of your most important responsibilities as a hotel operator or manager – but at the end of the day, you are still running a business.
In order to improve your hotel business, you need to sell hotel rooms. Your hotel room sales strategies should reflect your commitment to the guest experience while emphasising the importance of booking as many rooms as possible at any given time. Whether it’s the peak season or the off-season, you will want to develop hotel room sales techniques that are designed to increase hotel room sales.
Why should hotel managers focus on increasing hotel room sales?
For hotel managers, their worst nightmare is walking down the halls of their hotel and realising that rooms are empty. There’s a sad stillness that not only marks the sign of a quiet moment, but also the sign of a failing business strategy. In order to avoid this situation at any point during the year — even during the slow travel season — hotel operators need to design sales strategies that will improve hotel business and continually bring in more guests.
The first, and most obvious reason, to focus on increasing hotel room sales is because this will drive revenue. With additional revenue on-hand, hotel managers and operators are able to provide guests with the superior experience they expect, as well as move the hotel forward into the future. Before a hotel operator can dabble in additional packages, add-on excursions and luxury upgrades, they must be able to sell rooms.
Another reason to prioritise hotel room sales techniques is to provide guests with the atmosphere that they expect. A vacant or nearly empty hotel can seem depressing and distressing to people who are staying there. You want to be able to sell as many rooms as possible so that you can provide your guests with a lively, charismatic atmosphere.
Essential Hotel Room Sales Strategies
Every hotel will need to implement a sales strategy that works best for their own target market as well as for their local destination. Ultimately, it is up to the hotel operator or manager to create a customised sales strategy that will drive the most room sales at their own individual property, but these are some of the top hotel room sales strategies to consider:
