Enter your favorite shop and look around. Why do you think it has become your favorite? Very probably, because besides offering good stuff, it’s all set up for a great shopping experience. The signature products are presented in a way that grab your attention, the store surroundings let you feel comfortable and at ease, and making a purchase is a pleasant process.
Now, enter a hotel website to book a room. Most hotels treat their core product as a sideshow. A nice image of a room, a list of features next to it and that’s the end of that presentation. Not the optimal way to get business and successfully close a sale, is it?
Why don’t you tempt prospective guests with a shopping experience they’ll really enjoy and in the process, sell more rooms? Making your hotel store look appealing and inviting is relatively simple if you pay attention to three key points:
Reduce hotel room categories to sell more rooms
Too much choice can lead to fewer sales. In his 2004 book, “The Paradox of choice”, American psychologist Barry Schwartz shows that offering limited choices helps reduce shoppers’ anxiety.
Imagine you need a new printer. You go online, google “inkjet printer” and up come 1,894 hits under Amazon.com. Perfect – lots of choices and all you have to do is make the decision. But exactly how many printers do you need to view to find the one that’s “right” and how do you know this one is really the optimal choice? Anxiety starts creeping in and you become indecisive.
It’s no different in, let’s say, a supermarket. Ever looked at 24 different brands of jam on display and tried to make a choice? That’s what Sheena Iyengar, author of “ The Art of Choice,” and TED presenter asked her test group to do in an experiment. Turns out that of the people who were exposed to such a large selection of jams, only 3 per cent made a purchase. When, for a different group, the selection was reduced to six jams, 30 per cent (!) of the customers made a purchase.
Use yield management carefully. Once things get too complex, your guests won’t spend the time and energy to figure it out.
Revenue management enables a hotel to predict demand, optimize inventory and maximize revenue. It’s a great tool that helps a hotel sell smarter. That is, as long as it doesn’t get too confusing and complicated for potential guests…
