What is hotel upsell software? And how to choose one?

Hotel upselling software allows you to automate your upselling of hotel products & services using various communication channels and integrations. This article will explore how this tool works, factors to consider before choosing one, and some top solutions you must consider.  

Regardless of the hotel property type you handle; you need strategies and techniques to maximize your revenues from your existing customers; upselling is one of those crucial techniques that help you achieve this goal without affecting the customer experience. 

So, what’s upselling? It’s basically a method of convincing already interested customers to buy additional products and services at added cost. In the hotel industry, there are many ways and opportunities to do upselling. For example, you can offer customers a room upgrade before they check-in, or if you offer packages, you can upsell them by providing other amenities not included in the package. However, finding these opportunities and executing hotel upselling is a demanding task. That’s when the need for automating hotel upselling tasks presents itself, and hotel upselling software does it for you. 

What does a hotel upselling software do? 

As mentioned previously, the primary role of hotel upselling software is to automate upselling of hotel products and services. Having said that, how does this software achieve this automation, and how effective is it? Let’s try to answer it. 

The tools use different communication channels to reach guests with highly customized targeted offerings at various points of their journey. Many of these tools integrate post-stay guest communication with major travel review platforms like Trip Advisor, which becomes a reference point for other customers. Every user engaging with these reviews is a potential customer; the tools identify these individuals and groups and send upsell offers once they make a booking. The process eliminates the need for manual “upsell communication” from front desks. 

By now, you would be convinced about the utility of hotel upsell software. Yet an obvious thought that might strike your mind, which is, “are all hotel upselling tools good?” Not actually. Like all software solutions, there are good and bad hotel upsell tools. So how do you choose one? Next up, we are helping you with that by listing five critical components of the hotel upselling tool.  

Factors to consider for hotel upselling software  

The needs and requirements of different hospitality businesses vary. There is no one size fits all kinds of solution. Here we outline the essential features of hotel upselling software that will help you choose the right solution for your business. 

1. Availability of multiple communication channels 

Your upselling tool must offer you multiple guest communication channels that you can leverage to contact guests at various touch points of their journey. The software should at least offer communication capability with emails, chatbots, text messages, and live chats. 

2. Personalization suite 

Personalization rests at the core of any hotel upselling software. It should have provisions for dynamic room upgrade pricing, offer customization, and offer personalization. 

3. Automation capability  

Throughout this article, we have put thrusts on automation. Your hotel upselling tool must be able to automatically send offer emails, texts, and communication regarding offer redemptions and confirmations. 

4. Exclusion module 

Segmentation of interested and non-interested guests is crucial. Your hotel upselling software must have a module to perform this segmentation. And offer an exclusion module where you can list all the non-interested guests. 

5. Multidevice useability  

Your guest can use any device to book or modify their stay. And you never know the device they would use during their stay. Therefore, your hotel upselling tool should offer usability with all gadgets, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. 

3 Prominent solutions to consider  

To choose a vendor for your hospitality business, you will have to factor in many variables like the size of your enterprise, the category of customers you deal with, etc. So, without delving into those variables or promoting any specific tool, we list the prominent vendors that fare well on the factors we mentioned above. 

EasyWay  

Easyway digitally tracks end-to-end customer journeys and pushes personalized upselling offers through popular messaging apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, iMessage, and other similar applications. 

Revinate  

Revinate’s USP is to offer hyper-personalized hotel products and services to targeted guests. The tool banks on establishing a deeper connection with the guest through its data-driven solutions to upsell hotel packages and room upgrades. 

Oaky 

Oaky is a commission-free hotel upselling engine that helps you easily automate upselling functions. It is one of those rare hotel upselling tools that gives guests absolute control over the deals they are getting from the hospitality businesses. The guests also get the flexibility to accept part offers. 

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Upselling is an excellent method to drive organic incremental revenues to any hospitality business. You offer additional value in exchange for an added cost, and there’s nothing unfair in this practice. Whereas upselling hotel products and services manually can trigger unpleasant customer experiences because you don’t have solid data to back your advances, and you don’t know if the guests are interested.  

Therefore, you need these hotel upselling tools that not only automate your hotel upselling processes but also ensure the function does not invite any bad customer experience. You can use the information in this article to select the right fit hotel upselling tool for your hospitality business.