The effect of creative upselling on your incremental revenue

In the unstable period hoteliers now find themselves in, creative, thoughtful upselling has more agency than ever. Hotels like XO Hotels in Amsterdam are demonstrating how leaning into one's upselling strategy and thinking outside the box can make a deciding difference to your hotel's total revenue. Read on for some tips on developing a creative approach to upselling, rooted in psychology. Download our XO Hotels case report to find out how this has worked for them.

We all know how deeply psychological programming figures in the act of selling. Upselling is no different. Your upselling initiative can be used to streamline operations and to provide solutions to frequent requests, making everyone's day easier. But with the right approach and proper awareness of sales psychology, you can transform your upselling platform into a revenue generating machine for your hotel.

Develop creative and cleverly-packaged offers that provide your guests ample choice. The more relevant offers you display that are mindful of you guest profile, the more excuses you give your guest to celebrate and enjoy their stay in style. Covering all angles of potential celebrations and special occasions will increase the likelihood of engaging your guests.

Provide modular options. Offering packages, i.e. a birthday package with the whole nine yards, alongside individually presented, more affordable offers of balloons, cake or streamers will decrease the likelihood of guests abandoning an offer due to the inclusion of unwanted elements.

Provide variations. Here's where you can look to a bit of choice architecture to make a difference to your incremental revenue. In our XO Hotels Case Report below, the performance of a particular offer variation speaks volumes. They displayed two ‘rose petal on the bed’ offers on their Oaky, to interesting effect.

• • Overwhelmingly, the offer that featured the petals in a heart shape outsold the offer in which the petals were simply scattered on the bed.
  • In terms of cost to the hotel and preparation, these two services were almost identical.
  • Nonetheless, guest behaviour demonstrated that the extra step of the heart shape arrangement made all the difference.
  • The 'heart shape' version of the rose petals offer can be said to have positively impacted a guest’s decision through something akin to nudge theory.
  • A guest undecided on a romantic offer can be influenced by the grandeur of an offer like the 'heart shape' option while perceiving the additional cost to them as negligible.

In the case of XO’s rose petals, the added bonus of the heart shape arrangement resulted in unexpectedly high conversions.

Over time, the small price difference in these packages created a considerable difference in revenue, with minimal time and effort on the part of hotel staff.

Using the Oaky dashboard streamlines the creative, communication and analysis aspects of upselling, encouraging creativity and facilitating the experimentation of new ideas.

For ideas on how to create offers that convert and how to use your Oaky platform to deal with Covid-related setbacks, read our blog or get in touch!

We sat down with Ines van der Schoot, Reservations at XO Hotels, to speak about creative upselling at the popular group of city hotels.

For an in-depth look at XO Hotels Park West’s performance, examples of their creative offers, and their honest review of Oaky, download the case report below!