How to conduct a successful upselling meeting

An essential part of scaling your guest upselling initiative is clever delegation. Rely on the dozens of capable staff around you to build out a successful upselling programme by allocating ownership of various tasks to different departments. Make upselling guests at your hotel a team effort and you'll be halfway towards a well-oiled, scalable upselling system that generates incremental revenue reliably. Follow the below steps to get started and download our free hotel upsell meeting checklist for practical assets to work with.

Invite team leads from all relevant departments to your upselling meeting. Your team leads are the ears and eyes of your front of house. Identify what kind of information you’d like each department to contribute and make sure your team realises the importance of upselling in your total revenue strategy. Our tip: boost proactiveness by providing all upsell meeting attendees with the agenda points, so they can prepare relevant input.

Analyse the current state and results from your hotel’s upselling initiative.

• How would you collectively define successful upselling?
• What are you currently offering your guests via upselling?
• What is the engagement level?
• How much does each deal cost the hotel?
• What is the conversion rate of each deal?
• What is the revenue and profitability of each deal and the programme overall?

Work backwards from each department’s goals, brainstorming ways in which upselling can help.

• This helps highlight department-specific benefits of upselling to improve motivation
• Objective-led planning has a higher rate of success, as your team will always be able to review and adjust every activity to see if it aligns with their ultimate goal.

Tackle the practical aspects next, discussing the following:

• Which guests will benefit from this deal?
• What impact will this offer have on their guest experience?
• What suppliers, internal or external, can help or provide these services for you?
• How easy or difficult will it actually be to deliver these deals to the guests on a regular basis?
• What is a fair, yet profitable price point to sell this deal at?
• What are the costs, both direct and indirect?
• What are the best channels to use to present this deal to guests?
• Where/from whom can you source pictures and descriptions for each deal?

Going over these points with your team will give you a good overview of what is possible to achieve via upselling at your hotel. Although, it's likely you'll need to prioritise ideas instead of implementing them all at once. To help you, we've created a set of printable templates you can use to host a successful upsell meeting. Download the checklist below and reverse back to the step-by-step video guide by Oaky's upselling expert Mattia Zanella.