What’s new in Oaky? [Q2 2024]
Oaky Product Team
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In Q2, the Oaky team focused on crucial updates to help you spot high-value deals faster, capitalise on last-minute bookings with a refined reservation flow, and strengthen your branding. We've also introduced enhancements for Front Desk Upsell customers, empowering their reservation teams to upsell to guests proactively over the phone.
Read on to learn how the latest Oaky releases of Q2 2024 can have an instant impact on your ancillary revenue.
Feature: Spot high-value deals faster with team email notifications displaying unit and total price
Seeing high-value deals just got a lot easier!
With this enhancement, item and total prices are featured directly in your hotel team’s email alerts. The team can see full deal price breakdowns, giving them more context about the deal.
Not only does this help identify high-value deals more easily, but it also lets your team prioritise these deals faster and reject or approve room upgrades/services, improving the response time and customer service.
Behind-the-scenes enhancements: Capitalise on last-minute bookings with the improved reservation flow
Just like last-minute cancellations, last-minute bookings are common in hospitality.
To help you capture more upsell revenue opportunities from these bookings, we’ve improved our reservation flow prioritisation rules.
Now, with today's arrivals prioritised in the queue, you can capitalise on last-minute bookings more efficiently and boost room and service sales. What’s more, you can improve your guest satisfaction by offering guests the opportunity to upgrade and customise their stay even if they’ve booked on short notice.
Feature: Boost your branding with four new fonts
Beyond sharing key information about your guests' stay, a pre-arrival email acts as one of the primary touchpoints with your brand.
To improve the branding aspect of your emails and guest landing pages and consistently represent your brand across every touchpoint at the pre-arrival stage, we’ve added four new fonts to the Branding Dashboard:
Archivo Black
Gelasio
Antic Didone
Lora
This addition is especially useful for marketing teams, who are usually the custodians of hotel branding.
Enable reservation agent upselling and start upselling earlier with future bookings available 14 days in advance in the Front Desk Upsell module
With future bookings available 14 days in advance in Oaky’s Front Desk Upselling module (FDU), you can give your reservation agents a head start on upselling over the phone or email.
Now, your reservation agents can easily look up guest information using the FDU search bar and receive tailored upgrade and service suggestions.
This enhancement encourages FDU adoption within both reservation and front desk teams, allowing you to use the module as a central hub to:
Monitor performance and track your reservation and front desk teams
Review progress, points, and commissions
Reward agents for achieving milestones.
Seamlessly integrated with your PMS, Oaky automates upselling – after a successful upsell, agents can input the details into Oaky, which syncs automatically with your PMS, reducing manual tasks.
This feature also comes in handy for your front desk team. They can research arriving guests in advance and provide more personalised experiences at check-in, building rapport and facilitating more upsell opportunities.
Not only will it streamline both your reservation and front desk teams’ upselling efforts, but with all the upsells properly tracked, agents will also get rewarded for their performance, boosting their motivation.
Feature: Automate updates of arrival/departure times upon approval of early check-in/late checkout deals [Only for 2-way Oaky x OPERA Cloud customers]
Auto-approval of guest requests is one of the advantages of using the 2-way integration between Oaky and OPERA Cloud. To ensure that early check-ins or late checkouts don’t slip through the cracks with auto-approval, we’ve added an enhancement to the integration. Now, arrival and departure times are adjusted in the PMS as soon as the guest purchases either of these deals via Oaky.
This makes the job of housekeeping and front desk teams much easier. With the updated times directly displayed in the reservation, housekeeping will be aware of the changed arrival/departure times and can prioritise their tasks accordingly. For front desk teams, it comes in handy to ensure the correct room assignment. Plus, manual work is minimised as arrival and departure times don’t have to be updated in the PMS manually.
Feature: Base room upgrade offers on house-level availability to prevent overbooking [Only for 2-way Oaky x OPERA Cloud customers]
Overbooking can be an effective but risky strategy, sometimes resulting in double-booking. To prevent this from happening, you can now base your room upgrade offers on house-level availability. This means that Oaky won’t offer room upgrades to your guests if your overall availability reaches 0.
For example, let’s say the availability of the standard room type is -10 and the availability of the deluxe room type is 10. This means the hotel’s overall availability is 0 and our system won’t offer room upgrades anymore if you don't want to overbook.
You still have the option to base your Oaky availability on room level if this goes best with your strategy.
To enable this option, go to Integrations under your hotel settings and simply turn the toggle on.
Redefined Mews x Oaky 2-way integration to let you drive more revenue through elevated guest experience
In Q2, we also announced the release of the redefined Oaky & Mews 2-way integration. The redefined integration ensures that we’ll be able to continue delivering the best customer experience that matches the newest industry standards. Here are the benefits the redefined integration offers:
Personalised dynamic pricing: You can now apply dynamic pricing directly from Mews to your room upgrades. With this feature, you can maximise your revenue potential by capitalising on peak booking periods, demand fluctuation, and room availability. Oaky not only pulls dynamic prices directly from Mews but also tailors room upgrade offers to different rate codes, taking your personalisation efforts to the next level.
More real-time data for front desk agents: A live reservation flow between the two systems now enables the front desk agents to seize last-minute opportunities more effectively. This way, they will never miss a chance to upsell at check-in, unlocking even more sales avenues for time-sensitive deals such as last-minute room upgrades, early check-in and late checkout deals. Our customers using Front Desk Upsell automation will find this enhancement particularly beneficial.
Enhanced control: On-demand logic gives you precise control over your room upgrades and early check-in/late checkout deals. It allows you to approve upgrades manually once the availability reaches the predetermined threshold.
Enhanced speed and usability of the integration: Oaky can now retrieve reservation information and other details from Mews on the fly.
Final thoughts
Many of the enhancements and updates of Q2 zoom in on granular detail, key to your hotel’s overall success. Whether it’s choosing branding elements like fonts or identifying high-value deals, these updates are crucial for improving the bigger picture.
Want more ideas of how you can upsell throughout the entire guest journey? Read our recent blog post, Hotel Upselling: 10 key upselling techniques and ideas, that discusses practical suggestions.
