Is Your Hotel Bleisure-Ready?
For those of you who are not familiar with this term, it denotes a business trip that is extended either before or after the business component with a few days of leisure.
In its Travel Trends 2018 Report, WEX and Mastercard identified that nearly 60% of US travelers extend their corporate trips to include a leisure component. Thus, by embracing bleisure, you help to better frame your hotel as the business destination of choice.
Chances are you're already experiencing some bleisure stays by now, even though you may not be aware of this new segment's potential for revenues. The following are four activities you can take that will help.
Identify the Opportunity to Your Entire Team
Encourage your revenue management and sales teams to work together on pricing programs that entice business travelers to add leisure to a corporate room block or meeting. This could mean extending the preferred rates and perquisites to the leisure portion as well as other incentives such as free breakfast.
Use Multiple Folios to Manage Expenses
Some of your clients may be hesitant to encourage a bleisure stay for their employees, given the potential headaches in isolating service delivery for both components of a hybrid stay. Work with your accounting department to create multiple folios for the single stay, with an artificial checkout and checkin as the responsibility for expenses moves from corporate to personal.
Awareness is Always Key
Actively promote bleisure on your website and via eblasts to ensure that business visitors understand your receptivity to their extended stay. In addition to the website, actively promote the concept to your corporate client base. Bleisure gives your sales team another reason to contact their customers!
Any Group is a Good Group for Bleisure
The bleisure concept can also mean extending similar services to weddings or any social events where a room block is created. Consider allowing additional rooms to be attached to either side of the block at a preferential price point for a limited period of time. Perhaps you can try to extend that Saturday night wedding into a two-night stay, helping transform the typically slow Sunday night.
