Guests don't want your Random Offers

A family booking a five-night summer stay will not evaluate offers the same way as a solo business traveller arriving late in the evening. A guest reserving a suite behaves differently from someone booking the entry-level room. A couple celebrating an occasion responds differently from a guest booking purely on convenience.

These distinctions seem obvious operationally. Hotels see them every day. Yet many online booking journeys still treat guest intent as largely interchangeable when presenting an over-sized menu of generic add-on products. Yet research from Oracle Hospitality and Skift found that 74% of travellers now expect hotels to deliver more relevant and tailored offers, rather than generic promotions shown to everyone.

A late checkout offer may feel highly relevant to one guest and completely unnecessary to another. An experience package may perform well during leisure-heavy demand periods but poorly during corporate travel windows. Breakfast may convert differently depending on stay duration, occupancy pressure, or room category.

When every guest receives the same offers, hotels inevitably create a barrier between what they are trying to upsell and what guests actually value at that moment. Over time, guests begin to tune the offers out altogether due to irrelevance.

Why Static Upselling Underperforms

Booking behavior has become significantly more variable over the last several years. Consumer expectations now evolve faster. Booking windows shift more abruptly. Traveller intent changes according to economic conditions, trip purpose, world events, seasons, and demand volatility.

All of this puts static upselling out of step with how consumers shop online today. That mismatch also shows up in performance. The Skift booking data found that only 3% of guests purchased add-ons, with ancillaries representing just 0.1% of hotel revenue on average — highlighting how poorly generic offer menus typically perform.

An unnecessary sea of options can also lead to decision paralysis and in many cases abandonment. At GuestCentric, we observed this behaviour while performing usability tests leading up to the launch of our latest booking engine in 2025. Presenting too many unrelated offers made it harder for guests to complete bookings smoothly. In many cases, fewer but more relevant offers performed better than showing everything available.

The reality nowadays is that hotels are not just competing with their peers and intermediaries, but also with e-commerce experiences that have trained consumers to expect contextual relevance at every step online. Think about shopping on Amazon, where product discovery is shaped by purchase history, browsing behaviour, and predictive signals rather than fixed assumptions.

The Best Approach is not to Show More, But Show Better

The online world is overloaded with information and distractions, and as humans we have a limited cognitive load. Whether it’s paying utility bills, scouring online retail outlets to replace a broken household appliance, or booking an adventure to a faraway and remote location that’s difficult to access, most of us just want to complete tasks as easily and efficiently as possible. The last thing we need are irrelevant product alerts or worse, aggressive redirects to ads that interrupt our focus and momentum.

For many years the default approach of hotels has been to treat upselling as secondary to selling their core product, publishing an oversized menu of add-ons in the hope that something sticks. But as we discovered above, this approach can often hurt rather than improve online sales. On the other hand, showing less, yet more tailored offers is more likely to convert into direct ancillary sales for your hotel.

We often hear the word “personalization”, which evokes a maze of CRMs and complex loyalty programs that independent hotels barely have the time to dive into. But, imagine if a hotel booking engine could automatically adjust offers based on what your systems already know about the reservation.

That can include simple, practical signals such as:

• how full the hotel is,

• the room type being booked,

• the length and dates of the stay,

• who is travelling (solo guests, couples, families, groups),

• how fast the hotel is filling up,

• what similar guests have booked in the past.

In plain terms, it means the offers change depending on the guest and the situation, rather than staying fixed for everyone. That distinction matters, because when everything is promoted equally, nothing stands out. Confronted with information overload, guests stop noticing the offers altogether, and the upsell section becomes background noise rather than a useful part of the booking experience.

Hotels are also learning that reducing unnecessary choice can improve booking performance. The Skift research shows that when Mayfair Hotel & Spa in Miami restructured its booking process to reduce choice overload, within five months the hotel saw conversion rates jump 64% year over year, resulting in a 66% increase in revenue.

Less is More for your Hotel’s Bottom Line

Early data from GuestCentric hotels using adaptive upselling is already showing a clear change in how guests respond to add-ons during the booking process. Around 40% of ancillary purchases now come from add-ons that are selected and shown during the booking process based on what the hotel booking system already knows about that reservation.

In simple terms, guests are more likely to buy when the offer actually fits their stay. We are also seeing this in hotels that previously struggled to sell extras online, despite having plenty available. In one case, a hotel that had not been generating any add-on sales online now averages one per day after shifting to adaptive upselling.

That might sound small, but it adds up with:

• One breakfast.

• One late checkout.

• One parking space.

• One upgrade.

Over time, these sales become meaningful revenue. And because they come from guests who have already booked, they tend to be higher margin than discounted room rates.Just as importantly, guests have a better experience. That is why more of them say yes.

Why This Matters for Your Guests and Your Hotel

We have all experienced the opposite. You are trying to finish something simple online, like checking in for a flight, and you are suddenly shown car hire or insurance you do not need. Most people ignore it and just try to finish the process as quickly as possible. Hotel guests do the same thing. If the offers are not relevant, they stop paying attention.

Guests don’t experience the booking journey and the shopping experience as separate anymore, they expect both to feel relevant and in context. What’s changing is not just what is offered, but when and why it is shown. Upselling is becoming more adaptive, shaped by the details of the guest and the reservation data itself, rather than a standard list of options shown to everyone. The opportunity is to make sure the right ones appear at the right moment, for the right guest.

Hotels that adopt this approach will not only increase conversion and ancillary revenue, they will create stronger direct relationships with guests. When offers feel useful instead of disruptive, guests are more likely to engage, book directly again, and see the hotel as understanding their needs rather than simply trying to sell to them.