COVID has hit the global hotel industry hard. But as with every crisis, new opportunities surface. During the financial crisis of 2008/09, we saw Airbnb and Uber emerge.

Many revenue-generating ideas were born over the past year. From staycation and workation to renting out equipment and even offering outsourced services like housekeeping. Hoteliers have been creative in finding ways to keeping their business afloat.

What was born out of a need for survival might lead to a more permanent shift in a hotel's business model.

The idea of non-room revenue is nothing new and even pre-pandemic was something more and more hotels embraced. F&B or MICE revenue management is still in its infancy for the overall industry but terms like Total RevPAR have evolved from buzzword to serious KPI.

Is now the time to look at non-room, ancillary revenue? Where are the opportunities?

Federica Salvatori
Federica Salvatori
Revenue & Commercial Strategy and Founder of Federica Salvatori Consulting

The pandemic has forced hoteliers to find new ways of income. Finally, they started a process that should have been already in place: look beyond room revenue and maximize all the revenue streams.

No ways that after the rooms, F&B and conference & events are the main revenue drivers in most hotels, but in this time we do need to rethink our whole hotel strategy in order to capture all the opportunities.

The first step is to think out of the box and reimagine your offer by looking at EVERY SINGLE SQUARE METERS of the hotel according to the arising customer needs and sell EVERY SERVICE COMBINATION that could be of interest for a “new” kind of customer.

This means to rethink and rearrange the spaces for different uses: bedrooms not only for accommodation, conference rooms not only for meetings! Some examples, the already established workcation and staycation, but also bedrooms used for private meeting, day use/work spaces for meeting participants or suite terrace for private dinner etc.

In the past many hotel services have been conceived only for the in-house guests , but now it is crucial to open our services to the residential to detect the local demand. So, why don't sell parking slots, breakfast, working spaces, luggage deposit to the local/non guests?

Other opportunities could come from the use of technology (like chatbots, web check-in, concierge tools) that can help selling ancillary and upselling before the arrival or during the stay.

TRevPAR will be for sure the “new” strong KPI or even RevPAM could be soon applied not only in MICE but as a metric for all hotel spaces.

So be creative, flexible, detect the demand, introduce new services, rethink all the spaces and open your services to the local market. 

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