To "four airlines," CarTrawler chief commercial officer Aileen McCormack said, ancillary revenue is already the "predominant revenue source." She calls this phenomenon the "ancillary revenue revolution." However, in our industry, up/cross-selling seems to be perceived as mainly a "vanity metric."

A friend of mine always says that "there's no such thing as ancillary sources of revenue. If you're selling a service or a product, that's revenue, period." However, with few exceptions (golf resorts, casinos, SPA hotels, ski resorts), our industry is traditionally room-centric.

The benefits of upselling, however, are numerous:

  • Increase in booking value;
  • Better guest experience and, consequentially, positive impact on reputation and guest retention;
  • A deeper understanding of guests' need to hyperpersonalize their stays;
  • Increased direct revenue, as most upsold services/products are sold directly at the hotel and not through intermediaries.

Thinking out of the box of the "usual suspects" (room upgrades, early check-ins/late check-out, stay extensions, F&B, wellness packages, tours and activities, events tickets), how can our industry exploit such a lucrative activity?

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Laura Calin
Laura Calin
VP, Strategy and Solutions Management at Oracle Hospitality
Nicole Dehler
Nicole Dehler
Vice President of Product Management at StayNTouch
Mark Fancourt
Mark Fancourt
Co-Founder at TRAVHOTECH
Simone Puorto
Simone Puorto
Founder | CEO | Futurist
Tomeu Fiol
Tomeu Fiol
Global Hotel Technologies Director en Meliá Hotels International
Juanjo  Rodriguez
Juanjo Rodriguez
Founder, The Hotels Network
Max Starkov
Max Starkov
Hospitality & Online Travel Tech Consultant

I'm forever surprised by hoteliers who seem to consider that the room booking is the culmination of the guest sales journey, and not, as it should be, the start! The honeymoon period for upselling is at the time of booking, so why not employ tools that are easily accessed by QR codes to advertise hotel amenities and services to help boost spend per customer? Consider a booking to be like a project: two IT companies get an order for the same value - 100. At the end of the project company A has made 140 but company B has made 400. Guess which company is still in business and which one went bust? (True story, I worked for one of them - contact me for details).

Tristan Gadsby
Tristan Gadsby
CEO and founder, Alliants
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