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Automation in everyday life

How does automation help easily answer the question of how to upsell a hotel room?

Wondering how to easily upsell a hotel room?

 

When you hear the word automation, it may conjure up images of a future where artificial intelligence and robots take over jobs – but it should give you hope and trigger the thought, “how can I upsell a hotel room with little effort and resources?”

The notion of automation generally remains ossified in this physical, machine-replaces-labor frame and is perceived as another step toward automation-led obsolescence. The reality, however, is much more nuanced.

Automation in everyday life

Discussions about automation all too often focus solely on distant possibilities. However, the idea of automation isn’t necessarily a modern one – the word itself is synonymous with efficiency.

The theory behind utilizing automation technology has been around for centuries. Throughout history, there is evidence of different groups of people attempting to use automation to solve everyday problems they faced.

Surprisingly many people don’t realize the scale of current automation and the many aspects of our lives that are subjected to automation every day; look at your washing machine, the dishwasher, bus doors, even the humble ATM. Even though they might not be advanced, or overly obvious, all are examples of automation.

In recent years, automation has become more specific and refined to fit certain industries. The idea of the ATM, for example, has advanced further thanks to automation. With banking and payment apps, carrying cash is becoming a thing of the past. Consumers can now bank online and complete a variety of payments.

Whether it’s paying household bills, purchasing products online, or buying a coffee – it can be done at a simple click of a button or tap of a phone. Similarly, other phone apps allow us to streamline many everyday processes from shopping lists; paying a cashier, ordering pizza, managing smart home devices such as heating cycles, lights, alarm systems, etc.

Also, a family member can be using the same application, allowing you to share lists or functionally of the app, whenever, wherever.

How does automation help easily answer the question of how to upsell a hotel room?

Automation is everywhere. It cuts across everything we do. By leveraging intelligent software to perform any number of ordered steps and workflows, it lets us function more efficiently and freely, making our lives easier. Now, let’s talk about applying those same principles to business operations – specifically the hotel business.

You can improve a hotel by improving beds, renovating rooms, adding new F&B options, etc. But if you want to improve a hotel’s operations, you begin to look at those processes that are required to keep the hotel business running: marketing, sales, housekeeping, front office staff, maintenance, etc.

For hotels, automation can unlock more revenue, lower costs, increase productivity, provide a better experience for both staff and guests, and generally make an operation run more smoothly and profitably.

While there’s a broad spectrum of processes that can be automated in a hotel, one area where automation can drive more revenue opportunities throughout the guest journey is upselling, specifically early check-in and late checkout.

What is upselling in a hotel?

Upselling in a hotel is offering ancillary services like:

• Spa services
• Breakfast
• Local attraction tickets
• Early check-in
• Late check-out
• Room type upgrades

Some hotel upselling tips:

• Early check-ins and late check-outs are easy hotel upselling options
• Early check-in and late check-out are two of the best upsell offerings to enhance guest service and increase revenue – but they are also one of the most under-optimized areas of hotel management.
• Room type upgrade offers can be automated, and they personalize and enhance the guest experience

Many hotel revenue managers don’t consider upselling early check-in and late check-out for several reasons. From a lack of technology and pricing questions to simple communication, there are many hurdles to upselling hotel rooms.

To upsell a hotel room’s check-in and check-out features and processes is to break the normal check-in and check-out flow. Hoteliers then need to make an extra effort to coordinate between departments. Synchronizing housekeeping, room allocation, and guest arrival and departures for a special case like an early check-in are simply daunting.

Wondering how to easily upsell a hotel room?

While upselling software solutions exist, until very recently they required extensive manual intervention – which defeats the purpose of the technology. Hotels have had to constantly update the upsell price manually and have often had to add – and approve – the upsell in the PMS.

The static price points can sometimes be too high to lead to conversion. And, the biggest challenge to upselling in the past is that most solutions did not check inventory. Even if you sell an early check-in, if availability is not verified, the sale may not be fulfilled, leading to a poor customer experience.

These kinds of headaches resulted in hotels’ reluctance to offer early check-in and late check-out. They effectively washed their hands of it – ultimately leaving money left on the table.

But, now hoteliers have ROOMDEX and they know how to upsell a hotel the easy way.

ROOMDEX is upsell automation done the right way

Upselling is too valuable to abandon just because it’s too difficult to do well. At ROOMDEX, we’ve built a hotel upsell tool that automates the whole upselling process. We automatically check if the potential upsell guest room is available. We message the guest and quote the optimal price. The ROOMDEX Upgrade Optimizer hotel room upsell tool can:

• Automatically analyze your inventory each day to identify unsold rooms that are candidates for early check-in and late check-out
• Calculate the optimum price to charge the guest based on room availability
• Send an offer to the guest at the right time for optimized conversion

Automating upselling is a savvy way to improve your business operations. It allows you to remove any risk of human error by eliminating the disconnect between departments. Not only does all revenue drop to your bottom line, but you provide flexibility to your guests. And the best part of our solution to the question ‘how to upsell a hotel room?’ is, you don’t need to do anything – everything is automated. It turns out that automation is your new best friend.