Article Summary:

For an upselling system to deliver, it needs to take into account all of the critical components and bring them all together coherently.

Your upselling platform needs to address the traditional weaknesses of all three components. It should include:

• An exact reflection of the availability down to individual rooms, room features, and category;
• The ability to enrich traditional PMS data for a quick, accurate, and self-adjusting configuration of the hotel and its offerings;
• A pricing engine that yields in real-time and automatically, within the constraints set and controlled by the hotel;
• A forecasting engine that ensures that an upsell is priced appropriately and can be truly sold and fulfilled without human review, and;
• A persona engine accounts for external data, reservation data and faceted hotel information when matching guests to the right products the hotel has to offer to guests.

Make no mistake, hotel technology much more complicated than it might seem. It is easy to forget that a hotel operation is composed of a multitude of different services that all have to come together just right in order to form a seamless guest experience. Your selected hotel upsell tool must account for it all. If you are supplementing upselling with human intervention or are being told that Big Data is all you need to solve your sales problems, then I encourage you to look at your hotel holistically. If you continue to treat upselling as a trivial add-on, it will perform like one. But given the state of our industry right now, no hotel can really afford to do so.

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