Front Desk Upsell Strategy
Chris · August 30, 2007
HVS is an international hospitality consultancy, probably best known by hoteliers across Canada for its weekly occupancy and ADR reports by market. If you don’t receive these updates by email and would like to, you can sign up right here.
Neel Lund, an HVS consultant out of New York wrote an interesting article titled ”Successful Front Office Upsell Incentive Programs”. While I didn’t find anything particularly ground-breaking in Neel’s upsell strategy, it is a well written and useful template that other hotels could adopt and tweak when formalizing their own front desk upsell programs.
If you’re not familiar with upsell incentive programs, they are a strategy employed by many hotels that incentivize hotel front desk agents to sell guests a “better room” upon check-in, for a premium (ie/ higher room rate). Desk agents often receive a percentage of the difference between the original room rate and the new one, or sometimes a flat fee per successful upsell.
The point of these programs is, of course, to maximize the room revenue received by the hotel for the day. Remember, the hotel product is extremely perishable--a guestroom can only be sold “today”.
