Maximising spend per guest across all areas of a property has long been a challenge due to limited tech options—until now. Surfacing products for guests digitally has been a significant pain point for many hotels. The variety of booking engines and manual processes has caused friction for both guests and staff. However, with major advances in hotel retailing, there is a revolutionary solution: adopting a TRevPAR approach and enabling guests to personalise their stays.
In today’s highly competitive marketplace, hotels can no longer rely solely on room occupancy to remain profitable. To maximise spend per guest, it’s crucial to tap into previously untapped revenue from non-room activities, including opening hotel facilities to non-residents. It's time to move beyond RevPAR and recognize the contributions of all business units through a Total Revenue Management—or TRevPAR—approach.
Research from Oracle and Skift shows that the percentage of hoteliers who “strongly agreed” non-room revenue would become an increasing share of overall revenue more than doubled, rising from 23.2% in 2021 to 49% in 2022. In the most recent Oracle and Skift study, 49% percent of executives “strongly agreed” that “special amenities and upgrades are critical to our revenue strategy.”
Unlike airlines, hotels have been slow to market all of their business streams, often lacking the means to integrate wider services into their website booking processes. We’ve seen budget airlines lead the way by diversifying and boosting their revenues with add-ons such as seating preferences, baggage, meals, and priority boarding. Now, with the right technology, hotels can follow suit by surfacing hotel amenities via live inventory in a seamless digital booking experience, allowing guests to curate their personalised stays.
Guests want to unbundle services
Nearly 90% of consumers are either enthusiastic about or open to the concept of unbundling services. Moreover, 87% would likely book a hotel that allowed them to pay only for the amenities they use. This shift means that hotels no longer need to rely on pre-built packages and promotional bundles. Instead, they can offer all their products and services in real-time, allowing guests to shape their own experiences.
The market potential for hotel ancillaries is underexploited, and hotels now have the ability to build lucrative TRevPAR strategies by reviewing all potential revenue sources and optimising them.
A hotel’s valuable assets
Rooms
As the central revenue driver, rooms remain critical to success. Hotels should regularly review rates, pricing structures, and seasonal patterns. To truly optimise revenue, consider how to present room types to upsell premium rooms, and review value options like multi-night stays and multi-room bookings. Offering options like early check-in or late check-out, or welcome gifts such as flowers, champagne, or chocolates, can enhance the guest experience and increase revenue.Food and Beverage
Empowering guests to control their itineraries doesn’t mean the end of traditional "breakfast included" offerings, but it does allow flexibility with lunch and dinner reservations. By letting residents pre-select their dining times or menus, hotels provide a better experience that encourages upsells, such as a pre-dinner drink or a more expensive bottle of wine. Non-residents are also a vital part of a hotel's TRevPAR strategy. According to Skift, 33.7% of consumers have dined at a hotel restaurant as non-residents, and 25% have had a drink at the bar. These customers boost food and beverage revenue and present opportunities to augment revenue from other hotel areas open to day visitors, such as the spa or golf course.Spa and Leisure
Allowing guests to book spa treatments at their leisure not only meets consumer demand but also saves staff time spent answering emails and phone calls. Guests should have access to a full menu of offerings to make well-considered choices. Making these revenue streams available for booking 24/7 through technology like Journey Ecommerce ensures that hoteliers never miss a booking. Moreover, integrating online bookable spa services into the website experience allows hoteliers to offer these services to the local community, securing additional revenue and positively impacting food and beverage sales. Setting up memberships can also benefit locals who want to take advantage of the available services.Utilising Space and Optimising Inventory
Luxury hotels often have large rooms and a variety of inventory types that can remain unused, missing out on potential revenue. Spaces like top suites, apart-hotel accommodations, pool cabanas, and parking spaces can be offered for day hire, appealing to the local community for private events or corporate meetings. The rise of remote working has also increased demand for smaller corporate and team meetings, with businesses seeking hotels that offer intimate accommodations. Integrating your meeting and events booking engine into the digital booking experience surfaces available products and promotes options previously unknown to guests.Gifts
With a boom in gift card purchases, offering gift vouchers is a fantastic way to generate revenue, build your brand, and highlight different aspects of your hotel, such as afternoon tea, stays, events, or spa services. As finding the perfect gift for birthdays, anniversaries, and seasonal events becomes more challenging, consumers are increasingly turning to gift cards, creating a new revenue stream for hotels—especially those that can be creative with their promotions. More hotels are also realising the potential to market lifestyle products by selling merchandise and retailing key interior features of the property. SOHO Home has led the way—not with the average hotel shop selling branded spa products and clothing, but by retailing its desirable collections of paintings, furniture, lighting, and textiles.
Build a powerful hotel retail experience to harness TRevPAR
Driving direct bookings is integral to TRevPAR. Bypassing Online Travel Agents (OTAs) not only saves on commission fees but also makes it easier to personalise offers and build long-term relationships with guests. According to TripTease, 40% of hoteliers cite direct bookers as their biggest spenders. Booking experiences should be intuitive and seamless—83% of people aged 18 to 34 use mobile devices to research hotels, and across Journey’s clients, 77% of traffic comes via mobile.
More than half (57%) of travellers say the ability to add ancillaries is an important feature for mobile booking. Integrating Journey Ecommerce enables guests to create bespoke packages by adding the full range of hotel products and services into an Amazon-style shopping basket.
Using pricing, package, and availability data from the property’s booking systems, Journey Ecommerce presents product options to guests in real-time. Guests can digitally book rooms, spa services, golf, and dining through an intuitive, easy-to-use webpage. This ecommerce retailing approach is significantly driving revenue, with a 60% increase in booking value and a 30% increase in multi-basket orders.
By implementing the seamless ecommerce platform into its website, the Elms Hotel and Spa in Worcestershire experienced a 108% increase in year-on-year room revenue. More than a third (34%) of bookings are multi-product, and 59% are made on a mobile device. At Seaham Hall Luxury Spa Hotel in County Durham, transaction volumes are up 38%, the average order value has risen by 58%, and there is a 26% reduction in call volume. More than 40% of all transactions are processed through Journey Ecommerce every week.
You may have all the right booking engines to facilitate a full TRevPAR strategy, but it’s essential to provide a holistic digital guest experience to drive the conversion of products and services across the property.
Find out how Journey Ecommerce can help build a thriving TRevPAR strategy for your hotel.
