Whats in a Hotel Room
Whats in a Room?
Because we are setting up so many properties on the GuestDiary.com we are seeing a lot of potential 'free lunches' ie The opportunity to make more money without it costing you anything, by looking more closely at how your rooms are configured. on your website and on the OTA's
Lets take the classic example. Recently a customer told us they had 8 Double/Twin Rooms. In fact all of those rooms contained a Double Bed (Ziplinked) and a Single Bed. When questioned the hotel was quite happy to quote a customer a price for 3 adults on the phone, but well.....it was just too much effort to set them up to sell for 3 people on the OTA's, so they just offered 4 Doubles and 4 Twins online.
In fact the customer was missing a number of opportunities as those rooms could be sold in 5 different ways.
Double + Single
Triple (The Double was ziplinked).
Double
Twin
Single
You could argue that most properties will not sell a Double + Single Room to 1 person. But they will and they do, especially for the single Business Traveller, Midweek, out of season. The trick is to sell your 'high earning 3 person room' on peak dates, and allow it to be sold to 1 person on quieter days. (Image attached shows the hotel opening their rooms for Single occupancy on quieter dates).
Also hidden in the story above is the fact that the hotel elected to take their 8 Double + Single Rooms and upload 4 Twins and 4 Doubles. So as well as missing the opportunity to sell their rooms to 1 person or 3 people travellers, they have also missed the chance to sell their rooms to groups who ay be looking for 8 Doubles or 8 Twins.
Is it worthwhile? Lets take a look at the results for a typical property.
You would be right to say that 78% of the reservations are for the common 'Double/Twin'. And then;
7% for Double + Singles
5% for the Triple
10% for the Single Occupancy.
So in this case the property will have gained 22% of their rooms sales by setting up the extra 'occupancies'. If this property was turning over 1 million in room sales, it is now inline to generate an extra 220,000. So the answer has to be 'Yes' its worthwhile.
In short, in the year 2018, most Booking Engines and OTA's are capable of selling a given room in different configurations. Make sure you are set up to do so.