Want to increase your hotel sales in 2024?
Here are ten hotel sales strategies that can help you do that…
Our friend Alex Hormozi argues that when it comes to growing a business, the quality of your product or service is more important than marketing or sales strategies. Why?
Because word of mouth, whether positive or negative, always snowballs.
This means that if your product or service is terrible, you will have to pour more and more resources into marketing and sales just to combat the negative word of mouth. This is an uphill battle that you are bound to lose eventually.
Meanwhile, if your product or service is amazing, you will see a steady increase in sales over time due to word of mouth, even if your marketing and sales expenses remain the same.
Consequently, if you want to increase hotel sales, you should focus on improving customer experience.
People love to talk about their travels so if they have a great time at your hotel, they will probably tell their family, friends, and fellow travelers about it.
Moreover, they will also be more inclined to leave a positive customer review on sites like booking.com.
So look at what the world’s best hotels are doing to deliver an exceptional customer experience, learn from them, and implement those lessons in your hotel.
Of course, if you run a 3-star hotel, you may not have the resources to straight up copy the customer experience strategies of 5-star hotels. But you don’t need to do that in order to get ahead of your competition.
The unfortunate reality is that most mid-range hotels can’t even get the absolute basics such as cleanliness right, so if you can do that, you’ll stand out from the other hotels in the same price range.
And if you go the extra mile to provide an exceptional customer experience, you will leave your low-effort rivals in the dust!
Creating an offer means packaging your products and services in a way that is designed to appeal to your dream customers.
We assume that you are catering to several distinct customer segments such as:
These three customer segments have completely different needs, interests, and desires, so it’s unwise to cast a broad net with generic offers. As the saying goes, if you try to appeal to everyone, you will end up appealing to no one!
That’s why we recommend creating a separate offer for each customer segment designed specifically for that demographic.
For example:
It’s impossible to create a single offer that would be equally appealing to all three demographics. But creating a separate offer for each of these customer segments should be pretty straightforward!
Once you have your core offers for each customer segment, you want to create downsells, upsells, and cross sells for them.
A downsell is an offer that is a downgrade from the offer that the potential customer has already rejected. It should be less valuable and less expensive than the original offer.
For example, if the potential customer made it all the way to the checkout page but decided not to proceed with the purchase, you can downsell a similar but less expensive package (e.g. 2 nights instead of 3).
An upsell is an offer that is an upgrade on the offer that the potential customer has already accepted. It should be more valuable and more expensive than the original offer.
For example, if the potential customer is about to finalize the purchase, you can upsell them a similar but more expensive package (e.g. a suite instead of a standard room).
A cross sell is an offer that is complementary to the offer that the potential customer has already accepted.
For example, if the potential customer is about to finalize the purchase, you can cross sell them various local experiences (e.g. swimming with the dolphins, a historic tour of the city center, a wine-tasting excursion, etc.).
If you add a downsell, an upsell and a cross sell to each offer, some of your customers will inevitably end up buying them.
That’s extra revenue that you would have otherwise left on the table had you not added these additional offers!
This extra revenue can enable you to be more aggressive about customer acquisition.
Our co-founder Russell Brunson loves to quote Dan Kennedy: “Whoever can spend the most to acquire a customer wins”.
He had an opportunity to discuss this concept with Kennedy himself during one of our events:
Basically, if you can outspend your competition on customer acquisition, you will almost certainly get ahead of them because that money will get you more customers, more reviews, more word of mouth, etc.
And all that compounds over time so your competitors will start falling further and further behind!
A sales funnel is a system designed to convert potential customers into leads, leads into customers and customers into repeat customers.
In the context of online marketing, it means a series of connected web pages where each page represents a step in the sales funnel.
So the first page is designed to convert visitors into leads by persuading them to give you their contact details. Typically, this means getting their email address.
Then, you reach out to them, pitch them your product or service, and direct them to the next page in your sales funnel, the sales page. Typically, this is done via email and can be automated with email marketing software.
Then, you either take them to your downsell page or to your upsell and cross sell pages.
So the entire funnel that we just described would consist of 5 pages (the landing page, the sales page, the downsell page, the upsell page, and the cross sell page).
You want to create a separate sales funnel for each of your core offers!
You probably already know which countries most of your guests are coming from.
Consider reaching out to travel agencies in those countries to see if those agencies would like to partner with you.
Then work out deals with them so that they would include a stay in your hotel in their travel packages.
A lot of people go to online travel agency websites such as booking.com when they want to find a hotel in a particular destination.
That’s why you need to have a presence on these websites, feature a lot of photos of your hotel, and maintain a high customer rating.
The latter is probably the most important factor that determines the success on these websites.
Say, booking.com has a “Very good: 8+” filter that allows users to filter for hotels that have a customer rating of eight or above.
This means that if your customer rating is below that, people using that filter will not even see your hotel listing!
And it’s not just about the rating itself, it’s also about the quantity of reviews.
Say, if you have a rating of nine with three customer reviews, that’s not particularly reassuring.
But if you have the same rating with 1,000+ customer reviews, the number of reviews will make the rating look credible.
So the question is this: how can you get positive customer reviews on sites like booking.com?
We recommend implementing one of the seven persuasion principles that Robert Cialdini discusses in his book “Influence”: reciprocity.
Humans feel obliged to return favors so if you do someone a favor or give them a gift before asking them for a favor, they will be more likely to do whatever it is that you want them to do.
In this case, if you give every departing guest a gift from your hotel, such as a farewell gift basket that includes:
…they will be more inclined to leave you a positive review.
You can add a P.S. section to the note in the postcard saying that if they enjoyed their stay at your hotel, it would mean the world to you if they could leave a review on booking.com.
This can work especially well if the receptionist that they have probably gotten to know during their stay writes the note and signs it!
Google Search ads are displayed at the top of the search results.
You can use these ads to:
Hootsuite has a free, beginner-friendly guide to Google ads that you might want to check out.
There’s also the free Google ads training provided by Google itself that can help you get started!
Meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram, offers incredible ad targeting capabilities that make it easy to zero in on specific customer segments.
Interestingly, the company also has an Ad Library that allows you to browse all ads that are targeting a particular keyword. You can search for keywords like “hotel in [your location]” to see what your competitors are doing!
Buffer has a free beginner’s guide to Facebook ads that can help you get started!
Working with travel influencers can be another way to reach potential customers.
It should be relatively easy to work out deals where you give them one of your hotel packages for free and they post about their experiences on social media.
You can also build special sales funnels for each influencer where you offer that same hotel package to their audience but with a significant discount.
Influencer Marketing Hub has a free beginner’s guide to influencer marketing on Instagram that can help you get started.
Of course, influencer marketing isn’t limited to Instagram, so you might also want to reach out to travel vloggers on YouTube and TikTok.
Your aim should be to find influencers that can produce results and then build long-term business relationships with them.
Finally, you should create a loyalty program to reward your regular customers and incentivize them to keep coming back to your hotel.
You can set up an alert in your hotel management system when the same person books a stay in your hotel for the third time.
When that happens, put a loyalty program membership card in their farewell gift basket together with instructions on how to activate it and a list of perks included in your loyalty program.
Alternatively, you can instruct your receptionists to give them the farewell gift basket first, then give them the membership card, and explain that you only give this card to your regular guests. That should increase the perceived value of the card and make them feel special!
As for the loyalty program itself, the better the perks, the more likely people will be to join it and keep coming back to your hotel.
You can offer your loyalty program members better rates, free upgrades, free food, free access to premium amenities, free invitations to local events, and so on. Also, make sure to send them a gift on their birthdays!
Our co-founder Russell Brunson used sales funnels to grow our company from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue in less than a decade.
He is widely considered to be one of the top sales funnel experts in the world and has taught thousands of entrepreneurs how they can use sales funnels to grow their businesses.
While this approach to selling online is becoming more and more popular, some industries are lagging behind when it comes to adopting it.
The hotel industry appears to be one of them. It seems that most hotels are still using completely outdated sales strategies.
That means that you can probably get ahead of your competition by harnessing the power of sales funnels!
Russell’s best-selling book “DotCom Secrets” is the best place to start if you want to learn more about this subject.
In this book, he covers:
“DotCom Secrets” is available on Amazon where it has over 2,500 global ratings and a 4.7-star overall rating.
But you can also get it directly from us for free…
All we ask is that you pay for shipping!
So what are you waiting for? 🧐
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