When delving into the realm of Room Types and their supplements, a crucial consideration comes to the forefront: maintaining a proportional balance in accordance with the number of rooms your property boasts.
It’s paramount to strike a harmonious equilibrium, as an excessive array of room types can introduce confusion, not only for guests seeking clarity in their choices but also for your team tasked with upselling and proficiently managing the diverse offerings. Beyond mere categorization, the key lies in crafting room types that go beyond mere labels, adding substantial value to the guest experience. These thoughtfully designed types should serve as incentives, enticing guests to willingly invest in specific amenities that enhance their overall stay. This strategic approach not only simplifies decision-making for guests but also streamlines operational efficiency for your team, fostering a seamless and gratifying experience for all.
What are Room Type Supplements?
Room type supplements are additional charges that the guest pays for a higher category of rooms, such as Deluxe, Executive, or Suites. These rooms don’t need to be bigger in terms of area or have better appliances. However, they do need to come with additional benefits that could make them more attractive for the guests.
Some examples of room type supplements are:
- Tangible like additional space, a bigger bed, a balcony, etc.
- Intangible like sea view, prepaid minibar, access to golf course, etc.
What is the Criteria for creating Room Type Supplements?
Almost every accommodation has more than one type of room. Even the smallest detail can differentiate two rooms, which allows you to charge a different price for each one.
First, we need to take a closer look at the rooms and identify potential selling opportunities, such as different bed size (queen, king, twin), an extra sofa bed, two armchairs instead of one, slightly more space in the room, extra amenities attached to rooms, etc.
In terms of extra amenities, it can be either a free drink and snack from the mini bar, additional bathrobe and slippers, higher floors, views or even an extra floor or a whole apartment. Anything that adds more value to the guest experience can be the criteria for creating a room type supplement.
How to Charge for Room Type Supplements?
In order to find the ideal amount to charge for different room types, we have to do two things.
- Identify the worth of what we are offering in different room categories.
- The amount that guests would be willing to pay.
We need to keep in mind that if we overprice the room, we will be hurting the business, since most of the time, you’ll have to give out free upgrades to ensure occupancy.
Hence, in order to benchmark our room type supplement, we can look at our competitors and research how they differentiate their room types. That will help us place our supplements competitively in the market to gain additional revenue.
Why are Room Type Supplements Useful in Generating Additional Revenue?
Room Type Supplements are one of the easiest ways of generating additional revenue. Technically, once the supplements are set up correctly, there’s no need for an extra effort from anyone.
Once we ensure competitive pricing, guests will see the value in higher room types and book them more aggressively. Over time, this will lead to higher revenue without any additional operating cost.
How to Use Room Type Supplements to Maximize Revenue?
In order for room type supplements to maximize revenue, we need to make sure everyone is engaged. Whenever guests come to check-in, the team should be able to offer an upgrade for a nominal price. In fact, an email informing guests about such an opportunity right before the check-in date wouldn’t hurt!
This strategy works best as the guests perceive it as “just x amount extra” instead of adding it to the total price they were paying when booking.
Furthermore, as we all know we have limited number of rooms in each accommodation, some will always be higher priced than the rest. This is especially true in high season, with families staying as a group or around events in the city. These are all good opportunities to charge different room type supplements while considering multiple factors.
Conclusion
In conclusion, room type supplements are very important to showcase a variety of amenities on offer. Our rooms are perishable, and hence, if we don’t sell them for one night, we can never resell them for that specific night.
We need to take every opportunity to capture the maximum amount of revenue, even if by a small amount. It’s crucial to identify the potential selling points for our rooms, creating specific categories, and setting the correct supplement that is competitive in the market.
Furthermore, giving out free upgrades when we know that guests are celebrating an occasion or if we know that we won’t be able to sell the higher priced rooms is another good way to build relationship and loyalty.
Overall, we can see that room type supplements offer a range of benefits in the long run, and don’t require much effort to be set up.
Tools like PMS (Property Management System) and CM (Channel Manager) only assist lodging establishments in operating more simply, saving time, and being more efficient compared to not using them. However, that is not the root of growth or the challenges faced in the accommodation business. If you want to effectively manage OTA channels and create stable growth, you should have a clear understanding of how OTA platforms operate, such as their nature, operational models, and how they display, calculate displayed prices, and collect prices (after deducting commissions). Of course, larger hotels that want to approach it systematically will do it synchronously from the beginning, but smaller lodging establishments wanting to reduce operational costs should overlook it and focus on optimizing display and providing outstanding customer care.
Synthesized by: OTA Lyst
