Meetingselect
The global pandemic has brought the hotel and meetings industry to its knees. Many hotels have lost significant revenues. This article hopes to make some creative suggestions to help increase hotel revenue.
Yes, we know. Some of the ideas may not be suitable to your venue. The goal here is to encourage out-of-the-box thinking. Here are our ideas for hotels to increase hotel revenue.
1 - Turn Your Rooms Into Work Spaces
Everyone is working from home these days. Having a dedicated office space and meeting rooms may help boost your business. It’s a fact that a lot of people struggle to work from home, especially with kids around.
Having a workspace for local business professionals (and maybe even university students) could help increase hotel revenue. Hotels and venues can even create packages solely catered to this particular audience. Furthermore, Hotels can use this as a marketing opportunity to encourage this audience to use the hotel’s facilities to be more productive and innovative.
2 - Offer Hybrid Meeting Options
Hotels and venues can go one step further by having meeting rooms with hybrid capabilities. While it sounds like a heavy investment, hybrid meetings are here to stay and many venues & hotels are already hybrid-meeting friendly. According to Meeting Spotlight, 73% of event planners will run hybrid meetings in 2020 alone. Investing in the hybrid meeting trend now could be a long-term opportunity for future growth & expansion.
Offering a hybrid meeting ready venue? List with us today (it’s free)
3 - Enhance the Cultural Experience
Various surveys show that millennials especially value experiences over things. Hotels can capitalise on this, appealing to tourists by creating cultural experiences.
By creating an experience that shows the beauty of the country, city or even local area can be a great way to attract more people and drive hotel revenue.
Inviting local performers, having some traditional dishes or any event that conveys the culture of the area is a great strategy to increase hotel room sales. The great thing is a lot of these events can happen outdoors so that they are also COVID-friendly.
4 - Offer VIP Events & Services
Very few people travel these days. For those that do and are willing to pay for it, hotels can offer exclusive VIP experiences to increase revenue.
VIP events could range from a full range of massage and spa services to a personalized experiences at one of your restaurants. Further, you can offer VIP rooms for a discount as a special incentive.
5 - Increase Hotel Revenue: Make Your Hotel Pet-Friendly
Dog’s have always been the man’s (and woman’s) best friend. For a lot of people pets are part of the family and they travel with their pets.
Pet welcoming hotels who connect with a canine loving community can reap the benefits and increase hotel revenue. You could include a pet-offering in your menu, have recommendation for dog-friendly walks outside, or hold and promote pet-friendly events.
6 - Turn Your Hotel Into a Romantic Getaway Spot
Whether it's Valentine's Day, a honeymoon or just a romantic getaway for two, the hotel room is important. Hence, there’s a lot of things you can do to promote romantic getaways at your hotel:
- Turn your hotel room into a restaurant
- Set up a dinner for two with good lighting and candles.
- Play romantic music in the background
- Turn the hotel room into a dance floor
- Offer star gazing or sunset watching on the hotel roof top terrace
- Prepare some pampering sets and offer them as part of the package
- The ideas are endless here...
Turning your hotel into a romantic getaway experience can attract audiences that would like to spend a night away. Plus, you’re building a loyal customer base of people that may return in the future.
7 - Market Your Rooms as “Self-Isolation” Friendly
Across the country and the world, hotel providers have prepared for a Coronavirus safe environment and Post-Covid-19 Future. Rooms suitable for self-isolation may be one of the areas how hotels can pivot to maintain or even increase revenues.
This will not only show compassion and empathy but will also help hotels recoup some lost revenue. Furthermore, this service could be extended to essential workers i.e. healthcare workers.
8 - Increase Hotel Revenue By Offering e-Sports Facilities
E-Sports is a booming industry with a young audience, and Fortnite tournaments attracts huge crowds.
Hotels can capitalise on this and gain a lot of revenue. Having dedicated rooms for participants and spectators with state of the art equipment, or perhaps collaborating with a big player in the E-Sports Industry could significantly help hotels. If this turns out to be successful it could be an initiative that hotels do even after the pandemic is over and could turn into an additional revenue stream.
Since this caters to a younger demographic, hotels may also end up having an entirely new customer base which they can develop into loyal followers and brand ambassadors. I believe this is a very creative sales idea for hotels to jump on and could dramatically increase hotel revenue in the long-run.
9 - Embrace Millennials as a New Target Audience
Millennial's are more fearless than any other generation and are probably the one’s who will start travelling once the world gets back to some sort of normality. Therefore, it’s important hotels start planning for this audience once demand starts to pick up.
Millennial's are tech savvy, they value trust, transparency and brand authenticity. If hotels want to recover quickly from the pandemic, focusing on attracting millennial's will go a long way.
10 - Increase Hotel Revenue: Market to Local Tourists
Since a lot of people are not travelling internationally, hotels should appeal to domestic travelers and tourists to increase their revenue. This can be done by hosting events and offering experiences that can’t be found or done in the places where people are travelling from. Something which is exclusive to the region where the hotel is based.
11 - Provide Meal Delivery Options
Hotels have a lot of great restaurants with fantastic food, made by well-renowned chefs. Hotels can keep the revenue flowing during and after lock-down by offering meal delivery to customers at a discounted price.
This can be done by hotels arranging their own system of meal delivery or collaborating with other organisations such as Deliveroo or Uber Eats to boost revenue.
Conclusion
Hotels & MICE service providers need to embrace new revenue avenues even if they sound crazy at first. Temporary offerings and deals allow you to attract new audiences, set yourself apart from the competition and increase hotel revenue.
If you haven’t already listed your venues with us, make sure you do this today.
List your venue on Meetingselect (it’s completely free).
