Clever New Way Hotels Will Charge More For The Same Room – GodSaveThePoints
Clever New Way Hotels Will Charge More For The Same Room
Thanks to new ‘attribute based’ technology, there’s no escaping that the sales process for hotel rooms will change more in the next two years than in the last 25.
At the Skift ‘Future Of Lodging Forum’ in London, Hilton championed their cutting edge new “attribute based” sales technology built in the cloud which aims to make it easier for guests to get exactly what they want out of a hotel stay, particularly when booking direct.
It all started quite simply: guaranteed connecting rooms at the time of booking. It sounds basic, but this was previously a disjointed process which required manual contact with the hotel desk to request and hope.
Hilton developed its own sales system which is able to integrate with each hotel on a more detailed “mapping” level that can automatically block specific connecting rooms, rather than just saying something to the hotel system like book two standard rooms, with the subsequent, manual request to connect in the reservation notes.
No one likes that stress. The system solved that.
It’s been a remarkable triumph with more than 1 million of these connecting rooms booked thus far according to Hilton, but it’s nowhere near the complete vision of what “attribute based” sales can bring. The vision is mega sales personalization and with that usually comes opportunity — both for guest satisfaction and revenue.
A hotel may have 50 deluxe rooms and currently charge the same price for each, but in reality most are different.
Some will be corner deluxe rooms, some will have specific views like river, skyline or courtyard. Others will have the room justified in different directions and many will be spread across varying floors and varying distances from the elevators.
These things are already “productized” to an extent, but not as far as they could be. For now, it’s being referred to as personalization, but it’s an entry point.
Hilton is arguably the first seizing on the opportunity to find new margins by defining these differences and individual guest preferences but they certainly won’t be the last.
Hilton teased that this new sales and hotel integration system is an opportunity to better personalize the sales flow. Hotels will be able to map and uniquely identify the things which make specific rooms different and that will create opportunities to charge different prices accordingly.
Pricing won’t just be standard, deluxe, junior suite or suite anymore. It will be further fragmented by what matters to the guest, rather than an internal label like deluxe. It might be a room close to the elevator with a South facing view and a larger screen.
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Categories: Trends