How do you design a successful rate plan for your hotel? Why are some rate plans more successful than others?
When you create rate plans, try and tap into your inner hotel shopper psyche. Is your customer planning to visit your hotel for business, or pleasure? What are their expectations when they make their initial date search? When they’re visiting your hotel website, what do the images they see on the homepage represent? What do your images and copy in the Bedrooms, Food and Beverage, Golf and Spa pages represent?
Every rate plan has purpose. However, not every rate plan has a valid purpose. Is the rate plan there to, for example, keep your chef happy that you’re promoting the restaurant, or is there a real financial value for the hotel in having it there?
Below are 4 examples of the most profitable rate plans hotels typically offer, along with a breakdown of why they’re valuable and how to use them.
Offer a room only rate with a Best Rate Guarantee to your own website. In short, no matter the scenario, guarantee for guests that the best available rate for your hotel will always be when they book direct. Here’s a study from Cornell that gets into the specifics of how customers prefer to see BAR displayed on your site.
A word of warning: offering this rate plan to any third parties or other openly available sources opens up the opportunity for them to margin test your rate to secure a booking through their own website.
Margin testing is when an OTA tests the margins of the rate you are providing them, usually by taking 2% – 4% off the rate and selling the rate cheaper online. The hotel will still receive the correct rate for the booking, but the OTA will have taken the hit in commission by 2% – 4%. This percentage won’t concern them, as in most cases they are still making a further 12% and in some cases 15%. You can eliminate this risk by only offering “room only” rate plans directly on your official hotel website.
Bed and Breakfast rates are one step up from Room Only rates. They are the first opportunity to upsell your guests, so be creative! Be descriptive when you tell your guests what is included.
Make sure to incentivise them to book Bed and
Depending on your hotel’s location – for example, city centre versus near the airport – the rate plan including breakfast and savings may be all the more important. Make sure you’ve got ‘Breakfast’ in the headline.
Every hotel wants guests in their restaurant. Guests in your restaurant also come with the potential of indirect revenue spend in the bar before or after their meal – but how do you evaluate this?
There are two ways to look at it. A busy bar means other guests will come in. A good atmosphere at the start or end of their evening will attract some guests in for a nightcap, and secondly, it may attract walk in guests. Offering that free welcome drink gets people in for their first drink, and the savings may convince them to stay for a second.
Why should a guest book the dinner package in your hotel, then? Again, it comes down to incentive.
At this stage, consider reviewing your dinner supplement. What’s the allocation the Food and Beverage department gets from a dinner package?
Consider a guest who has stayed in your hotel previously and dined in the restaurant. They might remember that the early bird is €30.00 per person for a three course meal. Then, if the supplement is €60.00 on top of the Bed and Breakfast rate, they know they are paying the same rate they’d be paying if they walked into the restaurant.
Offer a welcome drink as part of the package to your direct booker, or potentially a €20.00 Spa or Golf credit if that option is available to you.
Advanced purchase rate plans are, of course, an extremely popular rate plan across all hotels. However, there are certain aspects you must identify and focus on if you are offering this package, or planning to.
Regardless of the type of rate plans you’re creating, the name of the rate plan is paramount. Make it is as descriptive as possible. Remember, a lot of your guests are likely visiting your website via a mobile device, so the rate plan description may not be clear or as obvious as it is on desktop. Take a look at your analytics to find out how many visitors you get on mobile, and make sure you look at your rate plans on your phone so you know how they display.
The rate plan names we’ve used above are strong messages for why a guest should book direct when searching for their next hotel stay. You should reinforce this message throughout all your online advertising, and even on your home page with a call-out box or a different feature to draw attention.
