One of the hallmarks of the hotel service industry is excellent room service. It has played a crucial role in boosting customer satisfaction for nearly a century. Today, hoteliers are finding ways to transform room service options to boost sales, ensure guest safety and make everything more convenient for customers.
An important key to improve the overall quality of room service offerings is to use available data to identify trends and find areas of improvement. After analyzing your collected information, you can apply different service techniques, create new offers, diversify dining options and revamp your services.
Below are five easy steps you can use to increase room service sales as you delight your guests.
Step 1: Review Your Room Service Data
It’s important to never update your menu or create new promotions without understanding customer data. Hotels need to review room service trends to provide an excellent customer experience.
Some may think that offering free room service should be enough. However, if your guests don’t value that offer, it will have very little impact on your sales. You’ll only be wasting money and other essential resources.
It is best to take the guesswork out of the equation to be more efficient with property management. Some of the crucial sources of information include:
- Your hotel records: You must pull customer data for the previous two years.
- Room service receipts: In-room dining receipts and other room service orders can give you significant insights into popular menu options.
- External data reviews: You can use the information provided by data-driven companies to understand the latest industry trends, including popular room service options.
- App data: If you provide customers with a hotel app, that tool can provide you with excellent insight into your customers. You can find information about popular orders, user behavior and preferred payment methods.
Step 2: Revamp Your Hotel Room Menu
After identifying the trends in the last two years, you can determine what offers and items were more successful. Next, review your menu and focus on the ones that created more sales. Finally, consider the following action items:
- Identify the top five food and beverage items based on your receipts. Compare that information to other room service data in your industry. You may find you’re offering something unique that your competitors haven’t discovered yet.
- Review your current menu and ensure that it includes the five most trending foods and beverages you found earlier.
- Find the bottom five menu items and see if you still have those in your current menu. Update your menu by removing these worst-selling options, or you can retain them but offer them only as add-ons.
- Consider removing all the unpopular items in your current menu and replacing them with items that performed better.
Another important detail about your customer data is a breakdown of your clientele. Each hotel is different since they serve a different customer base. For example, if your hotel attracts more families, expect more family-friendly menu options to become more popular in your room service receipt data. On the other hand, if your hotel caters to more adults, expect to see more wine and alcohol ordered than fruit juice and other beverages.
Step 3: Offer Digital Ordering Options
If you still don’t have a hotel concierge solution app, it’s time to develop one. Your hotel app is a crucial tool that can make everything more convenient for your guests. It should do more than just help your customers book rooms. You can add features like room service orders and meal schedules.
Hotel apps allow you to reach out to guests and display more offers, room upgrades and other services such as gym time, taxi hires and spa treatments. In addition, you can include a chat feature to facilitate easier communication with your staff.
Step 4: Improve Your Service Options to Enhance Customer Experience
Now that you have insights into your customers’ preferences, you can improve your services and make options more personalized. This strategy can provide more incentives for customers to come back for more. Individual touches like serving their favorite menu items, offering trending drinks and providing extras like a complimentary card, spa service and snacks for guests celebrating anniversaries or birthdays.
Another area you need to consider is your customer type and how fast you deliver room service orders. For instance, if you have a few business class clients, you should prioritize their orders. These guests are often busy and will appreciate it if you value their time by serving their orders within minutes.
As you track your data, you should also mind your current capacity, especially during the peak season. Hotel industry players have experienced capacity issues through the years and, at times, find it hard to fulfill orders quickly and efficiently.
Studies show that more guests today have become accustomed to the food and beverage operating model where they can order food using an app and expect delivery within 30 minutes or less.
To cope with this trend and growing customer demand, hotel owners have collaborated with food operators operating ghost kitchens – food preparation businesses with no physical dining areas and only offer food deliveries. Ghost kitchens can improve your capacity and delivery speed, allow you to offer more menu items and reduce costs since you’re not hiring additional kitchen crews.
You can improve the overall customer experience and increase sales by making these adjustments in your room service offerings.
Step 5: Launch Your Campaign to Boost Sales by Applying the Latest Techniques
Launch your latest campaign to boost room service sales on your hotel app. A simple add-on or announcement can capture their attention and browse your new offerings.
Apart from that, here are some more ways to let your guests know about your latest room service offers:
- Use traditional flyers
- Post some banners on stairwells and other areas
- Give away coupons and gift cards
- Leave some free samples in the lobby
- Use elevator advertising
Checking Out
The crucial step to boosting room service sales is understanding your customers and current hotel industry trends. Gathering important insights allows you to identify what works best for your enterprise. At innRoad, we equip your business with the state of the art tools that give you reliable market insight, allowing you to delight guests and boost sales. Speak to one of our advisors today to learn more about our award-winning software.
