What people get wrong

Most hotel upsell tooling defaults to: surface every possible add-on to every guest at every opportunity. Want a room upgrade? An early check-in? A late check-out? A bottle of champagne? Spa? Airport transfer? Pet bowl? Pillow menu?

The result feels like an airline website. Guests learn to skim past the entire flow because most of what’s surfaced is irrelevant to them, and the relevant stuff gets lost.

Worse, when guests do take an upsell from this kind of pushy flow, a meaningful percentage end up resentful about it. They book the welcome bottle of wine, they enjoy the wine, they leave a 7-out-of-10 score with an open-text complaint that the hotel “tried to upsell us at every step.” We have the data on this.

What the tasteful version looks like

The tasteful pre-arrival upsell follows three rules.

1. Surface no more than two add-ons per guest

Picking the right two requires actually using context. A couple booking for an anniversary gets the welcome wine and the late check-out. A solo business traveller arriving Monday night for two nights gets the early breakfast and the fast wifi upgrade. A family of four with a 6am flight on departure day gets the early-breakfast-to-go and the airport transfer.

Most guests will get neither — and that’s fine. Surfacing nothing is better than surfacing the wrong thing.

2. Tone matters more than copy

“Would you like to add a welcome drink to your stay?” sounds like an airline. “We can have a glass of something cold waiting for you when you arrive — let us know if you’d like that” sounds like a hotel. Same offer, completely different feel.

3. Test for the resentment signal

If your upsell flow is good, the post-stay NPS shouldn’t be lower for guests who took an upsell than for guests who didn’t. Track this. If you see a 0.5+ NPS gap between “took an upsell” and “didn’t”, your flow is too pushy. Adjust.

What it looks like at scale

Across the Innquire customer base, the average pre-arrival upsell revenue per stay is somewhere around £6-£12 — meaningfully meaningful for a 40-room property running 80% occupancy, more than meaningful for a 200-room small chain.

Crucially, the NPS of upsell-taking guests is higher than the NPS of non-taking guests, by about 1.4 points on average. Guests who get the breakfast they actually wanted are happier than guests who didn’t.

The principle

The pre-arrival upsell is, fundamentally, an act of hospitality. You are anticipating what your guest will want and offering to handle it before they have to ask. Done well, it’s the kind of thing your concierge would do for you in person at a great hotel.

Done badly, it’s a pop-up.

The technology can do either; the question is which one your tooling is configured to do.