Marketing personalisation is big news for modern hoteliers, as today’s hotel guest no longer craves uniformity but diversity of location, hotel appearance and experience. The hotel sector is traditionally good at adapting to new developments, and so it makes sense that this niche has been one of the first to fully embrace the possibilities of marketing personalisation.

Often used as a tactic to help entice customers to make a purchase, the possibilities for marketing personalisation to help maximise RevPAR (revenue per available room) is a less often explored subject. Hotels are often forced to drive down their room prices in order to boost occupancy levels and avoid empty rooms – but how can you utilise this new development of personalisation to improve your own hotel revenue?

1. Adapt Your Length of Stay Restrictions

This might be considered a traditional tactic amongst many modern hoteliers, but imposing restrictions upon the length of stay within your hotel can help drive up revenue per available room by creating a sense of urgency and exclusivity, therefore heightening the conceivable cost of your hotel rooms. This strategy can be further improved through the clever use of personalisation by providing options for different rate levels or segmenting your market to display different deals. This will require some adaptation to your existing strategy unless already implemented, but there are great potential results to your RevPAR, particularly if this strategy is adopted during high-footfall times of year for your hotel when demand for your rooms is at its peak.

2. Enhance Occupancy Options

By providing customers with more optional add-ons within the booking process, you can help take control of your revenue management without the need for too much compromise. Why not offer access to a specific room or service as a personalised addition to your customer’s hotel room booking? This is a great way to increase the perceived value of your offering. The actual room or service should be tailored to the user, meaning there is room for error if you haven’t got a good handle on your customer and his / her preferences.



3. Review Your Room Types

Reviewing your room types for hotel guest suitability helps you to ensure you don’t downplay or undersell your accommodation, whilst further market segmentation (for example pitching a particular type of room to business travellers, and another to leisure subsets) allows you to mix up your revenue system while providing your hotel guests with the great stay they expect from your hotel.

4. Continue personalisation offsite

Marketing personalisation to drive more bookings shouldn’t be confined just to your website itself. To achieve your revenue per available room targets, it should be a consistent thread through all of your marketing activity – from in-app messages to transactional emails and email marketing. Personalisation has its roots in email marketing and something as simple as using the guest’s name in your email greeting can help to create a closer relationship and build brand loyalty. Of course, you can take this much further and ensure content is also tailored to the guests’ interests and travel habits to ensure mailshots are perceived as being personalised and relevant.