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The end of room service? Not so fast! Reignite traveler demand for your hotel and its room service with these four hotel marketing strategies.

Hotel Marketing Strategies – 5 Types of Travelers Can Revive Hotel Room Service Revenues

While some hotels have decided that the sun has set on room service as one aspect of the service they provide to travelers, others are taking a closer look before deciding to follow suit. Before you decide to discard room service at your hotel, try turning it into a profit center by catering your room service menu to these five different types of travelers.

Like any other tactical part of your operations, room service should be viewed as a tool you can leverage to achieve your overall hotel marketing strategy. Since some hotels are calling it quits as far as room service for travelers, you may be able to carve out a competitive advantage for your hotel and improve your ability to attract new guests and ensure repeat guest visits by coming up with a creative approach to room service.

One size may fit all (or at least most) when it comes to the room at your hotel, but thinking one-dimensionally about your hotel’s room service will not fit all of your guests. Travelers come in all shapes and sizes and numbers, and not everyone is looking for chocolate covered strawberries and champagne. Use these entrepreneur.com-inspired ideas to tweak your hotel room service, turn it into a profit center and create a strategic competitive advantage.

Hotel Marketing – 5 Types of Hotel Guests Turn Room Service into Revenue

Instead of taking a “one-size-fits-all” approach, think about ALL the reasons people might want room service and create segmented room service options tailored to meet their needs, such as room service menu items for these five different types of traveler stays.

1. People who aren’t feeling well

Often the reason that hotel guests stay in and order hotel room service is because they aren’t feeling well or are recuperating from common effects of travel (not sleeping well, staying out too late, attending parties, etc.) These travelers are not looking for exotic, rich room service menu items – they need something simple.

Create a menu of room service options just for recuperating travelers with items like chicken soup, saltines and 7-up that comes with a side of antacid, Tylenol or Tylenol PM.

2. People traveling with small children

Hotel guests traveling with children may prefer room service to corralling kids who are weary from travel or tourist activities, especially if your room service options are perfectly chosen and perfectly sized for them. Think about creating room service options for travelers with kids like peanut butter and jelly picnic trays, pizza and ice cream or even kid-friendly meals bundled with an in-room family movie and fresh-popped popcorn.

3. Couples in search of romance and privacy

Attract more honeymooners to your hotel by creating room service packages with room service menu choices geared just for them. Here is where you will find those chocolate-covered-strawberries and champagne, but you can also think in terms of omelets for 2 and other room service menu options designed for couples.

4. People traveling for work

Your room service items for people traveling for work (or who may even be using your hotel rooms as temporary work spaces, meeting rooms, etc.) should be designed for quick delivery. Beyond food and beverages that you could have delivered within 15 minutes (like bagels, cream cheese and yogurt, or cheese, meat and cracker platters, veggie trays and other options that could easily be scaled for one or two or even a larger group of people) you could also put some non-edibles on the room service menu. Those traveling for work may appreciate being able to order pens, legal pads, and zip drives along with bottled coffee and energy drinks.

5. Hotel guests with special nutrition needs

It’s hard enough to “eat right” at home where people can be sure to include all they need and exclude things they cannot or should not consume; it’s doubly hard to do so while traveling! Think about guests who have special dietary needs due to allergies or who may want to subscribe to various types of vegetarian, gluten-free, low carb, high protein or other weight loss, gain or maintenance diets.

You might also like: 3 Room Service Reboots that Generate Revenue

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If you need a hotel point of sale solution to more-efficiently capture guest’s room service, restaurant and other hotel credit card transactions, we can help. Get a free, no-risk quote for restaurant merchant services, even if you just want to compare it against your current card processing fees.

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They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. If that is true, then as hotel marketing strategies go, improving your hotel’s room service options could be the way to capture the affection and loyalty of guests, and help boost revenue, too.

Hotel Marketing Strategies – 3 Room Service Reboots for Hotel Loyalty and Referrals

In the second of two articles on hotel marketing strategies, we lay out three more tactics that can help you turn room service into a point of differentiation to grow a hospitality business.

In part one we gave the first of our four hotel marketing ideas that can help you reboot your hotel’s room service in order to make it cost effective and create a competitive advantage for you with travelers, which was to stop thinking about room service as an elaborate menu or as a one-size-fits-all menu. Instead, we advise that you think about five different types of hotel guests that might choose your hotel, and create room service options that are personalized based on guest personas.

Now we will continue the conversation with three more hotel marketing strategies based on improving room service in your hotel. And it’s worth pointing out that these same tactics could help you attract customers and boost revenue for a hotel restaurant, not just room service.

Hotel Marketing Strategies – 3 Room Service Reboots Spark Guest Loyalty and Referrals

Add Value

Travelers stuck in their rooms due to weather, fatigue, illness or who are traveling with others might want to watch a movie, read a book or surf the internet.

Create room service options bundled with selections, such as a continental breakfast and WiFi package for travelers or a movie, pizza and popcorn bundle for guests traveling with kids.

Buy copies of a book of the month based on popular reading lists. Or collect books left behind and set up a library where guests can leave something they finished reading and take something they haven’t.

Provide copies of local interest magazines (wineries, restaurants, museums, state parks or local attractions) and encourage local publishers to provide your guests with in-room copies featuring local tourist destinations, shopping and other destinations that will help boost the local economy.

Give Away Samples

Grocery stores, big box retailers and countless other types of retail businesses have been marketing products and even services using samples for decades. Why not promote your room service options the same way?

Set up a guest hospitality station right in the lobby with a few choice samples and photos of some of your most popular room service items. On your display, note how quickly you could have the menu item delivered to their room or point out cost and time benefits vs. local dining options.

Providing guests with a sample of one of your menu items upon check in or arrival in their room could set the stage for an order during their stay, especially if you have done your homework and attempted to provide them with an item personalized to the traveler persona they most represent.

Do the marketing needed to make using and ordering room service as convenient and appealing as possible.

If people don’t know that your room service is something special, you can’t blame them for disregarding it.

Promote services with strategically placed advertising in-room (perhaps by the phone and television), with posters on elevators, hallways and walkways, using digital displays, in engaging lobby displays, leaving pool areas, leaving fitness center, etc.

Don’t neglect digital options in the tactics of your hotel marketing strategies. Send emails featuring your guest-favorite room service items to registered guests a few days before their arrival or even during their stay. Allow them to pre-order and pre-pay for room service items at a discount, digitally. Feature your segmented room service options on your website and social networks.

Give desk staff scripts to deliver based on traveler persona at the time of check in noting the room service option most suitable to them and giving them a room service voucher featuring a special offer at the time of check in (especially for repeat visitors or those loyal to the chain.

If you have a display or samples in the lobby, set up computer (or even old-fashioned paper form and pen) to encourage guests to take advantage of a special offer and order right from the lobby for later.

Over the years hotels have provided room service as a standard, but many have done so without approaching room service as a strategic part of their hotel marketing mix or expecting it to be a profitable and important part of the hotel guest experience. With hotels discontinuing room service due to lack of ROI, the door is opened to others to turn it into a selling point that helps to differentiate their hotel and become more profitable.

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We offer hotel financing that can be ideal for hotel renovations or improving room service as part of hotel guest amenities. In addition, we can partner with your hotel to create an efficient hotel credit card processing solution that boosts revenues through easy impulse buying and hotel loyalty marketing.

Get more information or request hotel financing rates using the quick quote form below.

 

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