Spas and hospitality companies leave money on the table in many ways. Here’s how to stop doing that and increase hospitality revenue.
Are you losing out on potential revenue? There are many ways that spas and hospitality companies leave money on the table, some more obvious than others.
Now more than ever, it’s important to capture as much revenue as possible, to keep our operations running and our people working. Let’s look at some of the bigger picture changes you can make and the more granular impact they will have on your bottom line.
Here are three strategic ways to increase hospitality revenue.
Get integrated & employ systems thinking
Systems thinking has been defined as “a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system’s constituent parts interrelate and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems.” This is in contrast with another common approach of evaluating systems separately, and can be applied to any business in any sector. Read more about systems thinking here.
We all know that the customer journey and customer experience are circular processes, rather than linear ones. But do we employ this same thinking to our business operations? Do you, when thinking about a software system, for example, consider how that system and its setup will impact employee scheduling and payroll, which in turn impacts employee experience, which impacts guest experience, which impacts revenue streams and occupancy, which impacts employee scheduling and payroll? Oh, look! We’re back to the beginning. Meanwhile, all of these things impact occupancy and revenue.
There are far too many examples of how systems thinking can be applied to go through here, but let’s also consider this through a lens of integrations: hotels and resorts often regard wellness amenities as an adjunct or afterthought rather than an integral part of overall operations. There are many ways in which this can cost a company. Any process that requires a guest to make a separate payment or go through a separate process is going to create a barrier. Integrated systems remove these barriers.
An excellent example is the Disney parks and resort experience. Disney’s guests – through the Magic Band from 2013-2021, and soon to be through the Disney My Experience app – can move through theme parks, dining, shopping, recreation, and even across brands, without interruption. This is a mastery of integration that drives revenue through the simple fact that the guest is not startled out of the flow of their experience because of having to pay for something separately, make an outside booking, or share their information over and over again.
Similarly, a hotel or resort’s Property Management System (PMS) should be able to look up a guest’s profile for a spa reservation and charge the treatment to the guest’s room. As simple as this sounds, to accomplish it, the spa system needs to be integrated with the hotel’s PMS system. Integrations create these seamless customer experiences by allowing you to easily maintain customer records, transactions, and interactions across all systems. A cloud-based software solution is key, as it can be accessed from anywhere and information shared across locations.
More benefits of integrations include the following:
Saving time – by automating a manual task, or expediting a process
Centralised data – multiple solutions feeding data into a central system (ERP, PMS, EMR, etc.) allows for a user to access what would normally be ‘siloed’ data, in one, central place
Greater accuracy in numbers – integrated systems reduce the risk for error in numbers that may have been originally captured manually (ie. human error)
Integrations are essential for driving revenue, keeping operations running smoothly and optimizing guest experience.
Book4Time integrates with many PMS systems including Opera (Oracle Hospitality), Infor, Guestline, Galaxy, Agilysys and many more, to ensure that hoteliers can centrally manage their guest accounts, and provide an excellent customer experience.
To read the rest of this paper and get more ideas for how to increase revenue, click here.
Spa Executive is published by Book4Time, the leader in guest management, revenue and mobile solutions for the most exclusive spas, hotels, and resorts around the globe. Learn more at book4time.com.