Room service has a direct impact on guest experience, guest reviews, and hotel reputation. Additionally, hotel services represent a way to increase revenue. Here's how to take room service to the next level and make guests' stay more comfortable.
Update Your Room Service Menu
Your hotel services should match your guests' needs to drive demand. To understand customer preferences, analyze orders. Determine what guests most often choose from the hotel restaurant menu and what services they use. If the data is not enough, you can conduct a survey. Ask guests to suggest what they would like to have in the hotel and what existing services or products they like the most. Then, based on the results of data analysis, you can adjust the menu, as well as, purchasing volumes to keep the most popular menu items always available.
To stand out from competitors, consider offering a unique experience. This could include special menus (e.g., vegetarian, seasonal, or festive), services for children, branded hotel merchandise, honeymoon packages, etc.
To stand out from competitors, consider offering a unique experience. This could include special menus (e.g., vegetarian, seasonal, or festive), services for children, branded hotel merchandise, honeymoon packages, etc.
Leverage Digital Solutions
Digital menus started gaining popularity in hotels during the Covid pandemic. With the rise of food delivery apps and online service ordering, digital menus have become default choice among users. In the digital age, paper menus seem old-fashioned and less convenient compared to electronic menus. Implementing a digital room service menu offers several advantages to hotels:
- Ease of use. The online menu is available to guests immediately after connecting to Wi-Fi or scanning a QR code. The user sees the services, photos of dishes, and their composition. It makes the menu more appealing and prompts more orders.
- Reduced staff workload. Automated order collection and transmission free up staff to focus on other tasks.
- Reduced errors. Digital order processing minimizes mistakes. It ensures that orders are not lost, items are not confused, and orders are delivered on time.
- Personalization. Tracking each guest's order history enables personalized offers for future visits.
- Rapid updates. Adding seasonal dishes, discounts, and special offers to the digital menu is easy. You only need to upload new data, rather than printing out sheets as you need to do with paper menus.
- Using new engaging content. Stories is one of the most popular formats on social media, and it recently appeared in the Hoop app. Hotels can now add "stories" and announce their special promotions, seasonal menus, and current offers. This can boost visibility and audience engagement.
- Recommendations. Implementing recommendation systems like Hoop enables upselling by suggesting additional items with each dish. You can add a list of extras that will be visible to the customer when ordering, such as toppings for cheesecakes or pastries when ordering coffee.
- Streamlined data access for hotel owners and managers. With digital menus, it is easy to upload data and prepare reports. This helps track sales dynamics and adjust offers.
- Increased revenue. Hoop users see a 20% increase in room service sales. This is thanks to personalized offers, instant promotion notifications, and recommendation systems.
- Ease of use. The online menu is available to guests immediately after connecting to Wi-Fi or scanning a QR code. The user sees the services, photos of dishes, and their composition. It makes the menu more appealing and prompts more orders.
- Reduced staff workload. Automated order collection and transmission free up staff to focus on other tasks.
- Reduced errors. Digital order processing minimizes mistakes. It ensures that orders are not lost, items are not confused, and orders are delivered on time.
- Personalization. Tracking each guest's order history enables personalized offers for future visits.
- Rapid updates. Adding seasonal dishes, discounts, and special offers to the digital menu is easy. You only need to upload new data, rather than printing out sheets as you need to do with paper menus.
- Using new engaging content. Stories is one of the most popular formats on social media, and it recently appeared in the Hoop app. Hotels can now add "stories" and announce their special promotions, seasonal menus, and current offers. This can boost visibility and audience engagement.
- Recommendations. Implementing recommendation systems like Hoop enables upselling by suggesting additional items with each dish. You can add a list of extras that will be visible to the customer when ordering, such as toppings for cheesecakes or pastries when ordering coffee.
- Streamlined data access for hotel owners and managers. With digital menus, it is easy to upload data and prepare reports. This helps track sales dynamics and adjust offers.
- Increased revenue. Hoop users see a 20% increase in room service sales. This is thanks to personalized offers, instant promotion notifications, and recommendation systems.
Train your staff
Room service staff must be able to respond quickly to guest requests and maintain high service quality. It's also important that all team members know how to deal with stressful situations and address negative feedback. Conducting regular training and having workshops with real-life scenarios as training material are crucial. Addressing communication errors and problem-solving strategies are also crucial. Since the hotel staff is responsible for the quality of room service and direct interaction with guests, the consistency of staff training and improving their skills will substantially impact guests’ loyalty.
Summary
To sum up, room service requires attention to detail and a constant strive to provide the best possible guest experience. You need to be prepared to analyze the results and make changes to create the best possible conditions and achieve growth in services sales.
