While other continents follow a similar pattern, here in North America the holiday season typically runs from the US Thanksgiving through to National Hangover Day (also known as New Year’s Day). Based on the data from some of the markets where we are currently consulting hotel clients, the holiday season for 2021 is on pace for some gangbuster occupancy numbers.

Rather than a panacea, what we stress amidst a short-term glut of travelers is to focus on TRevPAR (total revenue per guest) and getting as much prearrival capture as possible. Hotels need a big win here, not just a steady-state holiday season, and it’s up to you to make this happen.

To the former of these two components, TRevPAR means that you must know your guests in terms of what demographics and what attitudinal clusters will spend the most onsite and not just put heads in beds. It’s one thing to manage rate on the OTAs in order to grow occupancy as quickly as possible so that your weekly pickup reports look good; it’s a whole other to find and incentive those guests who are also going to fill restaurant tables, book spa appointments and purchase something in the gift shop. Having rich data integrations – either natively through a strong PMS or filtered into a CRM/CDP – is essential for identifying the characteristics of those high-TRevPAR guests in order to develop marketing campaigns that target lookalike consumers.

To the latter point, the crucial element underpinning pre-stay ancillary reservations is the ominous and ongoing labor shortage impacting hotels all over the world. We’ve seen hotels have to cut off yielded weekends at 85% occupancy simply because room attendants couldn’t be found. We’ve also witnessed hotel bars having to close at 10pm, rather than stay open until 1am or 2am, because the single bartender left standing had to close out and go home. That’s money left on the table!

Hence, the more revenue you have on the books in advance of the holiday stretch – be it guestrooms, F&B, spa or other – the better you can plan ahead in terms of confirming staff availability, incentivizing extra shifts or recruiting temps, all so that you have the flexibility in frontline labor to maximize that onsite capture come gameday. To this end, the ideal situation would be to have guests reserve dining, spa, welcome amenities and other purchases directly off the booking engine after confirming their guestroom purchases. A runner-up would be to personally call or email each guest soon after the confirmation goes through to secure those ancillary reservations.

And then, only once your hotel guests are satisfied would you open up your restaurant or spa to non-hotel customers, thereby minimizing the chances of a hotel guest being left without a dining spot or a spa treatment availability because they failed to reserve in advance. Prompting guests in your messaging that the holiday season will be especially busy would also help to untangle any dissatisfaction here.

We hope that our prediction about high travel numbers plays out in your territory, but ultimately it’s your job to make it happen and the execution has to start right now in order to get that big win.