Differentiate your offer: how to create hotel packages that attract guests

A hotel package is a promotional offer that combines lodging with additional services such as meals, unique experiences, or special amenities.

Therefore, hotel packages, on the one hand, attract customers by offering a complete and cost-effective experience, and on the other hand, provide an opportunity for accommodations to differentiate themselves from competitors and increase their profitability.

Here are the main benefits you could enjoy by introducing hotel packages into your accommodation’s sales strategy.

Packages help attract customers with an affordable offer that differentiates the hotel from the competition. This not only serves to increase tourist demand for the facility offering them, but also to significantly increase its revenue, provided the packages are managed as part of a broader revenue management strategy.

But that's not all, because hotel packages − by encouraging the occupancy of more rooms and the sale of additional services − allow costs to be spread over a greater volume of sales, thereby improving a crucial metric for any business: profit margins.

Another major benefit of hotel packages is their long-term impact on customer perception. By offering packages that respond to guests' wants and needs (or, even better, stimulate needs not yet expressed), hotels can increase the perceived value of the stay.

This leads to greater customer satisfaction, which results in increased positive reviews and word-of-mouth referrals among friends, family, and colleagues. Over time, this elevates the hotel's reputation and helps increase demand.

Usually, an establishment that sells hotel packages as part of its marketing strategy promotes them by publishing them on one or more dedicated pages within its website (these pages are called landing pages), so as to send interested people directly to the dedicated page.

The creation of these landing pages also has an additional advantage in terms of ranking on search engines such as Google. Within the pages, in fact, keywords will be used that are able to attract the attention of more qualified users and therefore more likely to book.

Obviously, to be appealing, packages must bring tangible benefits to travelers. Knowing these benefits will help you understand how to better build your offer.

Economic savings is one of the main attractive factors: your guest only needs to compare the price of the package with the standard rate to immediately understand the economic advantage. If you want to focus on this element, it is therefore essential to emphasize the price difference in the right way.

The best solutions are:

• show the standard price crossed out
• show the percentage discount (200€ - 25% = 150€)
• or quantify the cost savings (save as much as 50€)

In addition to convenience, hotel packages offer the huge benefit of guests not having to go crazy in planning their trip. If you want to bet on this advantage you will have to communicate the convenience of making a single reservation and having everything programmed with a single contact for all the questions and necessary information.

An additional benefit for travelers in certain packages is that they may have access to services or experiences that would not otherwise be available to the public or that are particularly popular and therefore difficult to book successfully on their own.

If you want to communicate this advantage you will need to clearly express that the proposed service is available only through the purchase of the package and that it is exclusive to the accommodation offering it.

In the face of so many advantages, however, the creation of hotel packages requires careful strategy. It is not advisable to "invent" packages solely on the basis of your own hunches or passing fads: instead, it is essential to consider certain factors that will allow you to design the most effective offers, without wasting time or revenue. Here they are:

It is normal to use different strategies to achieve the revenue goals set at the beginning of the year, however, you should avoid resorting to selling hotel packages at bargain prices (perhaps in the low season) just to avoid ending up with empty rooms. In the face of increased occupancy, this approach could even result in a significant loss of revenue. Therefore, it is important to incorporate packages into a well-thought-out strategy rather than offering a "one-off", creating an offer that can simultaneously increase occupancy and profits.

It may seem obvious, but it is essential to monitor and take advantage of holidays, festivities and events at your location (and at the home locations of your regular guests), focusing your hotel package offerings on these dates.

Likewise, it is important to analyze the offerings of your competitors' establishments in order to create hotel packages that are more competitive in price or type of services offered.

If you decide to offer hotel packages, design an offer for each guest segment that your establishment usually welcomes. To accomplish this, you don't have to invent anything! All you need to do is analyze your reservation record.

If you want to learn more about this topic, we suggest you read our article with the best segmentation techniques and examples.

When designing hotel packages, don't forget to consider your current (or projected) occupancy rate: to encourage very short-term bookings of rooms that have not yet been booked, focus on last-minute offers with discounts on services of definite interest (such as Food & Beverage), while if you are already working with high occupancy, you can veer into upselling luxury experiences or upgrades to maximize revenue.

As with any other business strategy, it is critical to evaluate performance for hotel packages to understand whether and how much they impact your revenues and to make the necessary changes to ensure they remain effective.

The metrics best suited to monitor the success of hotel packages are:

• RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room)
• conversion rate of bookings across different packages
• and ROI (Return on Investment) to assess the economic impact of packages. This involves calculating the ratio of package costs (such as discounts and extra services) to the revenue generated.

A/B testing is a method used to test two different versions of the same package and see which one is more successful. For example, you might test a package with room + breakfast included versus one with room + restaurant voucher.

In addition to data analysis, the best way to evaluate the effectiveness of the packages you create is to collect customer feedback through post-stay surveys, monitoring online reviews and your social media channels. Analyzing comments to understand what customers value most will also help you identify critical issues and room for improvement.

In this article, you have seen how creating hotel packages can benefit your accommodation in many ways, from increasing revenue and occupancy to customer satisfaction and loyalty.

However, creating and managing hotel packages effectively (especially if you have never done so with a structured approach), may not be easy. That's why we've created a comprehensive guide for you, where you'll find tips and practical examples on whether hotel packages are right for you and how to start leveraging them right away!