“Keep Calm and Upsell On.” - Me

Upselling guests on additional nights either before or after their stay, when available, is an easy way to increase both occupancy and revenue.

Hospitable users can automate this with the use of custom short codes, presenting this opportunity to guests only when available.

Our friends at Hospitable provide documentation on how to do this in two separate messages: the first goes out before the guest arrives, offering the night before if available. The second is a message after the guest arrives, offering to extend their stay, if the night after is available.

We won't explain that all here, they do a good job of documenting that in their support documentation here.

What if you want to offer both simultaneously?

The short codes are fantastic because they can either display, or not, based on certain conditions. One flaw in this system is the lack of support for multiple conditions.

A message to the guest could be sent before their arrival, offering either, or both nights depending on what's available.

If night before is available, show this text:

"The night before your stay is available, let me know if you'd like to come early."

If night after is available, show this text:

"The night after your stay is available, let me know if you'd like to stay longer."

That's all nice and lovely, but if you read those two sentences together, it reads a little funny. Your guest will think you're a robot.

Additionally, if you try to tweak the text of one so they fit better together, they will sound funny by themselves.

What's the solution?

Short codes inside of short codes! 🀚

Nesting short codes! 🪺

Russian short code dolls! 🪆

We have to solve for three possible scenarios and make sure no two messages appear together:

1. Both nights are available

2. Only the night before is available

3. Only the night after is available

We can put short codes inside of other short codes to achieve this.

Setup

We will need five different short codes, with the following conditions (you can change the name if you'd like, but for the sake of following along, I suggest using the same naming convention):

• Night_After_Open_Message : the night before check-in is not available

• Night_Before_Open_Message : the night before check-in is available

• Night_Before_NotOpen-Night_After_Open : the night after check-out is available

• Night_Before_Open-Night_After_NotOpen : the night after check-out is not available

• Night_Before_Open-Night_After_Open : the night after check-out is available

Create an outgoing message to your guest prior to check-in. I send this seven days in advance and include information about the area. You can of course send this whenever you want and include whatever else you'd like.

Two of the short codes will be included:

And now the fun begins!

'Night_Before_Open_Message' is set to display if the night before their reservation is open. Inside of that, we'll include two other short codes:

Let's take a look at what's inside the other two short codes!

This covers our first scenario of both nights being available!

This covers our second scenario of only the night before their arrival being available. One more scenario to go!

Let's go back to our outgoing message where we initially had two short codes. We covered the first one, now let's move on to the second one, 'Night_After_Open_Message':

And now our final short code!

And there we have it!

Hospitable team, if you're out there, you can save us all a headache by allowing custom codes to have multiple conditions. But until then, here's a great hack to upsell your future guests on available nights.

If you'd like to sign up for Hospitable, you can click our link and get $30 off your first month, and a free trial to boot! Click here to sign up.

Any questions? Head on over to our Facebook group and ask away!

@STRTechTalk