How to increase your hotel’s room service revenue

Room service at your hotel can be one of the trickiest parts of the business to get right. It’s something guests expect to have on offer, and they can get easily disappointed if the experience doesn’t meet their expectations. Room service is also not always easy to convert into a profitable exercise for your property, as there can be high operating costs and expenses involved.

However there are plenty of benefits to offering high quality room service at your hotel too, including:

• The ability to offer personalised services to customers
• Guest privacy and convenience
• Higher guest satisfaction leading to better reviews
• Increased safety measures, such as contactless service
• A chance to promote your hotel restaurant
• Becoming a full-service hotel

When it comes to increasing sales and revenue from room service, it can be just as lucrative for you as for your guests, we’ve got some extensive tips for you to check out…

Audit what you are selling on your room service menus

The first step to maximising your room service revenue is to remove or reduce items that don’t sell, optimise items that do sell well, and think about what you can add to further increase sales.

Of course, this needs to be based on key data, rather than gut feelings or casual observations.

• Look at your records for the past year or two and identify best and worst sellers for both food and beverage in that time period
• Next look at seasonality to see if there are any significant differences between when certain items are ordered
• Then look at external data from the industry and hotels that profile similar to yours, to see what items are proving popular
• Lastly, reconfigure your menu based on your research to ensure high demand items are on offer, and update this when required at different times of the year

An example of data you might look at was done by SuitePad, which indicated burgers were the most popular room service food amongst all hotels, while pasta dishes were the least popular. It also found that while orange juice was easily the most popular beverage for leisure hotels and resorts, it finished a long last for city hotels. This could be due to the fact that leisure or regional hotels offer fresh, local, produce.

So, as you can see there’s no blanket approach that will prove fruitful. As with most aspects of a hotel business, your room service strategy needs to be specific to your property, location, and also your guests. City guests are going to want great coffee early in the morning, while boutique guests may prefer freshly squeezed fruit juice at brunch.

Another way to audit your room service is to encourage guest feedback via reviews, comment cards, or suggestion boxes to see what guests enjoy and what they’d like to see next time.

Improve the way you sell and deliver your room service

If your room service menu isn’t performing as you’d expect, perhaps it’s a case of improving the overall experience and offering something a little special to pique the interest of your guests.

For instance, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic many hotels had to change the way they approached room service and guest experience in general.

One-of-a-kind experiences

Forbes looked at some examples which included Carneros Resort in Napa adding plum wine dispensers to rooms and The Houstonian Hotel, Club and Spa turning its ballroom into a theatre for 26 couples at appropriately spaced two-seat tables. In another case Ocean House in Rhode Island brought happy hour to the guests, with a cocktail cart rolling around between 5 and 7pm.

Sometimes you only need to offer one unique item and guests will be more interested in your entire menu, and will be inclined to spend more for a special experience.

Enhance processes and efficiencies

Sometimes the success of your room service is all about how well you execute it. If you can perfect how quickly you deliver, how well you present the orders, and how responsive you are to requests and enquiries you’ll start to see an uptick in performance.

The first thing you might think about is decentralising your room service – that is, separating it from your main kitchen and dedicating a separate team to oversee it, perhaps even with individual pantries or preparation areas on each floor if you’re a larger hotel.

Using a hotel app to manage room service or have dedicated tablets in-room to make ordering and communication easy is another strong recommendation. This will increase convenience for the guest, which is a huge factor given that 68% of people ordering room service are doing it for convenience. It also ensures orders are accurately processed and there are less delays.

Put the ‘service’ in room service

When room service goes wrong you end up with reviews like this one from TripAdvisor:

“I ordered room service at around 11PM, it came to the room cold. It was obvious to me that it had previously been frozen and that it hadn’t been re-heated properly. This was incredibly disappointing. When another one was eventually made and served at the correct temperature, it was missing a fork. I then called and asked for one, and instead of a fork, I was given pillows.”

It’s crucial that you give room service just as much care as you would give to your restaurant service. Ask yourself some questions so you can get it right:

• Is ordering fast and easy?
• Is communication simple and are enquiries responded too quickly?
• Is food and drink delivered without spills and at correct temperatures?
• Are staff friendly and helpful when delivering?
• Are you open to offering guests personalised orders? E.g maybe it’s their birthday and you can add something special on top
• Do your menu items allow for customisation?
• Is food and beverage presented with restaurant quality? Does it look appetising and ‘instagrammable’?
• Are your products in line with your brand and theme?

Taking room service beyond the room will also increase the feeling of convenience for guests. For example, perhaps they could order room service to the pool or the spa, the games room, or other similar locations at the property.