Cross-selling is often discussed as a revenue opportunity for hotels. However, after my recent conversation with Pablo Torres, I kept returning to a more fundamental question. How well do we actually know the guest before we try to sell them something?
Pablo has spent 25 years in hospitality, including hotel operations, revenue management, and consulting. During our conversation on the Shiji Insights Podcast, we explored what an effective hotel cross-selling strategy really requires.
Technology is certainly part of the answer. Yet technology cannot compensate for fragmented data, weak processes, or poorly timed interactions. Instead, the opportunity starts with understanding the guest and using what the hotel already knows.
For me, that distinction matters. Cross-selling works best when the guest experiences it as better hospitality, not as another sales message.
Takeaways
Beyond room revenue. Hotels should understand how guests spend across the whole property, not only what they pay for accommodation.
Start the conversation earlier. Relevant pre-arrival communication gives hotels more opportunities to support the guest journey.
Make existing data usable. Millions of data points have little value when they remain fragmented or inaccessible to employees.
Use automation selectively. Self-service can handle transactional interactions while freeing employees to focus on guests seeking human assistance.
Qualify before recommending. Effective cross-selling begins with understanding what the guest actually wants.
Looking beyond revenue from the room
One of Pablo’s opening questions immediately reframed our conversation: why do hotels concentrate revenue management on the space containing the bed?
A hotel contains far more than guestrooms. Depending on the property, it can include restaurants, bars, spas, gardens, golf courses, meeting spaces, and other facilities. Each represents part of the guest experience. Many also represent revenue opportunities.
Yet Pablo’s point was that hotels often understand room revenue far better than ancillary spend. They can track occupancy and ADR closely. However, they may struggle to answer a more basic question: what is the total value of this guest across the property?
That distinction becomes important as the industry talks more about total revenue management.
It also changes how we think about cross-selling. The objective is not simply to persuade somebody to spend more. Instead, hotels need to create relevant reasons for guests to use more of the property.
A restaurant is a good example. Pablo recalled how city hotel restaurants were historically places that many guests avoided. Today, there is no reason a hotel restaurant cannot attract both travelers and the local community.
That changes the revenue opportunity. More importantly, it changes the hotel’s role during the guest’s stay.
A hotel cross-selling strategy should start before arrival
Another point I found interesting was timing.
Hotels sometimes wait until guests arrive before beginning a meaningful conversation with them. However, the guest journey began much earlier.
An OTA, booking engine, or tour operator may have been communicating with that person for months. During that period, guests research destinations and decide what they want to do.
The hotel has an opportunity to become part of that conversation.
However, timing alone is not enough. Relevance matters just as much.
Hotels should use pre-arrival touchpoints to help guests plan their stay. That might involve dining, experiences, transportation, or other services. Yet the interaction should feel useful rather than intrusive.
This is where the difference between cross-selling and simply sending offers becomes very clear.
We have the guest data. Are we actually using it?
This was probably the part of our discussion that stayed with me most.
Hospitality does not have a shortage of data. In many cases, we have the opposite problem.
Pablo used Spain to illustrate the scale. Guest identification at check-in can provide roughly 15 data points. When booking information is included, he estimates that a hotel may have about 30 data points per guest.
Across a year of operations, Pablo estimates that a typical hotel can collect between two million and 2.5 million data points.
Then he asked the question that matters:
“The question is: what happens to all that data? In many cases, nothing. It simply sits in a database collecting digital dust.”
That phrase, “digital dust,” captures the problem extremely well.
Collecting information has little value if employees cannot use it at the moment it becomes relevant.
A returning guest should not repeatedly be asked whether this is their first stay. Likewise, a preference recorded during an earlier visit should not disappear into an isolated system.
For me, this is where data quality and organization become more important than data volume. The objective should not be to collect everything possible. It should be to make useful information available when it can improve an interaction.
Turning guest profiles into better hospitality
During our conversation, I discussed some of the work we have done around the guest profile in Shiji Daylight PMS.
The principle behind it is straightforward. The guest sits at the center of the PMS.
If a returning guest has established preferences, those preferences can inform decisions before arrival. They can support room assignment, for example. They can also give employees useful context when speaking with the guest.
However, the technology is not the hospitality.
Technology provides information. Employees still determine how that information becomes an experience.
This distinction becomes especially important when discussing personalization. Knowing a preference does not automatically create a personal interaction. Instead, it gives an employee a better starting point.
That can make something as simple as greeting a returning guest feel different.
It can also prevent one of hospitality’s most frustrating contradictions: collecting extensive information about somebody while treating them like a stranger.
Why self-service can make human service more valuable
We also discussed something that can initially appear contradictory.
As hotels introduce kiosks and self-service check-in, are we removing opportunities for employees to engage with guests?
Pablo offered a different interpretation.
Imagine a hotel has 100 arrivals. If 80 guests prefer a fast, self-service arrival, technology can efficiently serve that need. The remaining 20 have actively chosen human interaction.
Those guests may want advice. They may need a recommendation. Or they may simply want somebody to explain where the pool is.
The important point is that they have signaled a willingness to engage.
That creates a very different interaction for the employee. Rather than attempting to sell to every arriving guest, staff can concentrate on conversations where human assistance is wanted.
I think this is an important way to view automation in hospitality. The debate should not always be framed as technology versus people.
Sometimes technology removes an unnecessary interaction. As a result, the human interactions that remain can become more meaningful.
Qualification matters more than the offer
Pablo illustrated qualification through the example of a luxury hotel concierge.
Ask a good concierge for a Japanese restaurant recommendation, and they will rarely provide an immediate answer. Instead, they ask questions.
How far are you willing to travel? Do you want traditional sushi? Would you prefer something broader? What kind of experience are you looking for?
Those questions narrow the possibilities until the recommendation becomes genuinely relevant.
As Pablo put it:
“The foundation of all successful cross-selling is qualifying the guest properly.”
I think hotels sometimes overlook this because technology makes it easy to distribute offers at scale.
But scale does not create relevance.
If anything, greater automation makes qualification more important. Hotels need to understand which offer makes sense, for which guest, at which moment.
Otherwise, sophisticated technology can simply produce more sophisticated noise.
The fundamentals still come before the technology
This became one of the clearest themes of our conversation.
Hotels cannot jump directly into advanced cross-selling while ignoring the underlying data and operational processes.
Guest profiles need to be usable. Preferences need to be accurate. Teams need access to relevant information. Employees also need processes that help them interpret that information and act on it appropriately.
Only then can technology amplify the experience.
There is also a cultural dimension. A system can tell an employee that somebody is a returning guest. However, the organization still has to decide that recognition matters.
Pablo gave a simple personal example. He had stayed repeatedly at hotels where his birthday occurred during the stay. The property already held his date of birth, yet nothing happened.
He was not suggesting that hotels need an elaborate gesture. A card would have been enough.
That example stayed with me because it demonstrates the difference between possessing guest data and actually practicing hospitality.
Cross-selling should feel like recognition
After reflecting on the conversation, I think this is the central lesson.
The strongest cross-selling does not necessarily feel like selling.
When a hotel understands a guest’s preferences, asks good questions, and makes an appropriate recommendation, the interaction feels like service. Revenue can be the result, but it should not overwhelm the reason for the interaction.
Technology can make this possible at greater scale. A modern PMS can centralize information and make guest context accessible. Self-service can remove interactions that guests do not value. Better data can help employees start more relevant conversations.
However, none of those capabilities change the basic nature of hospitality.
It is still people serving people.
That is why something as simple as recognizing a returning guest can carry so much weight. The guest knows immediately that the hotel remembers them.
For me, the future of hotel technology is not about removing that human element. It is about giving employees better information so they can use it where it matters.
- Post test translations Jaime
- Hotel Cross-Selling Strategy: Why Better Data Comes First
- Why Simplicity Is Becoming Hospitality’s Biggest Competitive Advantage
- Hotels are no longer selling rooms. Here’s what that means
- Guest Experience Benchmark Report Q2 2026 Overview
Building a better hotel cross-selling strategy
My conversation with Pablo reinforced something that can easily get lost when we discuss data, automation, and personalization.
The fundamentals still matter most.
A successful hotel cross-selling strategy depends on recognizing the guest, understanding their needs, and making information useful at the right moment. Technology can support every one of those steps. However, it cannot replace the thinking and processes behind them.
Hotels already have extraordinary amounts of information. The next opportunity is not simply to collect more.
It is to turn what we already know into better hospitality.
And sometimes, that begins with the simplest detail of all: remembering a guest’s name.
