Unlocking Your Hotel’s Full Potential

The evolution of travelers and the hospitality industry has presented an exciting challenge and opportunity: How can you use technology to monetize every square foot efficiently, giving your staff more time to deliver remarkable guest experiences?

Traditional measures of success, including the beloved metric of room occupancy, are outdated. To be truly successful in hospitality today, you need to adopt a more creative approach to monetizing your property and embrace technology as an enabler of greater opportunities.

A Fresh Look at the Modern Guest

Today’s guests aren’t just traveling with a singular goal, like R&R, business, or “finding themselves.” Modern guests are blending their purposes for travel. They’re combining business travel with pleasure or family getaways, seeking to discover their community or experience new places.

Additionally, travelers today have high expectations. They want what they want when they want it, and they want bookings to be digital and mobile-optimized for easy planning on the go.

It’s a lot to deliver, but if you can get creative, you might find that you can satisfy the needs of today’s guests, grow your profit fairly effortlessly, and even discover greater opportunities to connect with guests.

Occupancy: Not Just Rooms

With changing guest expectations comes a need to redefine key metrics, starting with occupancy. By defining occupancy as the percentage of rooms booked for overnight stays, you’re limiting what’s possible.

True occupancy today is better defined as maximizing the utility and profitability of every space within your property and using those spaces 24/7/365 – or at least close to that.

This means extending bookings beyond guest rooms to monetize – and rate manage – any (and every) area of your property. It also means thinking beyond the typical overnight stay and using your booking engine to offer hourly or day use rather than leaving a room empty.

That is how you reach 100% occupancy in the new era of hospitality. This view gives you more opportunities to grow revenue, loyalty, and experience.

Reimagine Your Spaces

From outdoor spaces to meeting rooms, from an underused lobby to fitness areas, you could have a gold mine of opportunity sitting right in front of you.

Let’s start with outdoor spaces. They’re highly visible, easily accessible, and a great opportunity to attract not just your guests but community members too. Imagine what could be possible if you turned garden areas into pop-up cafes available for rent to local vendors. It’s a great way to keep guests on site (which means growing your share of the guest wallet) and attract locals to discover your property.

The ground floor is typically the busiest part of a hotel, hosting the lobby, restaurants, and other facilities. If yours has empty areas, you’ll want to take another look at how you could transform those spaces into profit.

Why not turn an empty table into a co-working space available to rent by the day or with a monthly membership? Add a coffee bar to generate sales and visitors for the morning and turn it into a venue for networking events or creative classes at night.

You might find that these open new opportunities to attract long-stay guests and people from the neighborhood, helping you grow revenue more sustainably.

Same Spaces, More Revenue

Guest rooms are the core of your hotel, but their potential extends far beyond the typical overnight stays. The same goes for meeting rooms, which are typically rented by the day.

Offering bedrooms or suites for day use can fill gaps in occupancy and attract a different segment of customers who might not need to stay overnight but still want to enjoy your amenities.

At the other end of the spectrum are long-stay guests: those people who want to book a room for months, providing you with stable revenue and reducing operational strain. The right hospitality cloud can support different lengths of stay and rates in one system, making it easier for both guests and staff.

Then there’s the parking lot. On-site parking is convenient for guests, but it could also be a revenue-generating opportunity if it’s easy to rate manage or put in front of guests (and non-guests).

Think about the potential boost to your bottom line if you could automate rates to be higher during evenings and weekends. Or maybe you’re catering to daytime visitors, and 9-5 is an opportunity for more. Now, think really big. Could you even open up unused spots to non-guests too and offer monthly or weekly parking subscriptions at a special rate?

And what if all of this was available in a unique, customizable booking engine or visible to guests during booking or online check-in?

We see this as a massive – and untapped – opportunity, which is why we’ve expanded the functionality of our property management system (PMS) to make managing parking spaces as easy as managing rooms. We even put them all in the same dashboard and timeline for maximum simplicity.

Leveraging Modern Tech

Integrating modern, future-focused, and innovative technology into your operations is crucial for maximizing space management and generating revenue.

A property management system can streamline the way guests book different spaces for different lengths of time and give staff a clear, concise view of the bookings and availability.

The Future of Hospitality: Beyond Beds

The hospitality industry is shifting toward a more dynamic, experience-led model, driven by technology and a willingness to rethink traditional spaces and services.

From subscription models to innovative room usage, a successful future in hospitality requires being able to diversify revenue streams and provide a tailored, memorable experience for guests.

Mews, with its forward-thinking approach and comprehensive hospitality cloud, is poised to support this evolution. Embrace these changes, and you’ll be well-positioned to thrive in the ever-evolving hospitality landscape.