By Duve Team Stay updated on the latest Guest Experience and Hospitality Tech updates.
RevPAR is no longer the full story. As guest spend spreads across rooms, F&B, and experiences, hotel teams are being pushed to rethink total revenue across the entire stay, and how to influence those choices without adding operational friction.
That was the theme of Duve’s recent webinar, Maximizing Revenue Beyond Rooms: Capturing a Bigger Share of the Guest Wallet, featuring:
Together, they shared a practical roadmap: how to grow ancillary revenue in a way that’s targeted, brand-appropriate, and measurable, across a multi-property portfolio.
One of the clearest takeaways from the session was that growing ancillary revenue doesn’t mean piling on promotions. In fact, the fastest way to weaken conversion is to flood guests with generic messages that ignore intent, stay type, or context. Jen framed “beyond rooms” growth as a relevance problem, not a creativity problem: hotels already have valuable products to sell, but they often communicate them like static retail, same offer, same timing, same price, no matter who the guest is.
The stronger approach is to treat ancillary revenue like a journey strategy. That means using what you already know (arrival time, length of stay, guest type, purpose of visit) to choose fewer, more meaningful touchpoints, the kind that feel like service, not selling. When that’s done well, hotels don’t just drive incremental spend; they reduce noise, protect brand tone, and improve the guest experience at the same time.
Group Revenue Director
RBH Hospitality Management
Ryan’s market context reinforced why hotels are looking beyond rooms more aggressively right now. On one hand, global travel demand has expanded significantly over the long term. On the other, supply dynamics, cost pressures, and shifting segment mix make it harder to rely on room revenue alone as the only growth lever.
What matters for commercial teams is the implication: when demand rises across the industry, competition doesn’t disappear, it often intensifies. Guests are comparing more options, booking windows can be shorter, and value sensitivity can rise depending on the segment. That makes post-booking and in-stay revenue strategies more important, not less, because they’re among the few levers hotels can still influence once the booking is secured.
Account Director
STR
Jen’s most practical guidance was about what conversion actually requires in 2026: not “personalization” as a buzzword, but precision. Hotels don’t need to create a complex program overnight, but they do need to stop treating every guest the same. A corporate traveler arriving late on a one-night stay is not evaluating offers the same way as a leisure couple on a long weekend or a family planning around pool time.
This is where data becomes a commercial tool. The hotels seeing the best results aren’t always the ones with the most ancillaries, they’re the ones activating existing information to make offers feel inevitable: aligned with the stay pattern, delivered at the moment the guest is already thinking about that need, and framed around the “why” rather than the product feature. That’s also why automation matters: it’s what makes relevance scalable across multiple properties without adding workload.
Group Revenue Director
RBH Hospitality Management
The webinar also challenged the idea that there’s one magical moment that converts best. Instead, Jen laid out a more useful way to think about timing: match the offer to what the guest is doing mentally in that part of the journey.
Pre-arrival is often a planning mindset, better for higher-value, less impulsive decisions (upgrades, breakfast, parking, arrival experience). Arrival can work for convenience, but only if it’s frictionless and doesn’t depend on a rushed front desk interaction. In-stay is where context can do the heavy lifting, especially around downtime moments when a guest is most open to experiences. Departure has its own “practical value” sweet spot (late checkout, transport).
Just as important: brand-safe upselling comes down to restraint. Curate instead of broadcast. Keep the tone aligned to the property and guest persona. When offers are relevant and limited, they feel like good hospitality, not a sales funnel.
Group Revenue Director
RBH Hospitality Management
To make beyond-rooms revenue a serious strategy (not a seasonal initiative), hotels need measurement that leaders can trust, and that works across different property types. Jeremy pushed the conversation away from vanity metrics and toward behavioral proof.
A standout idea was focusing on the moment a guest makes their first incremental purchase beyond the room. That initial conversion matters because it changes future behavior: once a guest has crossed the mental barrier of “spending extra with the hotel,” subsequent purchases become easier. For multi-property groups, this is a powerful way to think about scaling, because the goal isn’t just one big-ticket upsell, it’s creating a repeatable engine that increases attachment over the full stay.
Co-Founder & Chief Business Development Officer
Duve
Capturing a bigger share of the guest wallet doesn’t require hotels to become louder marketers. It requires them to become more precise operators. The hotels that win beyond rooms in 2026 will be the ones that treat ancillary revenue as a journey strategy, built on guest intent, delivered with restraint, and measured through incremental outcomes that hold up across a portfolio. When relevance meets timing, and technology makes it scalable, revenue growth feels less like selling and more like better hospitality.
