Hotel upselling: selling more or serving better?

An intern at GRACE La Margna in St. Moritz has published an analysis on Hospitality Net that asks an uncomfortable question for any hotel director: when the front desk clerk offers the lake-view suite, is he selling or is he serving? The piece doesn't give a clean answer, but it makes one thing clear. The incentive you put on the table shapes the behaviour of the team. Pay only commission and the clerk optimises for commission. Measure only satisfaction and upselling vanishes from the script.

The most interesting point is the warning about badly calibrated hybrid schemes. It isn't enough to hand out a percentage of the incremental sale. You have to define what counts as legitimate upselling, when it's offered and in what tone. An upgrade pushed at 11pm on a tired guest can close the sale and destroy the review. The intern suggests combining commission with service metrics and reviewing the model every quarter so it doesn't degrade into pure commercial pushing.

My take: the mistake isn't paying commission, it's paying commission without context. Profitable upselling is the kind the guest thanks you for because it solves something, not the kind that plants a product they never asked for. Hotels getting this right train staff on product, give them room to say no and reward both the closed sale and the experience afterwards. The rest, in my experience, end up with teams that sell hard in January and explain lukewarm reviews in March.