We ask. Then we offer what fits.
They booked eight weeks ago. They arrive on Friday. You do not know that it is her mother's eightieth, that they want a table at eight, or that they would have paid for the suite.
Show us where pre-arrival gets stuck. Nothing to prepare.Whitcombe HouseGood morning Mrs Ellis. One thing before tomorrow: the restaurant is busy on Fridays and we would hate for you to miss out. Would you like a table? The kitchen is open until nine.
Yes please, 8pm for two
Whitcombe HouseTable for two at eight tomorrow, confirmed. It is on your booking, and the kitchen already has the gluten-free note.
The guest gets a table booking email which gets lost in the noise.
Reception becomes the middleman between the guest and restaurant.
Nobody asked why they were coming, so the anniversary feels like any other stay.
The team finds out at check-in, too late to prepare anything.
The pre-arrival email asks them to click into a booking engine to do anything.
Someone spends an afternoon ringing guests, and reaches one in five.
Most hotels send a pre-arrival email. Some run a pre-arrival call. The email is a good record of the booking, but it goes out on a schedule, says the same thing to everyone, and asks the guest to click into a booking engine to act on it.
The call reaches maybe one guest in five, and costs a member of staff an afternoon. Neither of them asks the question that makes everything afterwards work.
Easier for the guest rarely means another app. We use whatever takes the least effort for the thing they are trying to do, which is often a conversation and occasionally a page.
Asking why they are coming, offering a table and confirming it takes a few replies on WhatsApp, SMS or whichever channel the guest already uses. They answer the way they would answer anyone else.
Three spa treatments, two suites, a menu. Choosing is easier with room to look, so we build a page for it, laid out to be taken in at a glance, and link it from the conversation.
Then we connect it to the systems you already use, around the way your hotel runs day to day, and change as little as possible.
Our Q1 Pre-Arrival Revenue Report, drawn from 20,000+ recent guest conversations, found 26% of guests were celebrating a birthday and 10% an anniversary. Another 29% were visiting friends. Country house properties skew towards celebrations. City hotels skew towards visiting friends.
That one answer changes every offer that follows. Champagne matters enormously for an anniversary and is noise on a Tuesday business stay.
It also reaches your team. The answer is added to the reservation and printed on the morning briefing, so the person on shift knows it's an anniversary before the guest arrives, and it stays on the guest's record for the next time they come.
We ask every guest, in conversation. Every offer after that is picked for their stay.
There is a window. Positive response peaks between 24 and 72 hours before arrival. But the peak moves depending on what you are offering, and on how far ahead your guests plan. A room upgrade lands best around 24 hours out, while the room is still empty and the guest is already packing. Dinner is a different problem. At some properties four to seven days is right. At others it needs thirty, because guests decide where they are eating long before they decide anything else.
So we do not arrive with a schedule and apply it to you. We watch what your guests do and adjust as we learn. When your goals change, the sequence changes with them: a quarter spent filling the spa is not the same as a quarter spent filling the restaurant. You do not have to think about any of it.
| Sent | Positive response |
|---|---|
| 2+ weeks | 30.1% |
| 1 to 2 weeks | 21.9% |
| 4 to 6 days | 38.2% |
| 3 days | 23.8% |
| 2 days | 50.0% |
| 1 day | 51.2% |
| Same day | 22.6% |
Tables. Room upgrades. Spa treatments. Celebration extras. Early check in, late checkout, parking.
Early check in and checkout requests draw a positive response 71% of the time. Spa sits at 27% and dinner at 19%, so spa converts around 41% better than dinner. That is the opposite of the order most hotels send them in. Occasion-led messages outperform every standard category, at roughly 80% positive. That sits on a smaller sample, so treat it as a strong signal rather than a settled number.
| Offer | Positive response |
|---|---|
| Celebration or occasion (indicative) | 80.0% |
| Early check-in or late checkout | 70.8% |
| Spa and treatments | 26.7% |
| Dinner and restaurant | 18.9% |
There is no template library, campaign or sequence for anyone at the hotel to maintain when the restaurant changes its sittings. You tell us what you want to say. We shape it for the channel, set it in your voice, send it at the right moment, and keep tuning it while it is live.
Where something needs to reach your team, it lands where they already look. On Opera that is a trace on the reservation in the standard view. Whatever you run, we work out where your people already are and put it there.
Where a property sits depends on how far through optimisation it is, and every property starts nearer the bottom of the range than the top.
Reply rates across our properties
From early stage to optimisedIntent rate, early stage to optimised
Optimised properties run from 41% to 47%Ancillary revenue
Properties that get the sequencing right, against those that do notThe Queen at Chester
Joji Esao, Hotel Manager
“Every week we're seeing stronger numbers than last year.”
Show us the action that is harder than it should be. We will tell you honestly whether we can improve it.
We map what the guest is trying to do, what the team needs, how the brand should sound and where the existing systems help or get in the way.
The work is ours: we build the journey, shape the messages, connect it and test it.
We walk the relevant team through the small part they will see.
Prove it in the operation before making an annual commitment.
Bring us the action, the brand, the awkward systems and the operational reality. We will shape the message for each channel and build the easiest route through them.
Show us where guests get stuck. Nothing to prepare. Sometimes the honest answer is that you do not need us.
