Danubius Hotels Group Case Study

Conscious Upselling Hotel program

Turn motivation into profit
Danubius Hotels Group

Danubius Hotels Group (DHG) had to face some serious challenges due to the market situation

Nowadays it is not only the professionals and managers of the hotel business who are aware of its hardships. Some players of the sector fight for survival, others fight for recovering a state of efficiency, while some others fight for market-leader positions with more or less success.

The market situation

During these years similarly to the other hotel chains, the Danubius Hotels Group (DHG) had to face some serious challenges due to the market situation, and decrease in the number of sold guest nights and average room rate, which resulted in lower RevPar (revenue per available room).

The hotel chain has realized in time that it is necessary to launch a program, which has “total sales” in its focus. They set a goal that every colleague, who is in touch with guests, would actively take part in sales in a conscious and planned manner, not only the sales personnel. The management set the improvement of guest satisfaction as an objective parallel with the increase of revenue per guest.

The management has defined as featured expectation that the comprehensive sales deve-lopment program, which targets the set objectives, should accommodate all the specifics of the DHG 3 and 4 hotels.

At the end of the selection process for finding a service provider, which lasted a few months, the decision was made in favor of Develor Consulting and its Conscious Upselling Hotel program.

DHG chose Develor mainly because it was important

that the appointed professionals had experience in the hotel industry, therefore a high level reliable delivery and consistency was assured along with its professionalism;
that the training program was unique, tailored to the hotel industry, and even more significantly to the DHG needs, which reacted appropriately to the market situation, to the actual challenges and needs formulated by the management as well;
that Develor had guaranteed measurable business results apart from excellent delivery quality.

Balázs Kovács
Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Danubius Hotels Group

“We are proud to say that as a result of the program our sales personnel became much more goal oriented, and are able to better represent the interest of the Danubius Hotels Group.”

The Solution

If you want to learn more about the Develor Solution contact us: info@www.develor.com

The Results

300.000 EURO extra profit

Following the launch of the program in April 2011, the 11 participating hotels in Budapest generated a total sum of EUR 283.950 incremental revenue in 9 months.

Balázs Kovács, Vice President of DHG reflected the program and its results as follows: „Participants’ feedbacks are very important, however sales development programs are evaluated based on figures and generated results, therefore the Conscious Upselling Program is a real success story. The program was launched in April, 2011 and Danubius earned HUF 80 million incremental revenue till the end of the year.

It was even more interesting for us to see that although we had n impression that upseling program is working mainly in 5 star hotels, this outstanding result was generated by our 3 and 4 star hotels.

Concerning the Key Account Management program, we experience that even in this market situation where everything is about rates & prices, our sales managers are able to use several techniques and tools so that they lead their selling processes and negotiations successfully along other dimensions ending in measurable results.”

Despite of the initial resistance, participants evaluated the program exceptionally well. It resulted in 98,1% training evaluation score! Written feedbacks emphasized the participants’ and managers’ general satisfaction.

Further plans and steps

Based on the success of the program which highly exceeded expectations, in addition to the ongoing application support processes, DHG management and Develor professionals have already started the preparation and design of next steps.

Among several options there is a Carrier management program aiming to prepare high potentials to overtake even General Manager positions within the chain. Launching of the upselling program to DHG hotels in the whole country and abroad is also in the planning phase which would stabilize the new operations and business results for the whole chain.

“The Conscious Upselling Program is a real success story.”
“There are serious changes behind the business indicators that can also be seen in the everyday activities of the participants.”