The next wave of upselling will be smarter, quieter, more contextual, and more effective. Instead of static menus or one-off emails, AI-powered upselling will coordinate offers across channels and moments to meet the guest’s true goal: reducing friction, enhancing comfort, and creating delightful moments.
We are still in the early innings
Generative AI and predictive models already LIFT opt-in and conversion rates, but real transformation comes when hotels operationalize data and adopt AI-driven workflows that act autonomously. 2026 will feel like the leap from manual to system-guided revenue management — and those who start now will see compounding results.
Challenges ahead for independents
The path won’t be the same for everyone. Independent hoteliers face a steeper climb than branded hotels within larger groups. Big brands benefit from centralized data platforms, standardized PMS/POS stacks, and dedicated analytics teams, which make identity resolution, real-time integrations, and controlled experimentation far easier. They also enjoy negotiating power with vendors and can amortize innovation costs across hundreds of properties, letting them iterate quickly on AI-driven offers.
Independents, by contrast, tend to run heterogeneous systems, have thinner budgets and fewer specialist roles, and lack the scale to A/B test meaningfully. They can, however, move faster on governance and process, choose modern plug-and-play vendors, and productize a smaller set of high-margin ancillaries. With a pragmatic data layer and clear owner for upsell margin, an independent can still out-execute a slower brand machine on speed, authenticity, and guest relevance.
Independent hoteliers can also lean into peer networks and regional hotel associations to close the knowledge and scale gap. Use these forums to share best practices, pool buying power for vendor contracts that include real-time integrations and experimentation, and run joint workshops on data governance, privacy, and AI guardrails.
Regional hotel associations can curate vetted vendor shortlists, provide baseline benchmarks by segment and season, and host a shared “sandbox” where members pilot upsell journeys with anonymized data and compare results. This collaborative model accelerates learning, reduces cost and risk for individual properties, and builds a local talent pool that understands both hospitality operations and AI upselling best practices.
Five recommendations
Start small. In 2026, treat AI as a readiness exercise: run a tightly scoped pilot, learn fast, and use those learnings to strengthen your (data) foundations.
- Make data usable. Stand up a lightweight guest data platform that unifies identity and consent across PMS, CRS, and messaging. Start with your top three ancillaries and the top five data events that drive them.
- Productize your ancillaries. Create a structured offer catalog with photos, tags, constraints, and margin targets. If AI can’t understand your offer logic, it cannot sell the product.
- Demand real time from vendors. Ask for webhook-ready PMS and POS connections, and inventory checks. Put this in RFPs and renewal criteria.
- Assign one owner for upsell margin. Align marketing, revenue, and ops around shared KPIs: attachment rate, take-rate by segment, contribution margin, and guest satisfaction impact. Review weekly.
- Pilot, measure, then scale. Run 90-day pilots on one segment and two channels, with holdouts and guardrails. Keep what lifts contribution margin and guest NPS, drop the rest, then expand.
When you get the basics right, AI stops being a headline and starts creating real guest value and measurable profit. The opportunity is here; your readiness will decide how much of it you capture.
About Revinate
Revinate is a direct booking platform that leads the hospitality industry in driving direct revenue and increased profitability.
Our products and our people combine to give hoteliers the superpowers they need to crush their goals. With Revinate, hoteliers shift share away from OTAs and drive tangible results across an individual property or a portfolio. Our industry-leading, AI-powered customer data platform collects, unifies, and synthesizes data to give hoteliers a foundational advantage.
Hoteliers gain critical intelligence — guest lifetime spend, stay preferences, ancillary revenue, and more. With Revinate’s Rich Guest Profiles™ data, hoteliers don’t need to guess who their most profitable guests are or struggle to drive conversions across email, voice, messaging, and digital channels.
Revinate’s direct booking platform and omnichannel communication technology powers 950+ million Rich Guest Profiles across 12,500+ hotels to drive over $17.2 billion in direct revenue.
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Revinate, Inc.
