Your upsell strategy needs tweaking

If you want to capture the modern traveler (and the modern lender), you have to get specific. Whether it's Uber sneaking its way directly into the hotel tech stack, lenders getting dramatically more selective with their financing capital or your digital upselling shifting toward real-time predictive signals, precision is where it's at. Say goodbye to blanket assumptions and hello to hyper-targeted hospitality.

And in your inbox tomorrow: A Mint Pillow Q&A with Joe “Mr. Hotel” Hollier, a New Orleans-based insurance concierge who offers hoteliers practical advice for avoiding costly weather-related surprises.

Margin call. ADR may be up, but so are payroll, insurance, utilities, OTA costs... This breakdown gets into the uncomfortable math behind why “busy” doesn’t necessarily mean “profitable.” 

Is “hope and vibes” still the digital strategy? A new AI Visibility Index shows that some hotel brands are already winning the AI recommendation game, while others are getting left out of the conversation entirely. 

Experience wanted. Hotel data is only as useful as the experience behind it. There's still time to contribute to this report, designed to identify hurdles related to data quality, accessibility and usability. 

What to do with an aging hotel? Adaptive reuse has moved well beyond niche projects and into a more intentional investment category.

The group chat gets bigger. A new 500-room convention-connected Loews hotel is headed to Pittsburgh, and the ripple effects won’t stop at the convention center doors. Nearby indies, you may want to start thinking about how to position yourselves as the more memorable alternative for guests after a long day on the trade show floor.

Quore is a Hospitality Orchestration Platform™ that brings preventive maintenance, work orders and real-time updates from the front desk and housekeeping into one place. Engineering teams fix issues faster and stay ahead of the next call, so they might even get a minute to enjoy the view.

Ride-hailing is heading into the hotel tech stack. Through a new partnership, Mews will allow hotel teams to book Uber rides, track trips live and manage billing directly within the platform, with charges routed through Mews Payments. The integration also opens up guest transportation insights that hotels typically never see.

Why it matters: Hotels spend plenty of time shaping the in-house experience, but the arrival and departure journey often happens in someone else’s app. This integration creates a more connected guest flow while opening the door to more personalized arrival and departure experiences tied directly to guest preferences and behavior. Absorbing third-party services into a single operational layer means one more guest touchpoint pulled into the hotel ecosystem and one less thing for the guest to handle. (Phocus Wire)

Multi-bedroom suites with full kitchens, oversized patios, hammock seating, handmade Mexican furnishings and cedar accents give the property a relaxed, residential feel, and outside, cactus-lined courtyards, cabanas and open-air gathering spaces create a layered indoor-outdoor flow that feels distinctly desert. Drift Palm Springs was clearly built around how travelers actually want to spend time.

Why it matters: Guests are gravitating toward spaces that support flexibility and lingering. Instead of defaulting to another midcentury remix, the hotel blends Spanish Colonial and Moorish desert influences with Baja minimalism, thoughtfully showcasing how layered materials, regional influences and locally rooted design create textured spaces that inspire relaxation and—dare we say it?—transportation. (Flaunt)

The hotel financing market hasn’t dried up; it’s just become... dramatically more selective. Lenders describe a growing divide between high-performing assets attracting competitive capital and lower-performing hotels facing tougher structures and pricing. These days, sponsorship strength and the operational track record are more critical than ever.

Why it matters: If you've been relying on the market to do the work of raising your RevPAR index rather than your asset, it's time to take a hard look at your strategy. Investors and lenders want confidence that a property can protect margins, maintain demand and navigate higher operating costs over time. If you're looking to refinance, renovate or sell, “The menu of capital available to hotel owners is broader today than it has been since 2019,” says Ryan Bosch, principal at Arriba Capital. “But not every opportunity is created equally.” Owners who understand how their asset is being viewed in today’s market will walk into negotiations with far more leverage. (LODGING)

When every single website visitor receives the exact same list of promotions, your carefully planned upsells quickly transform into annoying digital background noise. A guest checking in late for a solo corporate trip evaluates add-on options completely differently than a family booking a five-night summer stay or a couple celebrating an anniversary, and presenting generic options that ignore these fundamental differences creates a massive disconnect during the critical booking flow.

Why it matters: Blanket promotions are losing their charm with travelers. The modern booking journey thrives on immediate relevance, with 74% of travelers now expecting hotels to deliver highly tailored offers. Aligning your digital upselling based on predictive signals rather than fixed assumptions maximizes revenue per booking and makes travelers feel genuinely seen. (GuestCentric)

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Mint Pillow is curated and written by Jennifer Glatt and edited by Bianca Prieto.