We’re working on a new addition to Upsells: Upsell Requests! We’d love to hear how you’d use this feature—and what challenges you face when certain upsells need manual approval.
Right now, any upsell purchased through the Guest Portal, like Early Check-In/Late Checkout or Pool Heating, is charged in full immediately.
But what if you need more control to confirm availability before charging the guest? That’s where Upsell Requests come in! 🎉
Guests will still be able to browse and check out upsells as usual, but certain products can be configured as “requiring approval”. Those will remain pending approval before payment is (fully) captured. As the host, you’ll be able to approve or deny the request, and we’ll handle the rest—seamlessly—for both sides.
This is perfect for offerings like boat rentals, private chefs, or anything that depends on availability.
We’re already laying out the roadmap, but we want your input to shape the experience:
What kinds of upsells would you want to approve manually?
What does your approval process look like behind the scenes?
What information do you need from the guest to make a decision?
We saw your presentation in today’s Townhall. We love the idea of offering early check-in as an upsale, but we currently do it manually because IF we have a back to back check-in, then we cannot guarantee an early Check-in. Similar figure to late check-outs. Anyway to limit when this upsales are offered or at least for us o approve the request before the guest pays it?
Thank you!
Hi @Lipsy Maza, thanks for tuning in and great question!
There's actually a setting for that exact scenario. On the Upsell edit page, you'll find a “Block Day” option that automatically blocks the day before check-in or the checkout day itself, when the Upsells are purchased, respectively. You can read more about the available settings here:
Additionally, if needed, the early check-in/late check-out Upsells will likely support Upsell Requests once we launch this feature in the coming weeks, giving you even more control.
Thanks for the question, and feel free to reach out with any others!
Blocking the whole night before (for an early check-in the next day) doesn't sound like it would work for most hosts looking to optimize their return.
Many professional cleaners (if not most) can not guarantee that a property will be available by a specific check-in time on same day turnovers. So how are you going to prevent the early check-in upsell on same day turnover reservations? Without blocking a whole night before?
Hi @Mikey,
I understand that the current config options won't be ideal for every host's setup, but we're committed to making them more flexible based on feedback. If you have specific ideas for what you'd like to see, I'd love to hear them — or feel free to add feature requests on our Featurebase, that way others can upvote them too.
Blocking the whole night before (for an early check-in the next day) doesn't sound like it would work for most hosts looking to optimize their return.
That's exactly why we only begin offering Early Check-in upsells 14 days prior to a booking — to reduce the risk of losing out on higher revenue from another reservation for the night before.
Many professional cleaners (if not most) can not guarantee that a property will be available by a specific check-in time on same day turnovers. So how are you going to prevent the early check-in upsell on same day turnover reservations? Without blocking a whole night before?
To prevent this issue, we automatically disable Early Check-in and Late Check-out upsells as soon as a back-to-back booking is made before or after the existing reservation, respectively.
@Aryeh Raber - Thank you! Your last note about:
“To prevent this issue, we automatically disable Early Check-in and Late Check-out upsells as soon as a back-to-back booking is made before or after the existing reservation, respectively.”
This is all I needed. I didn’t see any of this information in any of the upsell documentation.
I think a lot of hosts are experiencing more last-minute reservations right now. A majority of bookings might be within those 14 days.
@Mikey That’s great, glad this info came in useful!
I believe our documentation was recently updated, perhaps that context wasn’t available before:
Early check-in and late check-out are only available in the Guest Portal within 14 days of check-in and if the day of check-in and check-out are open in the calendar.
Let us know if anything else is missing or unclear, we’re always looking to improve this kind of nuanced but important information.
What kinds of upsells would you want to approve manually? I would want to approve any service type upsell, especially one that requires coordination with a vendor, like a private chef or massage. I would also like a qty tracker or limit, so I don’t oversell an upsell (eg. selling 4 movie night kits, when I only have 3).
What does your approval process look like behind the scenes? Depending on the upsell, it could be as simple as confirming we have stock. For vendor fulfill upsells, I may need to check availability of the vendor compared to the booking dates.
What information do you need from the guest to make a decision? Booking dates, desired date of “rendering”, qty.
Anything else we should consider? Bulk edit would be really nice to turn on/off a certain upsell across all listings if we were reaching capacity.
I would like the 14-day feature to be configurable. Or at least make it available to request before the 14 days, and automatic after the 14 days. If I want to provide it to a guest before the 14 days, I now need to find another way to collect the funding.
In an ideal world, my cleaner has her own login and when a request comes in, she gets a notification and then she approves the Early Check-in / Late Checkout requests which then automatically updates the checkin/checkout time in Turno.
Secondly - EVERYTHING should be configurable, such as the “14-day feature” - we should have the option to configure everything to our personal needs. If I want to Hide the House Rules from the Guest Portal, I should have that option, rather than forcing me to show it there.
Agree with Sam - cleaner approves the request for late check out based on their availability. Could be requested up to the day before. Currently when a guest asks I have to contact the cleaner. It’s really the only time I have to as all other contact is automated/triggered via Hospitable.
Mandatory that early checkin / late checkout is approvable - will mitigate any problems
Ideally can be routed to cleaner or other teammate to approve
Need to be able to offer $0 for up to 1 hour before checkin. This is a nice courtesy that builds goodwill people can add on - right now this isn’t possible
One really cool feature that Happy Guest offers is to generate a QR code that the cleaner can scan when the unit is ready, that generates a message to the guest saying that the unit is ready for checkin, and they can pay at that time. So imagine the cleaner scans the code and marks unit as ready, then hospitable shoots out a message letting guest know and they can buy right then and there.
Allow .5 hour times for early/late check-in/out. If I want to allow for an early check-in at 1:30PM where my normal check-in time is at 4PM, this is currently not possible.
+1 for allowing $0 up to 1 hour before/after check-in/out.
Of course letting us approve early check-in/late check-out manually as an option is the top one, but that seems to already be well known.
Another one is things like grocery delivery/stocking. Ideally we could configure it so when the request comes in, it goes to a teammate we’ve set up as our grocery delivery person, and they can approve/decline it. If they approve, it creates a task/reminder for them automatically.
Even further, it would be great if there was a way to have an order of operations on this. IE if our main grocery person declines, we have a backup grocery person that the request would then go to (if we’ve configured them as a backup) and they would have a chance to accept/decline.
Sort of the way turno works for cleans with primary/backup cleaners.
We should also be able to create upsells where we are simply linking off platform, like with an affiliate link to a local tour operator’s website.
I love this, but how does this display on the guest’s end on Airbnb and VRBO, or is it just with direct bookings? How do I know when a guest has selected this? Also, does it integrate/update with Turno? Or do I have to manually notify my cleaning team?
In an ideal world, my cleaner has her own login and when a request comes in, she gets a notification and then she approves the Early Check-in / Late Checkout requests which then automatically updates the checkin/checkout time in Turno.
Secondly - EVERYTHING should be configurable, such as the “14-day feature” - we should have the option to configure everything to our personal needs. If I want to Hide the House Rules from the Guest Portal, I should have that option, rather than forcing me to show it there.
I like the part allowing cleaners to “approve” the request & a huge fan of custom configs too.
What kinds of upsells would you want to approve manually? - Anything that requires a 3rd party confirmation such as moving a cleaning with an extra night, late checkout, early checkin.
What does your approval process look like behind the scenes? Cleaning team would need to confirm availability which may vary depending on how far out the upsell is requested. Requesting a late checkout 10 mins before checkout would NOT be accepted and should never be permitted (as an example)
What information do you need from the guest to make a decision?
Anything else we should consider? The Host Co does a pretty good job at this already (and we use them for this currently with great success).
An automatic up sell when a booking is made to sell any gap nights before or after the booking at a reduced rate would be my dream!
An automatic up sell when a booking is made to sell any gap nights before or after the booking at a reduced rate would be my dream!
I’d love this as well! It’s actually part of my check-in info message that goes out a week before. If the night before their stay is available, I offer it at a discounted rate. Usually 25-50% off. MUCH prefer selling that to an early check-in fee. Helps with occupancy %, makes things clearer for the cleaners (not having to worry about a fluid check-in time), and the guest feels like they are getting a deal instead of being nickel and dimed with fees.
all upsells for the property visible in the guest portal, but the ones with time constraints showing unavailable until X date, or only available until X date, etc.
ability to set custom availability for each item. 1 week out, only up to 3 days out, etc.
ability to sell the nights before and after at discounted rates. MUCH preferred to early/late check-in/out fees! See my notes on Stay Salty’s post.
for food-based upsells, I’d like to know about allergies
more than one photo for an item! I have several packages in mind that would need more than one photo to clearly communicate. A short video capability would be fantastic as well.
Approval process would likely be manual, and include:
checking that cleaners schedule allows for changes
checking that I have stock to provide the add-on package, or have time to get it
Hi all!
Thanks for all your feedback on this.
Upsell requests is now live! You can go here to learn more & join the discussion:
Hi @Mikey,
I understand that the current config options won't be ideal for every host's setup, but we're committed to making them more flexible based on feedback. If you have specific ideas for what you'd like to see, I'd love to hear them — or feel free to add feature requests on our Featurebase, that way others can upvote them too.
Blocking the whole night before (for an early check-in the next day) doesn't sound like it would work for most hosts looking to optimize their return.
That's exactly why we only begin offering Early Check-in upsells 14 days prior to a booking — to reduce the risk of losing out on higher revenue from another reservation for the night before.
Many professional cleaners (if not most) can not guarantee that a property will be available by a specific check-in time on same day turnovers. So how are you going to prevent the early check-in upsell on same day turnover reservations? Without blocking a whole night before?
To prevent this issue, we automatically disable Early Check-in and Late Check-out upsells as soon as a back-to-back booking is made before or after the existing reservation, respectively.
If there was a way to change the days prior (from 14 to whatever we want) it’d be really nice. We currently say 5 days prior in our workflow (using Hostco)..
@anthonyrallo Yes, we shipped the ability to change the timing window of early check-in & late checkout upsells a few weeks ago:
We’re also actively working on optionally adding timing settings to custom upsells — coming very soon!
@anthonyrallo Yes, we shipped the ability to change the timing window of early check-in & late checkout upsells a few weeks ago:
We’re also actively working on optionally adding timing settings to custom upsells — coming very soon!
I’m excited about this. Since we currently use HostCo for upsells and had held back from HSPTB until ‘approvals’ came - we will scope this out to test.
One thing that I’ve mentioned that remains a challenge - a static link to the specific upsell that we can add to our guidebook.
Each property has its own guidebook (web-based) and guests will be directed to the guidebook multiple times prior to their stay. Having a direct link that we can put on a button in our guidebook to EACH discrete upsell offering will be essential.
This is what the top of our guidebook looks like now.
top of guidebook (this is a link to our specific Hostco store & checkin/out upsells
@anthonyrallo Thanks for the additional feedback!
It’s currently not possible to deep link to a product in a generic/static way, because each reservation has a unique Guest Portal link — unless your web-based guidebook can handle dynamic links in some way (the reservation uuid changes, the product uuid stays the same)?
We’ve taken note of this request but I recommend also adding this to https://feedback.hospitable.com to allow others to upvote it too!
