How to sell spa treatments and dining to hotel guests before they arrive

Hotels sell spa treatments and dining before arrival, often called pre-arrival upselling, by putting a few relevant, bookable offers into messages the guest already reads: the booking confirmation, a pre-arrival email a week or two before the stay, and the guest's online account. Each offer links to real availability, so the guest picks a time and pays or confirms on the spot.

Timing matters because spa and restaurant capacity is fixed. A guest who arrives on Saturday afternoon and asks for a massage at 4pm may find the therapists fully booked. Offering the treatment at booking, or a few days before arrival, gives the guest a real choice of times and fills the diary earlier.

When should pre-arrival offers go out?

• At booking, offer extras in the booking flow or the confirmation email, while the guest is still planning the trip.
• One to two weeks before arrival, send a pre-arrival email that suggests a treatment or a table for the first evening, with times to choose from.
• A day or two before arrival, confirm the dinner and spa times already booked and point to anything still available.
• On arrival, reception or the in-room information can mention late spa availability for guests who did not plan ahead.

If you are setting up automated guest emails for the first time, the confirmation and the pre-arrival message are the sensible place to start. In Tiquo, booking confirmation, reminder, cancellation and follow-up emails can be edited with your own wording and design, including a service image, a details card and an action button, and supported booking flows can replace the organisation's default template with their own.

For a separate pre-arrival offer, a Tiquo automation can start from a booking or order change, wait for a set period, branch on what the guest has done and then send a configured message. Before an automation goes live it needs the applicable marketing subscription and an AI review of the current revision, and sensitive changes can require staff approval.

What should you offer, and to whom?

Send fewer offers, matched to the guest. A couple booked for an anniversary weekend is a likely buyer for a couples massage and a tasting menu. A guest on a two-night business trip is more likely to want a gym slot, an early breakfast or a table for one at 8pm. A family may want a pool session and an early dinner sitting.

Use what you already know: the purpose of the stay if you asked for it, the number and ages of guests, length of stay and previous visits. A returning guest who booked a facial last time can be offered the same treatment or therapist. Keep each message to two or three offers. A long list of everything the hotel sells reads like a brochure and is easy to ignore.

Tiquo keeps room, spa and dining activity on one guest profile, with preferences, notes and visit history, so the team can see what a returning guest booked before. Marketing segments group customers by behaviour and attributes and update as activity changes, which helps you send each offer only to the guests it suits.

For some guests a package is an easier decision than several separate ones. A spa morning with lunch, or dinner with a bottle of wine waiting in the room, asks the guest to say yes once.

How do you make pre-arrival offers bookable?

An offer that says 'reply to this email to book' starts a chain of messages and leaves someone to enter the booking by hand later. A bookable offer shows the treatments or tables available on the guest's dates, lets them choose a time, and takes payment, a deposit or a card guarantee according to your policy. The booking appears in the spa or restaurant diary straight away.

A Tiquo spa or restaurant booking flow shows live availability and can take a deposit or full payment at checkout, and the booking lands in that department's diary. The spa flow can also offer fixed-price extras with a treatment in the same checkout, provided they are active fixed-price products from the same service area.

For the spa, the booking should also collect what the therapist needs, such as health questions, contraindications and pregnancy, along with the cancellation policy. For dining, ask for dietary requirements and allergies at the same time so the kitchen has them before the guest sits down. In Tiquo, a published form can collect those answers, including a drawn signature, and keeps the submission with the guest's customer record. Customer profiles also have standard fields for allergies and dietary requirements that staff can review on later visits.

Decide how much spa capacity to hold for residents. On a busy weekend, releasing every treatment slot to non-residents weeks ahead leaves nothing to offer the people staying in the hotel. One option is to hold a share of slots for hotel guests until a set number of days before each date.

Are pre-arrival offers marketing under UK rules?

Often, yes. The Information Commissioner's Office describes service messages as ones sent for administrative or customer service purposes, such as confirming or reminding someone about an appointment. If a service message includes elements that are direct marketing, even when that is not its main purpose, it counts as direct marketing.

Under PECR, marketing emails and texts to individuals need consent unless the soft opt-in applies. The soft opt-in covers marketing of your own similar products and services to someone whose details you collected while selling, or negotiating to sell, to them, provided you gave them a chance to opt out at that point and give it again in every message. The ICO says the question is whether people would reasonably expect the marketing based on previous interactions. A spa offer to a hotel guest may meet that test, but the simplest route is to ask for marketing consent during booking. Since February 2026 the ICO has been able to fine PECR breaches at the same levels as UK GDPR breaches. Our guide to UK GDPR and PECR for hospitality email marketing covers the detail.

Messages that only confirm what the guest has booked, such as the time of their dinner reservation, are service messages. Keep them free of promotion so you can still send them to guests who have opted out of marketing. That includes the booking reminder: add a spa offer to it and it becomes a marketing message. In Tiquo, a customer's presence in a marketing segment does not by itself make them eligible for a marketing message, and the appropriate consent rules still apply when campaign audiences overlap.

How do you measure pre-arrival upselling?

Track the share of room bookings that add a spa or dining booking before arrival, the revenue those bookings add per stay, and which message or page each one came from. Compare stays that received an offer with similar stays that did not. Check cancellations on pre-booked treatments as well, so the figures you report reflect treatments that were delivered. Tiquo's campaign reporting shows email opens, clicks and unsubscribes, down to individual recipients, and bookings, sales and customers can be filtered by segment in analytics.

Pre-arrival offers in the Tiquo customer portal

Guests who sign in to the Tiquo customer portal see a homepage you configure. Promotional banners can carry an image, heading, text and button, custom tiles can link to a booking or a published form, and booking flows can be grouped into named carousels, such as spa treatments or dinner, with your own descriptions. Guests can review their bookings there and reschedule eligible ones until your cancellation deadline.