Building packages for your B&B: which ones actually sell

A package is the easiest way to raise your average booking value without touching your room rate. Yet most packages never sell, because they are too expensive, too vague, or too much work. Here is how to build one that does sell, and how to work out what it earns you.

Raising your room rate feels risky. You are in a region where guests compare prices, and ten euros more can be the difference between a booking and an empty night. But there is a second dial, and many hosts never touch it: the value of the booking rather than the price per night.

That is exactly what a package does. Same room, same night, but a guest who spends 190 euros instead of 130 — and who is more likely to book direct with you, because the package does not exist on the platforms.

The catch: most packages I see on small accommodation websites sell nothing at all. They have been sitting there for three years, nobody clicks them, and the host concludes that "packages do not work for us". Usually it comes down to one of four things.

Why packages sit there unsold

They are too expensive in absolute terms. A guest willing to pay 130 euros a night balks at a 320-euro package for two nights with dinner. Not because it is badly priced, but because the number sits above their mental threshold. A 45-euro add-on to a booking they are already making feels completely different from a 320-euro starting price.

They are too vague. "Wellness package" says nothing. "Two nights, late check-out until 2pm, a bottle of cava in the room on arrival and sauna access on Friday evening" says everything. Guests buy what they can picture.

They cost you too much work. A package with a three-course dinner you have to cook yourself on a Saturday when you are already turning over four rooms is not revenue — that is giving yourself a second job. The best package is one you barely have to do anything for.

They are in the wrong place. If the package only lives on a separate "Packages" page nobody visits, it will not sell. It has to be visible at the moment the guest is already booking.

The kind of package that does sell

Look at what you already have in the house and what your surroundings hand you for free. The three categories that consistently work for small properties:

1. Time. Late check-out until 2pm, early check-in from 1pm. Costs you nothing on a day the room is not being re-let, and guests happily pay 20 to 30 euros for it. This is the highest-margin package you will ever offer. See also setting check-in and check-out times sensibly.

2. Local, bought in. A regional beer selection, a breakfast hamper with produce from the farm down the road, a bottle from the wine bar around the corner. You buy at wholesale or with a partner discount and sell at a price the guest finds reasonable because they recognise the products. A 40 to 60 percent margin is normal here, and you make nothing yourself.

3. Partner services. The bike rental, the kayak trip, the massage therapist who comes to the house. You resell, with a commission or a fixed margin per booking. Your main contribution is the arranging — and that is precisely what the guest is paying for, because they do not want to work through three websites themselves.

Note what all three have in common: none of them puts you in the kitchen for three hours.

The maths

Take a package with late check-out (costs 0), a bottle of cava (7 euros to buy) and a breakfast hamper of local produce (14 euros). Total cost: 21 euros. Sale price 55 euros. Margin: 34 euros per booking.

Sell that twenty times a year and you have 680 euros of extra gross margin without one extra room, one extra clean, or one euro of commission — because this sort of package only sells direct. Compare that with the number of extra bookings you would need to net the same 680 euros through a platform.

The rule I would hold to: a package should clear at least 50 percent gross margin. If it does not, you are reselling someone else's services without earning anything on them. How to track those margins per booking is covered in getting more revenue per booking with upsells.

Where you show it

This is where most of the revenue is lost. Three places that do work:

In the booking engine, as a tick-box option. The guest has already picked their dates and is mentally in buying mode. A 55-euro tick next to a 260-euro booking is a small decision.
In the confirmation email. "Would you like a breakfast hamper as well? Let us know up to three days before arrival." It costs you one sentence, and a share of your guests will say yes.
In your pre-arrival message, three days out. The guest is actively planning the weekend now, and is at their most receptive.

And a fourth you are better off skipping: putting the package on the platforms too. Then you pay commission on it, and you lose the only real argument you had for booking direct.

Start with one

Do not put six packages online at once. Pick one, keep it simple, give it a name the guest understands, and put it in your booking engine as an option. After three months, look at how many times it sold. If it is running, add a second. If it is not, drop the price or swap out one component — a far smaller intervention than revising six packages at the same time.

In BedFlow PMS you add such an option to your own booking engine, with a fixed price or a price per person per night, and it appears as a separate line on the invoice and in your revenue figures. That way, after a season you know exactly what each package brought in instead of it disappearing into your total turnover. What the platform itself costs is on our pricing page.

Want to see what a package actually earns you? BedFlow PMS is free to try for 30 days at bedflow.eu — calendar, booking engine with options and extras, and revenue per line in one overview. No credit card required.