Pull a single number out of most hotel gifting reports and you will land on an average order value. It looks precise. It is almost useless. Across a portfolio that spans more than one property tier, that one figure is the blend of three businesses that behave nothing alike. Manage to the average and you will overprice the bottom of your estate, underprice the top, and merchandise both to a customer who does not exist.
We looked at ~100,000 gift-voucher purchases across our five APAC markets, then sorted the properties into luxury, premium and midscale. The split was stark. Tier explained more about how a hotel's gifting behaves than country, season, or anything else we tested. Three tiers, three genuinely different economic models.
Luxury, Premium and Midscale Run Three Different P&Ls
| Tier | Avg order value | Voucher revenue | Bought as a gift |
|---|---|---|---|
| Luxury | US$193 | US$3.79M | 29% |
| Premium | US$115 | US$2.88M | 18% |
| Midscale | US$89 | US$0.40M | 11% |
Source: ~100,000 vouchers sold in 2025, de-duplicated and audited. APAC, five markets. No individual hotel named.
Read it across and the personalities separate. Luxury sells the fewest vouchers, but each one is worth far more. Premium is the volume engine: the largest share of orders at a middle price. Midscale runs as a high-frequency, low-ticket business built almost entirely on dining. The same product category on paper, three different profit-and-loss statements underneath.
Why Luxury Earns More on Fewer Orders
This is the line that should stop a commercial lead mid-scroll. The luxury tier sold roughly 20,000 vouchers; the premium tier sold around 30,000, half as many again. Yet luxury produced US$3.79M of voucher revenue against premium's US$2.88M. Fewer transactions, almost a million dollars more.
The reason is value per order, and it compounds across the catalogue. A luxury voucher averaged US$193 against US$115 at premium. That gap reflects something structural: the difference between a tier whose buyers reach for stays, gift cards and spa, and one that leans on lower-priced dining. Inside luxury, a staycation voucher averaged around US$252 and a gift card around US$216, roughly three times the value of a dining voucher. Premium's mix simply sits lower down the price ladder, so it has to sell more to bank less.
There is a myth buried in here worth killing off. Plenty of operators assume that pricing a gift higher suppresses demand, so the safe move is to keep denominations low and accessible. The data points the other way. Premium pricing at the top of the market does not shrink the gifting business; it shifts the product mix toward higher-value items. A US$500 gift card does not frighten luxury buyers off. They are the people buying it.
The Blended Average Hides Where the Money Actually Is
Behind the curtain, the most useful thing we did was stop reading gifting at the portfolio level and start reading it by tier. The moment you do, the strategy inverts in places you would not expect. Open-value gift cards, the product most groups treat as a downmarket convenience, turn out to be most popular at the very top. Dining, which a luxury marketer might dismiss as low-value, is the single largest category even in luxury and the entire business at midscale. None of that is visible in a blended average. It only appears when you separate the tiers and let each one tell you what its buyers actually do.
One Catalogue Across a Mixed-Tier Group Loses Money at Both Ends
Here is where groups lose money without noticing. A multi-property operator builds one gifting catalogue, one set of denominations, one campaign template, and rolls it across every flag in the portfolio. It feels efficient. It is quietly wrong at both ends. Run the same data by tier and the properties want different things:
- Product mix. Dining is 37% of luxury orders but 63% of midscale. A catalogue tuned for one is mistuned for the other.
- Gift-card appetite. Open-value cards are 27% of luxury orders, around 11% at premium and 14% at midscale. The richest gift-card buyer sits at the very top of the market.
- Who it is for. A luxury voucher is bought as a genuine gift nearly three times as often as a midscale one, 29% versus 11%. Your luxury storefront is a gift shop; your midscale storefront is a self-treat store. They need different words.
- Price points. In Australia, luxury gift cards anchor at $500 with a real $1,000 tier, while premium centres on $100 to $200. Drop a $1,000 option into a midscale catalogue and it reads as absurd; cap a luxury catalogue at $200 and you leave the biggest orders on the table.
One catalogue cannot serve all three without being wrong for at least two. The discipline that already governs your room rates, where nobody would price a luxury suite and a midscale room from the same sheet, just has not been extended to the gifting line yet.
Price and Merchandise Each Tier to Its Own Customer
The fix is simple. It just has to be deliberate. Treat each tier as its own customer with its own job to do.
Luxury. Lead with value and genuine gifting. Hero the gift card and the named stay, carry a high aspirational denomination, and write the storefront as a gift for someone special. This is the tier where scheduled delivery, a personal message and recipient personalisation earn their place.
Premium. This is your volume engine, so make the first purchase effortless. Lead with a named, sub-US$100 dining experience to win the transaction, then merchandise a stay and a mid-tier gift card as the trade-up. Round denominations, three or four of them, one aspirational top.
Midscale. Accept what it is: a high-frequency dining business. Price flat and simple, promote the named restaurant experience, and put your real effort into redemption, because this is the tier where vouchers expire unused most often. Volume is the whole game, and friction is the enemy.
Across all three, one rule survives every market: the round number. Odd, discount-math prices like $149 splinter demand and read as clearance. A gift's price signals how much the giver cares, so it should look chosen.
The Averages Were Always Going to Mislead You
There is no average hotel. There is a luxury business selling high-value gifts to people buying for others, a premium business winning volume on dining and trading up, and a midscale business that lives or dies on redemption. Price them as one and you quietly subsidise your weakest tier with your strongest, then wonder why the line never grows.
The question for your next portfolio review is blunt: are your gifting denominations, products and messaging set per tier, or copied across the group from a single template? If it is the template, the gap between what each property could earn and what it actually earns is sitting in that decision.
Want your gifting split out by tier the way this data is? Book a Ryse demo and we will run your numbers.
