Gift vouchers are not a new idea. Hotels have been selling them for decades. So why do most properties still treat gifting as an afterthought, managed through a spreadsheet, a PDF form, or a front desk conversation that relies entirely on whoever picks up the phone?
The answer is usually some combination of IT complexity, competing priorities, and the assumption that gifting is a low-volume channel not worth optimising. That assumption is costing hotels real money. Even the breakage alone, the 5 to 23% of vouchers that expire unredeemed, is pure margin most properties never plan for.
The Market Is There. The Infrastructure Often Isn't.
Consumer appetite for experience-based gifting has grown steadily. People are buying fewer physical gifts and spending more on experiences they can give to someone else: a spa day, a weekend stay, a tasting menu. Hotels sit directly in the middle of that trend. They offer exactly what experience gift buyers are looking for.
The problem is that most hotels make it harder than it needs to be to buy a voucher. The purchase journey is fragmented. Buyers land on a website, find a vague "gift vouchers" page, and are then asked to call reservations or fill out a contact form. By the time a staff member follows up, the buyer has moved on or bought something else.
Friction kills gifting revenue. A clean, self-serve purchase flow converts. The gap between those two things represents significant lost income for most properties.
Peak Gifting Periods Go Underserved
Hotels that do sell vouchers often fail to plan around the moments when gifting demand spikes. Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day: these are periods when consumers are actively looking for experience gifts and willing to spend more than they would on a typical stay or dining booking.
A property that does no active promotion around these windows, offers no themed packages, and pushes no traffic to a gifting page is leaving the table empty at the exact moment buyers are looking to sit down.
This is not about running aggressive discounts. It is about being present. A well-timed email to a past guest database with a relevant gifting offer costs almost nothing to send. The conversion potential is real because those recipients already know the property.
Packaging Matters More Than Most Hotels Think
One area where gifting revenue stalls is product design. A voucher for "one night accommodation" is a commodity. A voucher for a "private chef dinner for two with wine pairing, followed by an overnight stay" is a gift. The second option commands a higher price and creates a clearer, more emotional reason to buy.
Hotels that build thoughtful packages, combining accommodation with F&B, spa, or unique experiences, consistently outperform those selling single-service vouchers. The effort to build those packages is modest. The pricing power they create is not.
Redemption Is Also Revenue
There is a persistent misconception that selling a voucher is the end of the transaction. In reality, redemption is where hotels often capture their highest-value guests.
A guest redeeming a gift voucher is typically visiting on someone else's money, which changes their spending behaviour. They are more likely to upgrade, order from the bar, book a treatment, or extend their stay. Average spend per visit for redemption guests frequently outperforms direct bookers.
Properties that treat voucher redemption as an upsell opportunity rather than an obligation to fulfil tend to see a meaningful lift in overall voucher programme revenue. That starts with briefing front desk and F&B staff on who is redeeming and what the property's goals are when those guests arrive.
Breakage Adds a Layer of Pure-Margin Revenue
Hotels are often privately aware of another financial benefit of gifting: breakage. Not all vouchers are redeemed. A well-run gifting programme generates a consistent percentage of revenue from vouchers that expire unused.
This is legitimate income. Buyers choose to purchase, and if circumstances change and a voucher goes unredeemed, the hotel retains the revenue. A higher-volume gifting programme generates more breakage revenue in absolute terms, even if the percentage stays constant.
Manual Operations Are Why Most Gifting Programmes Stay Small
The honest answer is operational. Managing voucher sales, distribution, tracking, and redemption manually is painful at volume. Properties that handle twenty or thirty vouchers a month through spreadsheets find it manageable. Properties that could be handling two hundred find the manual process a blocker and never scale.
Throwing more staff at it does not help. What works is a system that handles issuance, redemption tracking, and reporting automatically, integrates with existing hotel operations, and lets a guest complete a purchase at 11pm on a Sunday without anyone on the property doing anything at all.
That infrastructure exists. Platforms like Ryse Cloud are built specifically for hospitality gifting, with direct integration into hotel workflows. The properties seeing the strongest gifting revenue tend to be the ones that removed the friction, built the right packages, and showed up during peak gifting periods, often not the biggest or best-known names.
Most hotels have not done all three of those things yet. That is why this is still a missed opportunity, and also why the upside for properties that act on it is still substantial.
Want to turn your gifting page into a channel that runs itself? Book a Ryse demo and we will show you how.
