Resort Reservations: What To Say When The Phones Start Ringing Again Shortly!
Wow, what a wild two months that resort reservations sales agents have endured. Agents were the first to feel the impact of the COVID19 pandemic, as suddenly a tsunami of cancellation calls and emails flooded the phone lines and inboxes. How painful it must have been to watch hard-fought bookings cancel and to see the flow of revenue change direction. Even more so, this team endured difficult conversations about the fine print of cancellation terms and travel insurance. Next, it was surely hard to watch as co-workers from operations were furloughed or laid off. Now, here in late April, …
Campaigns Your Email Marketing Needs
With the large bulk of bookings at your hotel coming from the world wide web, implementing a strategy around your hotel email marketing is critical. Due to the current situation and pandemic going on, the days of agents making inbound phone reservations have been put to a halt. With phone reservations, it allows the agent to build a relationship using voice interaction and personality. Generating less personal relationships in the near future due to social distancing, automated and personalized communication is the key via email blasts. You do not want your reservation agents and marketing team to send low-quality, unsegmented …
Turn Your Inbound Reservations Team Into Sales Hunters!
The reservations teams at most lodging companies are typically focused on responding to inbound inquiries coming in via phone, email, chat, and responding to messages in apps such as AirBnB, VRBO, and Booking.com. In essence, they have an administrative, “order-taking” role. However, smart leaders recognize the revenue-generating opportunities presented when guests reach out directly. They have already provided sales training to help agents evolve into being “order-makers.” Watch the webinar or continue reading the article below. In previous blogs and webcasts for TrackPulse, we have covered highlights from KTN training workshops that can help “order-makers” close more bookings from …
Why Your Vacation Rental Management Needs Revenue Management
It is no joke that in 2020 revenue management has become more critical to the Vacation Rental Management industry. Property managers want to understand why it’s relevant, how to compete, and ultimately, maximize their revenue. In this post you will learn how revenue management is more than just pricing, along with what revenue management companies TRACK Property Management Software partner with. Why Your Vacation Rental Management Needs Revenue Management Taking it back to the basics, revenue management is important due to the ancient rules of supply and demand. Your vacation rental management company needs to strategically set rental fees based …
Upping Your Game At Selling Experiences, Not Rooms!
As everyone who fields reservations inquiries knows all too well, most callers have already been online prior to calling. They have visited the hotel website, viewed images, seen the cool new drone video, read reviews and searched rates. Yet there’s still something that has prevented them from booking online just yet and some missing factor that has motivated them to call. That’s why these days we need to ask more and better questions, as we have explored previously in other posts, with the most important question being to ask them if they have questions! “As I’m checking those dates, are there …
3 Contact Center Essentials for Success
Is your independent hotel, resort, or vacation rental company setting up your reservation agents for success? Managing a contact center is a very rigorous task including pressure around staying in budget, staffing, call quality, and profitability. Checking that your contact center enforces and utilizes the following 3 essentials will help ensure you hit your goals. Call Tracking and Routing Call tracking is an important component to measure key data and performance insights. Reservation teams can utilize call tracking technology to capture contact data, improve customer service, and save leads. Call Logs Customizable user control in call logs allows your agents to quickly …
5 KPIs and Reports You Need to Run an Efficient Contact Center
It’s really easy to lose yourself in gut feeling or intuition, and it’s also really easy to follow patterns that aren’t really there. In business, we’re taught to trust the numbers, and not make decisions based on those gut feelings, but do you know which numbers you should be using to make these critical decisions? And more importantly, do you have access to these numbers/can you report on these numbers? The following is a list of statistics/reports that we feel are critical for optimizing performance of your contact center and reservations team. Occupancy Level When we talk about running a …
The Importance of Capturing Hotel Guest Data
Creating the ultimate guest experience should be a hotel’s primary goal. Today, leading hotels implement CRM functionality to capture guest behaviors, communications, interests and spend data in one single source of truth, leveraging and customizing this data to provide these unique and personalized communications and experiences.. Managing guest data via a rich profile gives the hotelier the ability to understand their guests needs even before they check-in and can create personalized marketing and experiences during stay and throughout the lifecycle of the customer. The 3 Functions of Data Connecting with your guests needs to be memorable, making data an extremely …
Get Your Reservations Team On A QUEST For More Bookings In 2019
Join the webinar on Thursday, April 18 at 11:00am CST Over my career in lodging industry sales and service training I have designed six different hotel reservations training programs with names like, 7-Step For Reservations Sales Success, Cooking UP New Reservations Sales and Hotel Reservations SAILS Training. A few years back, after recognizing that so much had changed on the caller’s side of a reservations phone call, I designed our newest KTN program and titled it Reservations Sales QUEST. In doing so I threw out all my preconceptions, locked myself in my office for a few days and spent time listening …
How Golf Resorts Can Effectively Use Email Marketing Automation
According to eMarketer’s Email Marketing Benchmarks report, B2C marketers who are using automation have seen conversion rates as high as 50%. As inboxes become more crowded with generic messages that are easy to ignore, businesses need to cut through the clutter with carefully crafted emails that speak to how people are feeling. Newsletters and other email blasts are created one time and sent out to a list of addresses that you’ve collected. An automated email campaign, however, is set up once and then continually runs by sending out emails automatically when an individual completes a specific action. For example, if …
