May
31
How far in advance do your customers book with you?
A day in advance? A week? A month? A year?
Do you measure it? If not why not?
Control over the booking window may appear to be tricky for you to establish, but it doesn't need to be. It really depends on how much you understand about your customers, their reasons for booking and the value they expect.
Late booking is an internet phenomenon which is fed by the fact that many hotels don't take the time to understand customer buyer behaviour. As a result, these hotels have less advance bookings than hotels with good marketing systems. A feature of this is panic "late availability" pricing on the internet.
If people know they can get good prices if they wait until they can hear your pips squeak - why should they book far in advance? Late availability pricing encourages customers to delay their purchase decision, then rewards that delay with a discount.
Is that really the way you want to run your hotel??
Hotels are not very good at offering strong value for distant booking windows. Not particularly because they don't want to offer good deals - usually because they haven't thought about them yet.
Take Christmas as an example. When do you think the first booking was taken for a Christmas break for 2010? For those of you who haven't sorted out your package prices for Christmas yet, this may come as a bit of a shock: A colleague of mine runs a hotel booking website - their first booking for Christmas 2010 was made on Boxing Day 2009.
Poeple with a purpose DO book well in advance. They're just not always prepared to pay the silly money many hotels quote far in advance.
If you know there is going to be more demand than supply for your offerings, then of course you need to be careful you don't leave money on the table with your pricing - you want to get as much as you can reasonably expect. But don't apply the same logic to those times of the year when supply outstrips demand. It's at those times of the year that you want to build base occupancy in your hotel - you want to know you've covered the cost of being there and to do that you need advance bookings. You can plan your resources accordingly. It's much more rewarding to produce a duty roster for your core staff throughout the off season than it is to send them all redundancy notices.
You can find out what a customers' purpose is by qualifying them. Again, late bookings on the internet are a direct result of NOT qualifying business (you know nothing about them, apart from the fact that they are suckers for cheap prices).
How do you qualify a prospect? Simple. Ask them some questions:
- Why are you coming?
- When are you coming?
- What can we do for you while you are here?
- Who else do you know is looking for the same thing?
Of course, it helps if you offer a decent price too. People are much more knowledgeable about prices these days. It is fair to say that people with a purpose aren't as price sensitive as "late bookers", but that doesn't make them stupid. If you have an offer on the internet for bookings this week which is less than half the price of the room they're trying to book with you for this time next year, it's just possible they might ask you WHY you want to charge them so much. That's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky all you'll hear is the click of death as they hang up on you...
If you want advance bookings, you need to reward them with something. At the moment, 90% of internet based hotel promotion rewards late booking, unqualified business.
Isn't it time you started rolling out your offers further in advance? If you reward long lead-in booking behaviour, that might just be the behaviour you start to see in your customers.
A day in advance? A week? A month? A year?
Do you measure it? If not why not?
Control over the booking window may appear to be tricky for you to establish, but it doesn't need to be. It really depends on how much you understand about your customers, their reasons for booking and the value they expect.
Late booking is an internet phenomenon which is fed by the fact that many hotels don't take the time to understand customer buyer behaviour. As a result, these hotels have less advance bookings than hotels with good marketing systems. A feature of this is panic "late availability" pricing on the internet.
If people know they can get good prices if they wait until they can hear your pips squeak - why should they book far in advance? Late availability pricing encourages customers to delay their purchase decision, then rewards that delay with a discount.
Is that really the way you want to run your hotel??
Hotels are not very good at offering strong value for distant booking windows. Not particularly because they don't want to offer good deals - usually because they haven't thought about them yet.
Take Christmas as an example. When do you think the first booking was taken for a Christmas break for 2010? For those of you who haven't sorted out your package prices for Christmas yet, this may come as a bit of a shock: A colleague of mine runs a hotel booking website - their first booking for Christmas 2010 was made on Boxing Day 2009.
Poeple with a purpose DO book well in advance. They're just not always prepared to pay the silly money many hotels quote far in advance.
If you know there is going to be more demand than supply for your offerings, then of course you need to be careful you don't leave money on the table with your pricing - you want to get as much as you can reasonably expect. But don't apply the same logic to those times of the year when supply outstrips demand. It's at those times of the year that you want to build base occupancy in your hotel - you want to know you've covered the cost of being there and to do that you need advance bookings. You can plan your resources accordingly. It's much more rewarding to produce a duty roster for your core staff throughout the off season than it is to send them all redundancy notices.
You can find out what a customers' purpose is by qualifying them. Again, late bookings on the internet are a direct result of NOT qualifying business (you know nothing about them, apart from the fact that they are suckers for cheap prices).
How do you qualify a prospect? Simple. Ask them some questions:
- Why are you coming?
- When are you coming?
- What can we do for you while you are here?
- Who else do you know is looking for the same thing?
Of course, it helps if you offer a decent price too. People are much more knowledgeable about prices these days. It is fair to say that people with a purpose aren't as price sensitive as "late bookers", but that doesn't make them stupid. If you have an offer on the internet for bookings this week which is less than half the price of the room they're trying to book with you for this time next year, it's just possible they might ask you WHY you want to charge them so much. That's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky all you'll hear is the click of death as they hang up on you...
If you want advance bookings, you need to reward them with something. At the moment, 90% of internet based hotel promotion rewards late booking, unqualified business.
Isn't it time you started rolling out your offers further in advance? If you reward long lead-in booking behaviour, that might just be the behaviour you start to see in your customers.
0 Trackbacks