Note: This article is based on the webinar Why “2022 Hotel Reservation Sales Report” Is Your Next Best Hack by Asksuite.
A few weeks ago, Merchandising VP at Chewy, Andreas von der Heydt, shared a post on LinkedIn making a link between data and Legos.
It compared unsorted data to Legos of all shapes and sizes, and how it doesn’t look like much at all. But as you start to organize it by colors and putting blocks together, you see the potential to build incredible things.
Our challenge in the hotel industry goes even deeper than unsorted data because, oftentimes, we can’t find data at all to back up whatever we’re trying to prove. There’s a lot to hospitality, but it’s not a data-driven industry.
A lack of data (and unsorted data in some cases) is the main reason why we decided to create a report on hotels’ pre-stay guest services. In the quest to find data to support new product updates and understand hoteliers’ biggest challenges, we were very surprised to discover we couldn’t find stats about many aspects involving the booking process. And even when hotels were collecting data, they weren’t doing much with it.
In other words, this report was born out of the necessity of collecting data regarding hotel customer service, sales, and reservations. We engaged in a series of interviews with hotels of all sizes, then selected topics and problems they flagged to create a survey, and subsequently, this report.
More than 200 hoteliers worldwide trusted us enough to share their exclusive data. So, this is your unique chance to:
- Compare your best practices and results with other hotels
- Identify and correct your performance gaps for better results
Remember, you can find all this data and more in our pre-stay guest service report. Download it for free!
What we discussed in our webinar about this market research report:
Social media
Who is responsible for your hotel’s social media?
- 45.3% reported that their in-house marketing handles social media
- 37.2% use a marketing agency
- 9.3% stated reservations
- 7% answered reception
- 1.2% indicated other departments
Most hotels delegate social media to marketing teams, which makes sense. However, what happens when a traveler asks for a price quote? Today, social media is not just a marketing channel, it’s also a customer service/sales channel.
In our Hotel Cast Tv webinar, we chatted with a handful of hospitality social media experts like Sarah Dandashy, Russell L. Edmond, and Regitse Rosenvinge. One thing all of them have emphasized is that travelers’ behavior has changed. Bookings and inquiries don’t happen only through traditional channels anymore. People want the ease of contacting hotels and getting fast replies through any channel.
You might like: Asksuite’s Free Social Media Kit
So, the results above make us wonder:
- What happens to the booking inquiries on social media?
- Do hotels answer with a simple: please, email us with your question?
- Do they take long to answer?
- Do they ignore the messages?
- Is the marketing team or agency trained to close deals?
This scenario sets hotels up for headaches, such as lack of answers, delayed responses, and no control over missed booking opportunities.
Solutions:
- Designate one person on the team to respond on social media.
- Build an efficient process, so your marketing agency (if applicable) can send requests to your team quickly.
- Consider an omnichannel service platform, where all agents have access to decentralized chat history.
- Activate digital assistance to provide 24/7 customer service.
An omnichannel service platform like Asksuite enables you to distribute messages automatically to your team and gives you control and management of your customer service:
Call abandonment rates
Do you know your hotel’s call abandonment rate?
As we all know, when it comes to the hotel industry, the phone is still one of the main communication/reservations and sales channels. So, we’ve asked hoteliers how long a customer or possible customer is willing to wait in line before their team picks up.
- 35.4% of respondents didn’t know the answer!
- 30.7% of hotels affirmed that customers tend to hang up if the line rings more than 3 times
- 25.2% stated that customers hang up between 4 and 6 rings
- 8.7% of hotels said that customers hang up after the line rings 6 times
It’s a red flag that over 35% don’t know the answer to this question, which means they have no idea how many calls they are missing. Calls should not be ignored. If someone calls to ask you about something related to booking a room, it means they are very close to booking with you. They are so invested, that they picked up the phone and called your hotel. Hotels cannot miss this type of lead.
And if a hotel doesn’t provide assistance, travelers will go to options with quicker answers. Like Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos said, “Your margin is my opportunity.” Travelers won’t wait, and competitors will benefit.
Solutions:
- Use an IVR system for incoming calls. It also collects data on the caller.
- Analyze what time of the day you have your biggest gaps and rethink your operation. Manage your workforce effectively by arranging agent schedules so that someone is always available to answer calls.
Recommended: Our webinar, How to Turn Callers Into Bookers, brings you industry experts sharing unmissable tricks on how to convert more bookings from incoming phone inquiries.
Conversion rates
Do you know the sales conversions per agent?
- 35.4% of hotels don’t know what their conversion rate per agent is.
- 24.4% affirmed the conversion rate per agent is greater than 30%.
- 17.3% shared that their conversion rate per agent is between 11-30%.
- 14.2% reported a conversion rate per agent between 21-30%.
- 8.7% reported a conversion rate per agent between 0-10%.
That’s a high percentage of hotels that don’t know their conversion rate. Management guru, Peter Drucker, rightly said, “What gets measured gets managed.” When you don’t measure your conversion, it’s impossible to know whether you’re underperforming or not, so how can you improve it?
In this episode of the Hotel Cast Podcast, we chat with Shona Whitehead, Managing Partner of Cogent Blue. She shares how to optimize hotel commercial performances, best practices in revenue management, as well as the relationship between commercial teams and hotel techs.
Hotel industry research report
More often than not, we make business decisions based on what we think. We think this or that channel is the best, we think it’s cheaper to do this strategy over another… In reality, we don’t actually track and analyze.
Now, however, we have technology that helps us, and it pays back when used right. This market research report on the hotel industry is a free tool that can help hotels benchmark against the competition, spot performance gaps, and stop missing opportunities. But most importantly, it draws attention to unsorted data, KPIs that can be tracked, and neglected areas where hoteliers have room to make revenue.
Getting back to Legos, we truly hope this report turns out to be a great starting point for hotels ready to see the potential for building greater things. It includes data such as improving the pre-stay experience as well as the workflow of every employee.
We hope every new analysis is like a section of colorful blocks coming together, so that your hotel discovers new and creative ways to excel and optimize revenue.
If you liked this article and want to have easy access to the complete webinar where Paula Carreirão, Content Coordinator at Asksuite, and Evelin Lima, Content Strategist at Asksuite, discussed their findings with a live audience, here is the replay:
You can also download this full guest service report by clicking on the button below:
