Building Relationships
I’ve been thinking about the different ways in which I can build relationships with prospective clients and what it should be based on and decided that trust was the ultimate key to do doing so.
This in turn got me thinking about how hotels could do the same thing and I remembered what used to help me gain trust in a hotel when I was a Travel Agent.
I would spend quite a bit of time qualifying my client’s needs and researching the hotel and booking the property at what I thought was the best rate available only to have the client call back a few hours later to say “Thank you so much for all of your help you were terrific but we have found the hotel cheaper on the internet so are going to book it ourselves.”
So you know what I did to stop losing sales? I ended up with a few hotels in each major city that I absolutely trusted, along with a distribution channel that I absolutely trusted and I used them again and again because I just lost faith in those hotels that chopped and changed depending on the channel and its commission and fee structure. How did these hotels gain my trust? By having rate parity across all channels, so no matter where any of us looked, whether it be me as an agent or my client the rates were the same.
Now put yourself in the shoes of the potential guest, the home shopper who doesn’t even venture into a travel agency. What if I don’t know ALL of the places I can shop for your hotel, what if I think your site should be the most trustworthy of all channels and book a room through your online booking engine only for the friend of a friend of a friend to inform me that I should have booked through such and such site because the rates are 20% cheaper there. That’s going to leave me feeling really cheated and lose trust in the hotel.
And if I think about it from the extra net channels perspective rate parity is also imperative because why would I want to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars marketing my site which in turn is helping you to market your hotel only to have you sell it somewhere cheaper. Isn’t that just a bit cheeky and untrustworthy?
So as an hotelier what should you do?
You need rate parity across ALL of your online distribution channels, your booking engine, the GDS network and your extra net channels. This will help you build a relationship of trust between yourselves, potential guests and extra net channels and keep them coming back for more.
