What do Clients Look for Before Booking a Hotel?

Summary: Patrons looking to book a hotel property for their cherished stay, can be a whimsical bunch. They have their notions and beliefs when it comes to pricing and timing of booking for the stay. A Hospitality Call Center can be your go-to guide while navigating this mesh.

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Patrons looking to book a hotel are an enigmatic lot when it comes to finding out the best deal available on a property in their dream destination. Some believe that booking early is the best course of action while others would like to postpone making reservations since they feel that rental prices would be slashed at the last minute. A hotel property owner has to be ever watchful about their changing desires and beliefs to understand them more deeply and make sense of their needs and wants.

Around the world, among hotel patrons, there are all sorts of myths and legends about how to get the best deal and have a meaningful boast with friends and families circle. The most prevalent belief is timing – the day or hour in the week when they do the booking. They are always looking at the rules of thumb when it comes to securing the cheapest possible property price.

Talking about timing, hotel patrons do take into cognizance that booking a hotel is not as same as booking a plane ticket. They understand that booking a flight on a Monday or a Tuesday would be the most cost-effective, but the same phenomenon doesn’t apply to booking hotels. 

They avoid booking hotel rooms at the beginning of the week as they believe these to be the peak demand day for such bookings as people tend to schedule the itinerary of their weekend pleasure trip well in advance. They would rather wait for the weekend to come by and hope that demand would have tapered off by then. Then they exclusively start looking for properties that are slashing prices since they now have vacant room inventory on their rolls. 

Another way in which patrons differ between booking a plane ticket and a hotel room is the flexibility of up-front payments. For booking an advance airline ticket they have to do an on-the-spot upfront payment and also bear a penalty for cancellations on the due date. Since many hotel properties have a far more lenient cancellation and refund policy, they tend to use it for making advance bookings without any up-front payments and can cancel anytime (especially if they are reward members) without giving second thoughts, as there is no underlying penalty.

If a patron has made plans for a vacation with friends or family, they will look for properties that have got all the bells and whistles and are within budget, and can even book too far in advance. However, without exception, they would still keep looking for better deals. Thus the incumbent hotel is left with complete uncertainty unless D-day has arrived. 

The clients keep this booking as a benchmark and become more and more aggressive towards deal hunting during the last two weeks of their scheduled departure dates. They go to the extent of visiting the hotel’s native website for scouting better deals. The common consensus is that this time period is best for deal hunting. Their thinking is not baseless as well. Hotels need rooms filled in order to make money. Apart from the principal rental for the room, their source of revenue is auxiliary purchases and more bookings through world-of-mouth reviews and recommendations.

If the Hotels are left with unsold rooms near or on D-day or guest visits, they will likely cut down the prices in hopes of making up for the lost revenue. But there is a catch too. Sometimes when the demand outstrips supply, Hotels can raise the bar on charging revenue per room. These are the only occasions when clients come to the receiving end. Usually, this phenomenon is observed during holidays or if the city is hosting a large event like festivals, marathons, political rallies, or sporting events. Etc.

To cater to these vagaries of clients, hotels across the world are paying a lot of emphasis on the skill development of their front desk customer support staff which specializes in reservations. They employ the services of a Hospitality Call Center. These are experts who are well-trained to convert impromptu client visits over the website, into real bookings. They are adept are up-selling and cross-selling existing products and services as well.

Many a time for a hotel property owner, it is financially and staff bandwidth-wise restrictive for setting up an in-house Multilingual hotel reservations support customer help desk. These are tasks that require a high level of dexterity. The good news is that there are international companies like LiveSalesman, which provides Multilingual hotel reservation support at a fraction of the cost. They have a team of experts who provide reservation services in more than 30 international languages, thus catering to a wide range of international customers.

As a hotel owner, if you have plugged in a Hospitality call Center, you can rest assured that not only do you meet the stringent demands imposed by your visiting patrons, but excel in them.