Have you ever experienced this issue at your property? You receive some reservations via some OTAs, a few from online wholesalers and others from your website booking engine. Most of these are emailed to your team to be inputted into your PMS. Unfortunately though, your front desk and reservation team are busy dealing with a chaotic day of issues and the arrival of an entire conference of people. The new reservations (which are for check-in tomorrow) are not noticed until much later that evening, once everything has settled down. When the reservation was originally made, your property was at 98% occupancy (due to the on-site conference) and by the time the new reservations were discovered in the email inbox, the hotel was completely booked.
It's actually a fairly common problem. People get busy, emails overlooked, faxes lost. And no matter the reason, it results in problems for your hotel. But it doesn't have to be that way…
Instead of manually inputting reservations received from the online channel into your PMS, it is possible to have your reservations delivered automatically to your PMS. As well as being convenient, there are many other benefits to automatic reservation delivery tools:
1 Eliminate costly typos and errors.
Automatic reservation delivery removes any possibility of data entry errors. Even the most careful, detail-oriented employee could make a tiny error while entering the info into the PMS, which could result in loss of profits or potential customers. Especially in the case of overbooking, unhappy customers may post negative reviews online that may deter future clients from booking with your property. This fact alone makes it important to have automatic reservation delivery because, as you can see, not having it can have a long-term (negative) effect on your revenues.
2 More time to focus on providing better customer service.
When your staff isn't responsible for monitoring the email inbox and fax machine for incoming reservations, they will have more time available for providing the best possible service to your guests (and potential guests). From faster response time, to shorter front desk wait times, to having more time to handle last-minute emergencies, these improvements to the customer service that you provide can have a significant impact on your property's occupancy, ADR and RevPAR. As we mentioned in our last article "Three Steps to a Better TripAdvisor Rating", a one-point increase in a property's TripAdvisor rating can yield an increase in room rates of 11.2% without causing a drop in occupancy. A 1% increase in a hotel¹s online reputation score leads to a 0.89% increase in price (as measured by the hotel¹s ADR), up to 0.54% increase of occupancy and up to 1.42% increase in RevPAR.
3 Real-time data.?
Automatic reservation delivery ensures that there is no time delay between the booking and the delivery of the reservation to a property's PMS. It ensures that every reservation will be 100% accurate (to reflect the info that the customer requested). It ensures that your revenue management team is making decisions on strategy and pricing based on accurate and up-to-date info about your occupancy, room rates, etc. Eventually, the whole industry will use automatic reservation delivery because it will change the way that hotels manage their reservations drastically helping them earn more revenue from their bookings and keep customers happier. So why don't you take advantage of this great tool before the whole industry jumps on the bandwagon?!?
REVPAR GURU helps hotels to analyze complex data – including historical rates, the rates of competing properties in the same destination, pricing trends and environmental factors – to determine the right rate, at the right time, to secure the highest number of bookings. REVPAR GURU's system calculates room rates up to a year in advance, and continues to update the rates automatically multiple times every day as factors change, across all online channels including OTAs and direct channels.
In short, REVPAR GURU helps hotels to increase their occupancy and their revenues.
Headquartered in Miami, Florida, additional information can be found at www.revparguru.com or by calling +1.786.478.3500.
