Luxury hotels, projected by many as offering a ‘home away from home’ put in the best of their efforts in trying to pre-empt the customer’s needs and do their best to offer personalized service by way of throwing in a wide range of add-ons to woo their customers – known generally in the hotels as ‘guests’. This apart, special rate agreements, incentives, enticements and motivations are offered to woo the customers. This is the same customer or a set of customers after which, several other service establishments are also running.
Hotel sales managers and sales executives who are incessantly working towards increasing room and banqueting business directly amongst the guests, the mediators or the agents in order to get some share of business available in their city, need to face challenges at different times. The choice of which hotel to stay in during a regular business visit or during a conference, despite all contracts signed, depends however, primarily upon the individual choice of the traveler. This is what one learns in the marketing classes at the Vatel Hotel & Tourism Business School, Sushant University.
Despite many organisations tying up with different hotels for a special volume-guaranteed rate-agreement, they are still not able to extend their entire business exclusively to a particular hotel due to specific reasons. During my own experience at the ITC hotels as a sales manager I came across building key accounts (which used to give us almost their entire room business) I could, however see that a few of the executives of the same organisation, despite being offered similar or even better amenities, privileges conveniences and even better rates, still used to prefer patronizing the competing hotels, whereas some of them continued to be with my hotel on all their visits to the city.
The best hotel management institutes teach the students to be customer-oriented. A home away from home is the place where you get to meet the kind of people you like, who understand you as a person (not as a customer) and who are always keen to go out of their way to look after you. In other words, going by the nature of humans, everybody is looking for recognition and gratitude. There is therefore a greater need to understand a guest as a person who has visited your house, your family home, in the expectation to be looked after well, to be treated well, to be made comfortable and happy so that he or she may always aspire to stay at your hotel in all the visits.
Taking about hotel sales promotion or business to a guest or to an agent is the last thing that an experienced salesman must indulge into. The guest, so also the agent tends to pay you more attention and is more attentive to listen to you if the subject of discussion centers around his ‘personal choice’. One of my clients, a football enthusiast, who upon my sales call to his company, used to enjoy talking about the latest techniques in the game, the best of the teams around the world and, of course used to be watching TV in his cabin during most of the matches. Such a person, if given the gift of news, pictures, videos or clippings about football would automatically raise you to the level in the list of his most preferred people and look forward to meeting you. Talking about business if these be the circumstances, stands to be a secondary or even a futile exercise as the business will always flow towards you and take precedence over rates, amenities or facilities offered by the competing hotels.
The second chapter of this exercise of personalization begins once after the guest (booked by the organisation of a client) has checked into your hotel. Besides taking care of the minutest of the requirements put in by the concerned guest, it is important to put such first–time guests in contact with your colleagues, superiors or other managers (including the general manager) over coffee or a dinner hosted for the guest. One must agree with the fact that the larger the span of contact in the hotel, the larger will increase the comfort level of the guest as he/she will always find somebody who understands him and can respond better to his queries. This really creates the atmosphere of a home away from home.
A happy guest is an ambassador of goodwill and will always go out his way to recommend your hotel to his other colleagues, to his friends and to his family circle by saying, “Go and tell any manager of the hotel that you are staying in their hotel due to a personal recommendation by me and then, just wait to see the treatment they give you” are the sentences usually said proudly by the happy and satisfied guests. “They treat me as if I am the owner of the hotel.”
A happy and satisfied customer, besides being loyal to you, will also tend to disregard petty instances of inconvenience and will not worry about the occurrences of embarrassment and understand them as ‘something that can happen in any household’.
Hotel sales are not functions of a hard sell – it is always a soft, easy and a relaxed business transaction, which, sooner or later, is bound to bear positive results.
