I run a hotel. What would this look like?
A guest finds you on a travel site, books, stays, likes it, and books through the same travel site next year. You paid a commission on both, on a person who at some point stopped being a stranger and became a regular.
Everyone in this business knows what that percentage is. Almost nobody has a way of asking, at the right moment, in a way that makes booking direct the obvious thing to do — because the right moment is three weeks after they got home, and nobody is at a desk three weeks after anything.
The second stay is the one worth owning. It is also the only one you can still do something about.
You have someone on the desk. That is why nobody sees the problem.
A restaurant at service has nobody free, and everyone accepts it. You have somebody standing right there — and they are checking a family of four in, and the phone is ringing, and the enquiry that came in through the website at 21:40 is going to be answered tomorrow either way.
The staffing is exactly what hides it. Nobody looks at a manned front desk and concludes that enquiries are going unanswered, so nobody counts them, so nobody knows how many there were.
An answer at 21:41 with the right dates and a real price is not a better version of tomorrow’s answer. It is the difference between a booking and somebody else’s booking.
Before, during and after are three different conversations.
Before is directions, parking, what time the kitchen closes and whether the dog can come. During is the thing they wish they had asked at check-in and will not ring down for. After is the only one that decides whether there is a next time, and it is the one that never happens.
None of those is difficult. All three are simply somebody remembering, at a specific hour, for every guest, forever — which is precisely the kind of work that stops happening the week you get busy.
A guest who has been remembered once behaves like a regular. That is the whole of it, and it costs nothing to be true.
What actually changes, in the order it matters to you.
- Orders arrive without anyone writing them down.
- Every customer hears from you at the right moment, and nobody sends one by hand.
- Someone who left without buying gets a reason to come back.
- A customer's history is remembered forever, so nobody re-explains anything.
- The follow-up that always gets forgotten, never gets forgotten.
- Money's collected, receipts go out, and nothing gets chased.
- Your ads point at your street, not your country.
- Pages get written for the things people are actually searching for.
- Everything about every customer sits in one place, and it's yours.
- There's one number that tells you whether it's working.
The audit will tell you what someone finds when they search for a place to stay in your town and land on you rather than on a travel site.