Your travellers don’t sleep in tents
Back in the day when I was a travel consultant, the agency owner (Matie Geldenhuys, he’s passed away since) would unexpectedly stop at your desk, open your stack of forward booking files and randomly pick one. This was when we still opened a physical file for each booking with the OKI printer printout stuck on the front of the card or file. (remember that?)
He would then proceed to see what you wrote down in the box for “no hotel”. As he would read, he’d cast his eyes at you over the top of his half-moon reading glasses and start tutting, “Prof Smith does not have family in Belgium, so I don’t understand why he would say he’s staying with family for this trip. I’ll ask him about it tomorrow when I see him for lunch.”
Now you knew you were in deep trouble. Matie did not accept that business travellers wouldn’t book their hotels with his agency and so he made it a very, very important issue - always sell more than just air.
Since then the industry’s desktop and working processes have matured into a digital state, so much so that we don’t even create booking cards or folders for our clients anymore. What has happened to our hotel attachment rate? If anything, it’s gone down, with agents now being impressed if they achieve a 10% hotel attachment rate.
Yet, business travellers don’t sleep in tents - they are staying somewhere, and if you’re not making that reservation, you’re losing out on that income.
I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. Let’s however look at some of the reasons why attachment rates are so low:
Travellers don’t want to think about or buy the hotel at the time of making the air reservation
The default GDS process is focused on getting the booking ticketed, then it sort of disappears off the radar
There is a perception hotel rates from your agency are higher than what the traveller can find online
You may charge an extra booking fee to make the hotel booking
… And so forth
Many agents have tried to address some of the above with things such as a review booking process putting the booking back on the consultant’s queue closer to time of travel, insisting on no-hotel reason codes in each booking, and the use of alternative hotel booking providers to ensure the lowest rates.
But still, hotel attachment rates remain low.
Here’s how we think we can help with this.
Out of sight, out of pocket
Firstly, a process to bring the booking back in front of your team with visual aids to help them quickly see which ones they know they can sell a hotel into.
In Agentivity, we have an unsold hotel opportunities report and in NavAgent we bring that right in front of the consultant, showing the consultant the city and number of nights per opportunity.
It’s an easy to use interface - much easier than a GDS queue - and sits idle on the consultant’s desktop if they are not working on a booking, thus always keeping that list within sight.
Any old excuse will do
As mentioned, some agents have implemented reason codes, something a consultant must add to each booking to say why no hotel was booked. Very few agents however analyse those codes to see which consultants keep adding the same reason, or to use some of those to push the booking back to the consultant (e.g. “wants hotel quote later”).
Our data platform can actively look for the reason codes your staff are adding to their bookings, and we can work with you on how best you want to analyse those.
We also use this knowledge and will eliminate those from the presented opportunities, as well as bookings where the actual hotel portion might be in a separate PNR. Thus you know what we show your team are qualified opportunities to sell more content in the PNR.
A fresh look at the post-ticketing sales process
You’ll see some start-ups in the industry now targeting agents with a solution that will send an email follow up to your travellers, trying to sell them more in the booking. Their argument is that as your staff aren’t doing it, what have you got to lose?
We think there is a better way. Firstly, let’s use the rich data we already have about your travellers - our data platform can refer back to booking data from years ago, and pick up where the traveller might have booked a hotel from you before. We can use this to approach the traveller with an offer for their next trip with more qualified suggestions.
Then we also think the knowledge your staff has about not only the traveller but also the destination is worth a lot, and we are thinking of ways to create email suggestions to travellers but have those validated (or at least the content suggested) by your team. This is something we think we can achieve in the NavAgent window - e.g. where we present a list of opportunities, get the staff member to add a suggested hotel and rate in there, and we’ll do the rest in the form of an email.
This is still in design but it’s an ideal time for you to engage with us on this - we’d love to hear your thoughts.
If you want a more detailed discussion with us on how we can help your team achieve a higher hotel (and other) attachment rate, please get in touch. Contact email here
