GROUP-1

TOPIC: Room Sales Management( Adequate

staffing, Sales strategy, Rooms inventory, Call
management, Merchandizing, and Direct sale)

‘’To guess is cheap..To guess wrongly is expensive’’

Confucius
ROOM SALES MANAGEMENT
 The reservations department (referred to simply as
“reservations” inside hotels)

 Thereservation department has two important functions:

making all transient bookings and supplying the rest of the
hotel with occupancy data.

 The director of transient sales must monitor and manage a staff

of reservations agents.

Managing the transient sales effort requires proper staffing,

training, call management, and sales strategy.
Staffing

 Staffing and scheduling are critical in

reservations.
 The reservations staff may consist of just two

or three agents, or a few dozen

 The reservations department is proactively

booking rooms, so they are not affected by

occupancy as are the reactive departments
Cont..
 The general “rule of thumb” for reservations
staffing is to adhere to prime selling time
 Prime selling time is defined as the specific

hours during the day when the transient

guests are most likely to call in for a
reservation.
 Prime selling time will differ from hotel to

hotel based on their group versus transient

mix and traditional booking cycle.
Cont..
 Weekends and evenings may require
reservations staff because those are also
times when transient reservations are made.
 Another factor to consider in staffing is the

hotel’s advertising schedules. Special

packages, discounts, and other promotions
may increase volume during their runs.
Cont..
 The number of agents required is dependent
on these call volumes.
 Reservation calls are routed to available

agents via an automated call distributor

(ACD).
 All good ACD systems produce call volume

reports at regular intervals.

Cont..
 The data in those reports identifies how long
calls are kept waiting, among other things.
 Armed with this data, proper staffing and

scheduling will fall into place.

Training
 Each call is a sales opportunity
 When hiring for reservations, a sales or

customer service background is preferred.

 People can be taught software systems, but it

is much harder to teach someone to be

enthusiastic, friendly, and eager to please
 Employing an evaluation system via mystery

callers is an excellent way to provide

objective feedback to reservations agents.
Cont..
 Need areas or weaknesses can be identified
based on these test calls.
 Constructive retraining may be required if the

need is identified.
 The training of reservations agents should be

ongoing
 Cross-training is also valuable to the hotel

because it creates a pool of multi-skilled

employees who can be used in other
departments as needed
Call Management
 Reservations agents are measured in their
ability to make a reservation on every call
 The ACD data are limited to the length and

scope of the call, but it cannot measure what

is said on each call.
 These ACD data, coupled with other tools, are

used to measure the productivity and

efficiency of the agents.
Cont..
 The ACD data most useful to the director of
transient sales are call length, wait time, and
dropped calls.
 Call length is important because long calls

preclude agents from taking other incoming

calls.
 It is for that reason that agents are taught to

keep calls as short as possible, without

rushing the guest
Cont..
 Wait time is a good measurement of demand
versus staffing.
 If people are waiting a long time to reach an

agent, then more staff might be necessary

 Dropped calls are the number of people who

simply got tired of waiting and hung up.

 Although the ACD data are useful, they do

not provide a complete picture of the agents’

productivity and efficiency
Cont..
 The primary measurement for all reservations
agents is called the conversion ratio.
 The conversion ratio is defined as the number

of transient bookings made versus the

number of calls received.
 An agent’s ability to close every call with a

booking is paramount to their success

 Another important measurement is the

agent’s ability to upsell.

Cont..
 Upselling is the ability to move a guest from a
lower-priced product to a higher-priced
product
 Upselling is difficult to measure.
 The best way to track upselling is to measure

the number of “regular” rooms available at

the time of the call
Reservations map
 Show specific room numbers and their
availability for specific dates.
 The director of transient sales will use a

reservations map to determine what types of

rooms are available and when they are
available.
 The agents themselves also use other types

of reservations maps to check availability of

certain room types, designations, and
configurations
Sales strategy
 There are several different selling strategies
when it comes to reservation sales.
 The “top down” strategy is the most widely

used.
 It is quoting a rate for the hotel’s best room

type (i.e., most expensive) and moving down

to a lower rate if not accepted.
 This strategy is used in situations where the

hotel wants to drive rate.

Cont..
 It is not successful in a highly competitive
market with low guest room demand.
 It is successful, though, when buyer

confidence is high.
 Buyer confidence is defined as a hotel guest’s

predetermined desire to book a room at a

hotel at almost any cost.
 Hotels with a reputation for high quality and

service invoke buyer confidence.

‘’Bottom up’’
 The “bottom up” strategy is just the opposite of
the “top down” strategy.
 The agent begins by quoting a rate
corresponding to the lowest room type(least
attractive or least expensive of the available
rooms).
 It is also called “menu quoting” because it gives
the caller a choice of different rate options.
 This strategy is the best way for agents to
upsell.
Cont..
 The bottom-up strategy is also successful
when buyer confidence is low.
“Mid-range”
 It suggests that the agent quote a rate from
middle room type, going either up or down a
tier based on acceptance or opposition of the
guest.
 Agents using this strategy have the flexibility

to tailor their approach to the guest and the

progress of the call
Rooms inventory
 The total number of rooms available in a
hotel for sale is called the room inventory.
 Based on the reservations received, rooms

occupied the status of the rooms can be

discussed as under.
 As soon as a receptionist takes over the shift

he/she should know the hotel position .

 Accordingly the shift can be planned.
Cont..
i. Hotel position negative : It means hotel’s
rooms are in high demand and the hotel has
received more number of reservations than the
actual number of rooms available for sale.
ii. Hotels position Positive : This means the
numbers of reservations received are less than
the actual number of rooms available.
Direct sale

 It is a balancing act for hoteliers between selling rooms

through their own direct channels and using the help of
third party websites, wholesalers and online travel
agents

 The internet era has been affecting hotel industry in so

many ways

 It’s not surprising then that the domination of online

travel agents (OTA) could be a nightmare for hotel
direct sales.
Challenges of Direct sale
 Getting hotel direct sales are almost impossible now
because the domination of the OTA on the
distribution process

Why is this happens?

 Regulation from OTA

 Unoptimized website

 Unoptimized booking engine

Boosting Direct sales
Metasearch

 It is the way of putting your hotel’s website

on the OTAs you are listed to

SEO( search engine optimization)

 It is enhancing the probability of your website

to appear on the first page of the search
result by using some optimizations on it
Cont..
SEM(search engine marketing )

 Just like SEO, SEM make the use of search

engine and take the advantage of it.

 But unlike SEO, SEM use the paid scheme to

make your website to appear on the first
page of the search result.
Cont..
Reputation management

In the world where online review means

everything, boosting your online reputation is
crucial.
 Make sure that you always respond to

customer’s review

 Always make sure that you build the image

that you listen to your customer.
Cont..
Brand protection

 Brand protection means the different way when

we are talking about hotel management in the
modern days

 You can start by registering your trademark in

Google.
 Once you register your trademark to Google,
they will block other Ads that using your brand.
Merchandising

 Merchandising for hotels can often mean the selling

of rooms themselves, via online distribution channels

 An easy way to understand online hotel

merchandising is by thinking of travel websites as
mega-stores with thousands of hotel listings sitting
on the shelves

 Effective merchandising influences travel purchase

decisions at every step in the planning process and
ultimately leads to increased bookings.
Merchandising and marketing
 In the world of online travel, merchandising and
marketing are not one and the same.

 While marketing is focused on getting consumers

into the store, merchandising is what happens
once consumers actually enter the store.

 Brand.com, OTAs and third-party travel websites

drive travel shoppers to their “stores” so that you
can focus on how your hotel is actually displayed
in the store.
THANK YOU!