After you’ve been in the hospitality industry for as many years as I have (more than 30 years… how time flies when you’re having fun!), you get used to seeing human error manifest in so many truly unfortunate instances: from putting the decimal point in the wrong spot (hello, $10 rooms!) or using overbooking as a revenue management strategy, I’ve seen it all.
While these types of mistakes may make the front page (of our favourite hotel trade publications), there are also a HUGE number of mistakes caused by human error in all types of operational processes that are (almost) never talked about.
One of the biggest mistakes – one that separates the winners, from the losers and the amateurs, from the experts – that a hotel could make today is:
DRUM ROLL PLEASE… Hotel and resort fees!
Fees are the thorn-in-the-back of every, single guest that walks through your doors. There has never been a guest who responded positively to a bill with double-, or even triple-digit, surcharges unexpectedly added at check-out!
(An aside… can you even imagine how that interaction would go?
Front Desk: “Hello Ms. Smith, how did you enjoy your stay?”
MS: “It was lovely. Never slept so well in my life!”
FD: “Glad to hear it! Btw, here is your final bill; please note the extra $100 that we tacked onto your agreed upon booking rate. Cool?
MS: BEST. VALUE. EVER!!
Head slap emoji!)
Since we, as an industry, decided that we wanted to follow the ‘yellow brick road’ to ancillary revenues, there have been many consumer articles and TV travel segments warning guests about hotel fees, all of which make hotels sound like evil monsters, out to steal every last dollar from travelers’ well-worn wallet(s). Even though these fees are a legal business practice, consumers don’t see it that way; they see it as a “trick” to get guests to booking, which could be supported by the fact that, most properties that do charge fees, go out of their way to hide the fact that the fee exists. Talk about fine print!
While I fully acknowledge that it’s not a fair portrayal industry wide – we are businesses, just like any others, and we need to maintain profitability – some properties have been taking the fee frenzy to a whole new level of sketch:
- Ever heard of a hotel that, all of a sudden, became a resort overnight – just so that they can charge a resort fee? I have… talk about sketchy, right?!
- And excuse me for harping on about semantics but, if you’re charging a fee, don’t call all the items paid for by that fee “complimentary.” Every single person knows that charging $32 per night is the EXACT opposite of free – and reasonable, to be honest.
These bogus tactics are what make consumers think of the rest of us are a bunch of crooks. And it’s not right. In the end, it comes down to this: our profitability shouldn’t come at the cost of our guests’ satisfaction.
Hotel and resort fees do help us to cover the ever-increasing cost of doing business, without decreasing bookings (hello, low price!) but they will not work in your favor in the long-run; in fact, they will ruin your property’s reputation and decrease your occupancy – and profits – over time.
So, how can we, the hotel industry, ensure that we are covering our costs, without making our customers think that we are scheming, lying, money grubbers?
There are two ways:
