With the overwhelming flood of new technology, mobile bookings and other reservation options, some hotels have stopped paying any attention to the phone calls they receive and the bookings they sell through them. One of the reasons for this is they believe their fascination with apps and smartphones is mirrored by the majority of travellers. The only people still calling hotels are baby boomers, right? Wrong.
And not measuring or tracking your voice reservations could be damaging your hotel’s revenue and marketing strategies.
While mobile bookings and website visits have both increased year-on-year, the ‘click-to-call’ feature on smartphones is increasing voice traffic to hotels in turn.
Here are five reasons why you need to remember the importance of customer phone calls:
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Voice reservations make a difference to your campaigns
When hotels are running digital marketing campaigns they often fall into the trap of only tracking the digital results from those campaigns. Consequently they might believe email marketing, for example, is a dying channel that no longer provides adequate revenue.
However, who’s to say a large volume of voice reservations aren’t coming from your email marketing, as opposed to online bookings? A case study in Florida showed that over 41% of booking reservations from the property’s digital marketing campaign came via the voice channel. Without measuring this, the property would have deemed the campaign a failure.
Knowing where your voice reservations are coming from is just as important as knowing where your other bookings spawn from. It will better allow you to understand the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and create new revenue initiatives.
When a customer makes a booking via phone, you should be aware if it came from search engine marketing, email, display advertising, social media, etc.
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