Nowadays it seems that Reservations, the most basic selling & service point of the hotel, is becoming an extremely complicated field of work. As the industry is rapidly evolving affected by the technological evolutions outburst, hotel rooms distribution has become much more than emails and calls! Every hotel needs to secure their reservations/sales management; this includes proper b2c and b2b selling and reservations handling.
Hiring a proper Reservations professional has now proven to be more challenging than ever, as we can see that people tend to stay in departments like reception, guest relations etc for years and won’t usually express any interest in moving up the chain to the back office. We must admit that on many occasions, these posts pay better and require much less effort. So, what will happen to those job openings?
Taking this subject a step further, even finding and training an employee to handle reservations successfully still carries risks, like what happens when you need to replace that person, how can you know how efficiently this person works, what happens if that person needs time off etc. Out of the many hotel departments, reservations and sales is the only one that can be outsourced and as the scenery changes, it probably should. When it comes to a single property, the person in charge of the reservations may not be properly supported, supervised and educated. Additionally, he or she may need longer brakes, may have special needs or agendas.
On the contrary, hiring a company to act as your reservations department means full clarity, regular updates and access to all data 24/7, higher performance rate and consequently faster business growth. An expert will always evolve and adapt faster to the industry’s needs, while the hotelier’s interests will be more secure since the company will share the same. Finding the right partners may be tricky but after you do and eventually establish a trusting relationship with them, you will most likely see growth rate increasing!
