Unreal customer service
No, really unreal. From the hardcopy March edition of Budget Travel magazine (p. 46) an anonymous "hotel executive" makes these comments:
It’s been said that we treat guests worse when they reserve through third-party Internet sites. It’s no myth: Of course we treat them worse! Travelocity, Expedia, Priceline, Hotwire, Orbitz, Hotels.com–you name it, we turn up our noses at them. You can’t tell me that these people care about service! Can’t! The way we look at it, these folks are solely concerned about price and they probably can’t differentiate good service from bad. People who reserve through third-party sites are the first clients we downgrade or relocate if rooms are oversold. Heck, we might even pull the sparkling water, cheese and crackers, and other nice amenities from their rooms. You might think that policies such as these are unspoken rules, but they’re discussed openly during our staff meetings. On the other hand, guests who make reservations through our website or call center almost always have access to the lowest published rates. And when you book directly, it says that you picked us for us, and we’ll treat you accordingly.
This person is saying, in effect, that if a guest doesn’t book
directly, we’ll make them pay for it indirectly. We’ll make their
experience incomparable to guests that book directly, but we won’t tell
them that–we’ll just keep them guessing. This is such a bad strategy on so many levels, I don’t know where to begin. Most importantly, it completely ignores the commonly held understanding in retail that people who have bad experiences say more about it than folks who’ve had good experiences. Why would you purposely give a guest a bad experience? Am I missing a key ingredient? Is there something else going on in the hospitality industry that wasn’t mentioned in the article?
The last sentence in the article was as telling as the previous quoted paragraph: "…make the tip extraordinary or the special service will disappear." What if the focus were changed around a bit to say this: "…make the service extraordinary or the special tipper will disappear." I don’t think this "hotel executive" would understand this new point of view.
My own experience here: a couple of years ago we went through Priceline to get a room at the Benson. We paid a fraction of the published rate and we experienced exemplary service. I wouldn’t blink at going back at full fare, and I tell others the same thing. However, if our service had sucked, what motivation would I have to return? Why would I encourage anyone else to go there? Who would I be blaming for the poor service? Hint: it’s not Priceline.
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POSTED IN: management
8 opinions for Unreal customer service
Jim Logan
Mar 12, 2005 at 8:08 am
You hit the nail on the head with your closing comment - if I get bad service using a Priceline-secured hotel, I blame the hotel. All I’ll remember years later is how poorly the service was at the hotel When I pay full purchase, all I’ll remember is poor service from the hotel. Bottom-line, I won’t stay at the hotel given any other reasonable choice.
I don’t mind the hotel having a policy of reassigning rooms, upgrades, etc. based upon paid price - if you pay more you expect more. But to intentionally deliver poor service to someone that paid less is incredibly poor business. If the hotel doesn’t think much of Priceline-like business, they should opt out of the program.
blog.dreampro
Mar 12, 2005 at 8:34 am
How to get people to stop talking
Oran Dennison
Mar 14, 2005 at 1:56 am
I used travelocity to book a room at the Palm Springs Hampton Inn, around 2 months before my visit there. When I arrived: the bed configuration was different, the air conditioner was broken, and it was a smoking room (I had specified non-smoking). When I asked the staff why my room had been changed they told me that they gave priority to people who booked directly with them, and that since I had used Travelocity I had a lower priority. My smoke allergy gave me respiratory trouble for the next week. They lost a customer for life, and I’ve told many people about this.
fortino
Mar 14, 2005 at 11:05 am
Amazing! You need to find out what hotel supports comments such as these.
Not only did he alienate his paying customers but also his channel sales partners being expedia and the like. the power of the web is not going away and the role of the aggregator will always beat out going direct. simple economics and efficiency of scale.
jerry
Mar 16, 2005 at 11:01 am
My experience was different. Hotels.com refunded $200 immediately when I told them of a bad experience in a Paris hotel (when the hotel itself refused to do anything.) They say its worth it to them to weed out the bad players.
busy
Apr 9, 2005 at 4:21 pm
A lot of hotel managers don’t quite have a grip on the way the internet works, or how it can work, but on the other side of this, I’ve seen more than a few problems come from the online reservations sites. (I used to manage all the online programs for two different hotels, BTW) At both hotels we always treated all guests very well, preference (if any) was usually given to repeat guests and non-problematic guests rather than who paid the most for their room. The online channels would frequently send reservations for the wrong date, wrong room type, wrong price, and even send people to our hotel after we had called, emailed, and faxed them to say we were sold out for certain dates. They would also promise things our hotel didn’t have, and wouldn’t update our listing to correct important details like *no pets allowed* To many guests, I’m sure it seemed that our hotel was to blame. To my experience, the majority of 3rd party sites also have awful customer service once the initial sale is made, and are often quite strict on their refund policy. I know their hold times are often over an hour to correct problems. Nothing against online reservations though, for the 2 chians I worked for, the easiest way to go online is through the franchise’s official website, and most if not all will give the lowest internet rate there. The only way to get a lower rate is to use a *blind* reservation site like … Priceline, I think? The ones where you don’t know what hotel, but you know the price, until after you pay? Those type of sites will usually be the lowest rate you can find, because they don’t undermine price integrity. Of course you give up some of your choice in the process.
Shelly Dunne
Jun 28, 2005 at 10:33 am
My experience with hotels.com was that my reservation disappeared some time after I had entered my credit card number, printed out a confirmation, and before I had shown up at the hotel three weeks later. No notification, no record of the transaction, no rooms. The hotel told me that this happened “all the time” with hotels.com. I feel that there is plenty of blame to pass around. Since the hotel refused to confirm my reservations earlier in the day, or move me to another hotel later, and continues to do business with a company that creates enraged customers, I blame them. For shoddy treatment, shady policy and failure, I blame hotels.com. Since many hotel booking websites operate under the hotels.com, LC umbrella I will never do business with them again. I will go directly to the hotel’s website and print out several copies of my confirmation. Twice burned and determined to talk about it!!
roger
Oct 20, 2005 at 11:19 am
I booked a room through Hotels.com, but had to cancel the reservation almost immediately. The room was in NYC for one night. When I called Hotels.com to cancel, I noticed that the cancellation/change policy was “one night + tax” before the 24 hour deadline and a “100% cost of stay penalty” after the 24 hour deadline. Therefore, I was going to forfeit nearly $500 dollars for a one night stay, regardless. Speaking with the “customer care” representative, I explained that my wife was having a medical procedure preventing us from attending. His response was “we put cancellation policies in place to follow them, not bend them.” I was astounded! This was my first and last experience with Hotels.com and I want the world to know. Your comments reflect my sentiments. Truly bad experiences mar your perception for life, why would anyone want to lose a customer (and mouthpiece to everyone they know) over one reservation in a million.