What do you do about dis-organised guests?
Let’s face it, most people don’t get terribly organised on their holidays and figure that everything will work out fine in the end.
However, ’tis the owners of the various establishments that they come in contact that need to organise that “working out fine” bit and in a lot of cases that falls to the places that they’re staying with. That’s YOU, so what do you do about it?
First off, remember that it’s not your responsibility to sort out everything for them. Yes, you’ll try to help but you need to make clear where your help will run out. This is very important as you’re unlikely to be able to sort out everything.
For example, we had a party of 12 that arrived during a very popular local festival recently who booked about almost two months in advance, quoted an invalid credit card, didn’t book any transport as we advised and didn’t book any meals. The invalid card meant that we cancelled their reservation and they were lucky that we still had enough rooms to accommodate them. They arrived and said they’d like to book a car yet found that because of the festival there was only one four seater car available. No meals booked and the festival falling after the end of the main holiday season meant that we weren’t in a position to provide any. Net effect of this was that they spent nearly six hours per day ove four days ferrying everyone back and forth to the festival in a EUR 200/day Mercedes sportscar.
It’s usually easy to pick out the dis-organised people: they’re the large groups by and large. Yes, there may be a group leader but we’ve found that whilst the leadership skills might be fine (“let’s go there”), the management skills are distinctly lacking (“em, can we get a car without a driving license?”).
That being the case, it’s usually best to add that little bit more to your acknowledgement e-mail for group reservations with a view to highlighting as many of the potential problems that a large group might find. For example, there are usually lots of small cars available but fairly few minibuses (which may need special driving licenses) therefore groups need to book their transport early. Also highlight limitations in the services that you can make available. For example, our group came with 12 separate laptops and our internet connection couldn’t cope with that many at once. Likewise, whilst we offer an airport pickup service we can’t realistically deal with more than 3 or 4 people at once.
Popularity: 76% [?]
Related posts:
- Assumptions that holiday guests make
- What do you do about the guest comments on websites?
- Keeping a varied mix of advertising outlets for your holiday property
- How are you going to get money off your guests for your vacation property?
- Updating your holiday property guide