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5 Ways to Lose Guests and Alienate People

Follow these five tips if you never want to hear from your guests again.

Customer Service is king. Never underestimate the power of less than perfect service to alienate your guests and turn them away from your website. It can take just one bad experience, left unchecked, to make sure that your guests only ever use your business once. News of bad service spreads like oil on the surface of a lake, and people follow this advice - in the opposite direction of your business. We all know that one place where a friend had a terrible experience, or even just a mild annoyance, and now avoid it like a black mark on the consumer landscape.

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Your reputation is fragile and needs to be treated with care. Imagine every transaction as being as delicate as penguins swapping over an egg. Today we’re giving you five sure-fire ways to do lasting damage to your reputation and make sure that your guests never want to use your business again.

Don’t Respond to Property Inquiries
Leaving potential guests hanging after sending an inquiry is a guaranteed way to push them towards another website that has instant property and booking information available for them. The longer you wait, the more guests you will lose. Wait more than an hour and you should take your booking rate down to about 20% of inquiries. If you want to really alienate potential guests, avoid automated response emails that give accurate booking information to every guest as soon they as they contact you.

Be Late for Appointments and Handovers
Leaving your guests hanging around outside your property means they are not likely to ever want to return. Holiday guests love being stranded outside a locked door with their luggage in a foreign country. This is one of the easiest and quickest ways you can stain your reputation and make this booking your last from these customers. If you are running late, not informing them with a call will only help you further to confine these guests into the leagues of ‘ex-customers’.

Treat Every Guest the Same
What’s good for the goose is good for the Gander? If one guest loved your service then they all will, right? Avoiding personalised service will make your guests feel generic and basically unwanted. Small touches of personalization is the best way to build guest loyalty and encourage multiple bookings. By treating every guest as interchangeable, you give them no reason or incentive to choose your business over the stacks of competition.

Always Aim for the Bare Minimum
Don’t do anything you don’t have to. Do not do anything that was not agreed upon beforehand. Leave your guests to work out everything for themselves and give no details about the local area. Customer service is all about ensuring your guests do not just get what was advertised, they get more and they enjoy their stay in your property. Ignore this principle and you will soon see your booking numbers dwindle. Providing just a small element of something special or unexpected  

Once they’ve paid and left, forget about them.
Don’t follow up with your guests about how their stay was. Do not ask them for reviews or find out if there was anything you could improve on. Make no attempt to learn anything about your guests and how they enjoyed their stay. Do not add them to your promotions and email campaigns.

With these 5 tips, you be sure that no guests will want to book repeat stays with your business. So, if you don’t want to put off prospective guests and actually want to encourage multiple bookings, make sure that you don’t follow the advice above.

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