Dear Hotel Friends:
The hotel industry and the travel agent community maintain, for the most part, a cautious and steady peace. But you are often less than satisfied with our sales efforts, and we often question your commitment to our value as a distribution channel. You deal with us on a largely statistical basis, while we often introduce emotion into the equation, trying to imagine what our clients will experience walking in your front door and up in their room when head hits pillow.
You do try to communicate with us, hiring some of the best and the brightest to get us to remember your name, to sell your brand and to remember that your Saltine Suite comes with complimentary crackers.
We inspect your hotels on a sort of a drive-by basis. On fam trips, our task is less to remember the specifics of your property than to try to recall if it was even one of the 15 we visited yesterday.
Going back to 2002, there was a steady relationship that had developed over the years. You worked with us, but you made it difficult for us to collect our commissions. You promised to work on that, and, for the most part, you kept your word. We all started looking at brand loyalty, and some of us became Four Seasons, Starwood and Marriott fans.
We watched what you were doing with your brands. The ASTA 2011 Supplier-Agent Marketing Report showed that a personal relationship with a hotel representative was important to our sense of loyalty to your brand, but 94% of us ranked the quality and overall reputation of your product as the most important criteria for our decision to sleep, so to speak, in your collective beds.
Virtually every analysis of our ongoing relationship reveals that you woke up one morning and discovered that the top five online travel agencies (OTAs) were poised to take control of 40% of your total inventory. That scared you, since you pay more for OTA bookings, and 40% ownership of inventory means that the distribution channel can begin dictating terms. So you reacted quickly, designing direct-booking sites that promised the lowest available rates on an often "exclusive basis."
In early 2012, Smith Travel Research and the American Hotel and Lodging Association issued the conclusions of a massive study involving more than 25,000 hotel properties. It showed that you paid OTAs about 25% in discounts compared with 12% in revenue dilution on bookings generated through GDSs.
That must have been a wake-up call. Not only were OTAs starting to control your available inventory, they were costing you twice as much to support.
But then there's us. We choose hotels and utilize your top income-producing rooms. We market our services and, with some exceptions, we do our own marketing. So I guess the question might be, "Why don't you appreciate us more than you do?"
It's not like we're going anywhere. In fact, our share of luxury bookings in the hotel sector has actually risen. You seem to be courting us, but we know you like to "play the field." You should fall in love with us because, short of someone just showing up on your doorstep, we are the most productive and economical source of nondirect business available.
I've noticed that you haven't always taken the time to understand how we do business. Each year, you meet us face to face at consortium and large-agency functions. You have a few minutes to get to know us. In a spirit of future cooperation, let me suggest some steps you can take to make our portion of the distribution channel work. Here are some things you need to know about us:
• We don't inspect the world's top hotelson fam trips. We visit them by personal invitation, and we look for customized inspection itineraries using multiple cities.
• You need to train your sales staff to sit down with us to initiate a signed marketing agreement. But first, you will need to determine what it is that you can negotiate.
• We have access to exclusivehotel inspection content that offers objective, undercover industry evaluations of your property. We usually share these hotel inspections with our clients to help them make a decision, yet your sales staff often seems unaware of their existence.
• You seem to underestimateour commitment to destroying any remaining faith the public has in online hotel review sites. You ought to be taking an active role in these efforts since you have the most to lose from the dissemination of inaccurate information about your properties. This is war, and we need to know whose side you're on.
• You need to exercise the poweryou have to stop being a competitor and to start being a partner. If we find, cultivate and send a guest to your property for the first time, that fact should be noted in your reservation system, and we should receive commission on any future bookings made directly with your property. In Texas, they call that "dancing with the one what brought you." If you are going to fight us for the "next time" booking of the same guest we introduced to your property, we have no relationship. All of your words are meaningless.
• You need to fully understandthe one nonnegotiable we require from your company/property: We need to know that you will formally welcome the guest on our behalf, acknowledging our role in a way that is truly meaningful. When it comes to an arriving guest, we need to know that someone on property will represent us and our interests in a manner that reflects a true partnership.
• Like so much of what we do,our brand, though smaller than your brand, is based on relationships. But email messages about your new marble toilet seats and announcements about a new assistant to the assistant sales manager at your property in Marrakech are a waste of our time. We need to know the name of the manager's personal assistant and the direct email address of the lead concierge on the property. Make sure you give us that information.
• Oh, and one final observation: If you really want us to sell your property, make certain that we know the very best room numbers in each of the primary categories. That will help us appear to be experts on your specific property.
Thanks so much for listening. And thank you for being there for us through thick and thin.
Contributing Editor Richard Bruce Turen owns Churchill & Turen Ltd., a luxury vacation firm based in Naples, Fla. He is also managing director of the Churchill Group, a sales training and marketing consultancy. He has been named to the list of the World's Top Travel Specialists by the editors of Conde Nast Traveler for the past 13 years. Contact him at rturen@travelweekly.com.