To sell hotel rooms you have to know a series of basic concepts that only occur in the hotel sector. Both sales to individual clients and those aimed at groups require that the agent in charge of them have certain skills. The ability to sell rooms to groups involves understanding how to provide a customer with the room they need, also applied to sales to individual customers.
“Knowledge is half the battle”
Anonymous
Table of Contents
Steps of the sales process
The sales process in the hotel sector is based on the application of specific analysis with which the business opportunity will be applied. These analysis, which will help determine whether to proceed with the sale, include:
Assessment
It is the process by which the sales agent learns the characteristics of a possible sale. Evaluation is the first and one of the most important steps in hotel sales. With this analysis, the answers to the questions who, which, when, where and why will be discovered. Therefore, the evaluation begins a mutual understanding with the client, an essential part when selling.
Room availability
To sell rooms, the agent must know the number of available rooms in the hotel, that is, the number of rooms the hotel has to sell on the same night. Hotels, regardless of size, type of product or level of service, have internal monitoring systems through which they can know, at all times, the available rooms. Like overbooking in air transportation, overbooking hotel rooms is a risky practice that is carried out in order to keep the hotel full, being at the same time a double-edged sword for both parties.
Arrival/departure models
The pattern of arrivals and departures determines the number of rooms that can be sold and the availability that will be available on a given day. There are two ways of referring to arrival/departure models, since both can be strong or weak. For this, it is important to understand the hotel industry’s classification of the days of the week, since they start the week one day earlier than normal, that is, the working days of a hotel go from Sunday to Thursday and the end of week would be composed of Friday and Saturday.
Periods of need
Apart from the day of the week on which a hotel guest arrives, another very important factor that must be taken into account is the time of year. Thus, the period of need for a hotel is defined as the set of consecutive days in which the return achieved from the sale of rooms is very low.
Knowing when and why these periods occur will allow you to compensate for them and the best way to do this is to reassess the hotel management and the decisions made by the sales groups.
Prices
The price of the rooms is one of the most important points, which is why a series of considerations must be established to correctly adjust the room’s price to the client. The sales agent must be able to evaluate the price of the service, the relative maximums, minimums and the sales equation for groups and individual clients.
Space Considerations
The space function plays a very important role in sales. If the client wants to have certain spaces in the hotel for events, it is necessary to determine their needs.
In the hotel industry, sales agents have a series of tools whose purpose is to arrange a meeting with the client. These tools will be those carried out by customers who want to check the hotel’s services for themselves before closing a sale.
