Attack Fixed Costs & Keep the Money from Your Heist with Danny Ocean!

In the film Ocean’s Twelve, Danny Ocean (George Clooney) asks Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) how he could have spent ALL of his share of the $150,000,000 heist stolen in Ocean’s Eleven.

Rusty’s one-word answer? “Hotels”. He may as well have said, “fixed costs at my hotels”, because fixed costs are the killer at many hotels, and they must constantly be evaluated and controlled.

One way to simultaneously reduce hotel fixed costs and increase top line revenue is to hire a commission-based voice reservations company to back up your reservations department. Such companies only charge when a room is consumed, meaning that a call to cancel a reservation or to change dates wouldn’t cost a cent.

By using a commission-based reservations company, you may need fewer reservations agents, reducing fixed payroll costs, payroll taxes, and benefits. And since a well-run reservations company is staffed well enough to capture your calls more quickly and to answer them with the kind of enthusiasm that only commissioned agents can generate, revenues will increase because more calls are being answered with a stronger desire to close the sale.

The result is pure magic to your bottom line: what was previously a fixed cost item – that is, one that remains the same regardless of the hotel’s current revenue – becomes completely variable, rising and falling in perfect unison with revenue. This is the ideal management situation.

As a bonus, if reservations calls are being answered by the front desk at your hotel, having a strong back-up team to take those calls will mean you might need fewer front desk agents, and those agents at the desk won’t be distracted from in house guest needs. And we all know that taking care of guests while they are in house leads to better social media scores.

So, attack those fixed costs with a vengeance, and keep the proceeds from your next heist with Danny Ocean!