It’s Essential Your CRO Sends Guest Requests and Sales Leads to the Right Place, In Real Time.

If your hotel uses a remote Central Reservations Office (CRO) to answer reservations calls, it’s critical to ensure that there is a system in place for the CRO to convey guest requests and sales leads to the right person at your property, in real time.

A CRO doesn’t just receive reservations calls, it receives the same calls that are handled by the reservations team in-house. This means that a CRO agent may receive a call from an in-house guest with an operations-related request, or a possible solid sales lead for the sales department. It’s vital that these be sent to the right department immediately.

If a system is not in place to do this, such requests may languish as a “to-do” list sent to the hotel at the end of a shift or at irregular times, possibly resulting in lost business or the perception of a lack of service for in-house guests. Obviously, these are not acceptable outcomes.

Losing a sales lead to a competing hotel because of the delay in receiving a lead from the CRO is disappointing, but negative social media comments from a perceived lack of attention to guests is demoralizing. Recently, Skift’s Dennis Schaal wrote, “TripAdvisor’s metamorphosis is category-changing, heralding the advent of the pseudo online travel agency/booking site. Hotels that choose to be the powers behind Book on TripAdvisor are creating an alternative to the currently more expensive online travel agencies but they are making the already powerful TripAdvisor even more of a force.”

A simple missing or delayed guest request from the CRO can live forever on TripAdvisor for all potential guests to see, and as TripAdvisor grows in influence and in booking ability, such comments will disproportionately hurt ongoing revenues.

Take the time to analyze how your CRO is communicating with your operations team, and take steps to ensure that it’s being done instantaneously and accurately.