Category : Uncategorized
SOPA
January 18th, 2012NOPA!
Bill Schlosser
Vice President – Marketing
Booking Trend Shows Strong Growth
April 25th, 2011If bookings are any indication, things are definitely looking up. This graph shows year-over-year bookings for the U.S. Note that this doesn’t represent the entire client base of NAVIS, but rather just those who have been on long enough to include in this dataset.
Bill Schlosser
Vice President – Marketing
Am I Interrupting You?
April 6th, 2011As we all know, first impressions can immediately and permanently decide your prospects willingness to do business with you. That being the case, I must say, I’m amazed at how little focus is placed on “utilizing the proper greeting” within most reservation departments. At the very, very, very least a reservations agent should be introducing themselves, the company and asking for the caller’s name.
The typical greeting I hear “This is John…”, what? Did I just interrupt you from something important? Are you so busy that my call is bothering you? It’s scary really that a business owner would be willing to put someone on the front lines who is not trained, coached and motivated to provide a phenomenal experience. A couple quick steps I would recommend to ensure that the face of your company delivers a powerful experience to each and every prospect:
- Record and monitor your inbound calls. If you don’t it’s going to be difficult to provide any kind of useful feedback or coaching for your agents.
- Coach each reservation agent twice a month. The most successful sales people receive coaching so that they can grow and improve. By the way, your agents should be considered sales people. They decide if someone stays with you or not, right?
- Use behavioral incentives initially. Following basic human psychology, behaviors that get rewarded get repeated. Therefore, start by rewarding the behavior (using the proper greeting, in this case), once the behavior is established you can transition to rewarding the result: bookings. Beware; auditing the behavior should always exist as a qualifier, even as you offer other incentives.
Let me know how it works, or what you find? Here’s to the face of your company.
Brise Carpenter
Client Advocate
NAVIS Helping Gulf Coast Resort Lodging Clients Mitigate Revenue Loss
June 17th, 2010NAVIS has been working closely with our resort, hotel, and vacation rental management clients along the Gulf coast in a multi-phase program to help them mitigate their losses from the catastrophic oil spill.
As part of the first phase, we have helped them develop a pro-active approach that includes daily updates about the beach conditions in their area, many of which have yet to see any effects. Live web cams, guest videos and blogs are among the many communications that NAVIS clients are using to get the word out that their area continues to be a great vacation destination. We have also helped them develop phone scripts that speak to the positive aspects of staying at their property.
In phase 2, NAVIS is providing detailed analytics about their call volume that shows the decline in lead calls from last year to this year. This data, when combined with the revenue and cancellation data obtained from their reservation software, serves as powerful evidentiary information for filing a claim with British Petroleum. Where needed, NAVIS can also provide regional call volume information to corroborate an individual company’s claim.
NAVIS Research shows that while call volume for NAVIS clients on the Florida Panhandle is up by 4.9% during the period of April thru June 16, the volume of lead calls is down 16.9%. Call recordings indicate that a lot of people with existing reservations are calling with questions about the oil spill, but there is a significant drop in calls regarding new reservations.
NAVIS realizes these efforts are just band aids on a massive problem, but if in some small way it helps these companies survive this terrible ordeal, we are happy to do what we can.
“The NAVIS Model Works. Use It!”
May 12th, 2010Check out this new video of 4 of our clients telling our Leaders Conference audience about their “Ah-Ha” moments with NAVIS. It’s short (3.5 minutes) but speaks volumes about the results we deliver.
The “Power of Conversion” for Your Resort Lodging Business
May 10th, 2010With all the focus on online marketing, people in the resort lodging industry often overlook the revenue that can be gained by improving the conversion rate of their calls. Just a small percentage increase can result in significant improvements to the bottom line.
Case in point…Say you take 2500 reservations over the phone each year with a typical conversion of 27%. If you can increase that 5 points to 32%, and your average stay value is $1200, you will bring in an additional $555,556. Plus, if you implement an outbound calling strategy to the ones you didn’t book and close just 5%, you will gain another $377,778…for a total revenue gain of $933,333.
Want to see how much revenue you can gain, using your own data? Visit our new “Power of Conversion” online calculator.
Follow NAVIS on Twitter
February 19th, 2010Twitter.com/NavisNow
Email Response Study
February 10th, 2010NAVIS recently held our bi-annual Leaders Conference in Orlando where we discussed the technologies and Best Practices that our vacation rental and resort clients can use to drive new revenue. Prior to the Conference, I conducted an interesting “secret shopper” study to see who of our attendees would respond to my email asking for more information about an upcoming vacation.
Drew, our network wizard at NAVIS, setup a covert email account for me so that the recipients wouldn’t know I was from NAVIS. My email simply inquired about dates and asked about pricing options. I recorded the exact time the emails went out and the time that responses were received. 34 companies, some of the biggest vacation rental and resorts in the country, were on our list.
This graph shows the time it took for the responses to come in. Amazingly, the first response came 18 minutes after sending.
As you can see from the graph, nearly 40% of the recipients didn’t respond at all. And if you didn’t notice, this adds up to just 28 companies. The other 6 either didn’t provide an email option on their website, or they required more information on their contact form than I was willing to provide.
The bottom line is that responding to emails in a timely manner can affect your bottom line. And if you don’t respond at all…well, you’re just leaving money on the table.
NAVIS Releases Major Narrowcast Enhancements
February 8th, 2010Attention NAVIS vacation rental management and resort hotel clients…
Numerous new features and enhancements have been added to our flagship product NAVIS Narrowcast, effective at 8:30AM Pacific time today. From a totally redesigned and more intuitive navigation menu, to automatic template-based emails, this newest release brings online more new features than we have released for quite some time.
You can now assign specific agents to follow up on leads – directly within the ELM lead screen. You can even select the time and date to remind the assigned agent.
Several new reports have also been added including the Scoreboard Report, which provides conversion metrics, lead revenue, and compliance information about your reservation agents. Posting this information on a daily basis will help to drive new revenue.
An email was sent to all NAVIS clients detailing the many new features. If you didn’t receive it, you can find the document HERE. Of course, your NAVIS Client Advocate is always available for questions.
Happy Bookings!
Resort Lodging Social Media Usage Survey Results
November 19th, 2009I polled 1290 vacation rental managers and independent resort managers on Nov. 16 to ask them about their usage of social media. 86 responded (6.6%). Here are the results:
1) Do you use social media as part of your overall marketing?
2) Please check all that you are using.
The “Other” category included LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, FlipKey, Vimeo and Flickr.
3) Of those you checked, which are bringing in reservations?
The power of Facebook to bring in reservations was no real surprise. We’ve heard of it being used very successfully by many clients. Probably the biggest factor to note here is that 55% really don’t know what is working and what isn’t.
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