There is no telling how many dollars in missed business are passing over to competitive properties each day because of lost opportunities for generating revenue. A day does not go by at any lodging operation in any city without a mishandled lead that could have developed into a business prospect.

Our biggest lost opportunities lie in the misuse of our property telephone. There is no record kept of how many times in any one day we lose an inquiry for potential business because the phone wasn't answered in a prompt manner.

How many times should the phone ring before someone decides to answer it? If someone doesn't answer a ringing phone within four rings, there is a good chance the inquiring caller will disconnect and call a competing property.

What about someone who answers the phone promptly but then says, "ABC Hotel, please hold"? Then there is the phone call that is answered by a busy front-office staffer who sounds rushed and impatient. Sometimes, a staffer with a poor-sounding attitude is enough to turn off a prospect for business.

Transferring calls is another potential problem area, especially when the transferred call rings off the hook and the inquirer, out of desperation, hangs up and calls the competition. Don't forget the annoying voice-mail message that comes on with a long marketing message about this wonderful hotel property and continues to burden the caller with an extended list of numbers to punch.

No question about it: The hottest lead any property can get is the phone inquiry, and we are sure to mess it up. Because we can't measure how much business is going down the drain because of how we handle these phone inquiries, we need to stop the leak.

We spend big bucks on marketing efforts through advertising and direct sales. Sales personnel go through great efforts to generate prospects and develop relationships to bring business to their properties. Then, when someone calls to make an inquiry about booking a room or group event, there is a good chance we will mess it up.

The Sales Clinic readership knows that we have covered this subject more than once in this column, and many are fully aware of how we cover it in our HOTEL & MOTEL MANAGEMENT-sponsored Sales Workshops. At every workshop, we make live telephone inquiries to randomly selected hotels to demonstrate what we have discussed above. This has been going on for many years at the workshops and the results are always the same. I have found that in more than 95 percent of the calls that are made, the hotels fail for the reasons discussed in this column.

hmm@questex.com

Howard Feiertag is on the faculty of the Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, Va. He can be reached at howardf@vt.edu
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