13. Why is everyone so afraid of selling out? Not "selling out" to the man or the establishment, but rather, selling every single room in your hotel when the opportunity presents itself. It drives me crazy when salespeople work to get the hotel to 95% or fuller and then the Front Desk fails to effectively manage the last 1-5% of the inventory and clinch the sell out. This is usually do to a lack of training, or a lack of guidance from the leadership team, and it results in a litany of excuses:
"We save extra rooms in case something goes wrong."
"We can't walk Elite members."
"We can't oversell because there isn't another hotel nice enough to walk our guests to."
"We charge no-shows a fee... what do you mean that doesn't count?"
"I've never walked anyone before."
I've heard it all.
What I want to hear is that teams are being aggressive in selling those last few rooms, using a fill-first strategy or whatever strategy works to get them to full capacity. The airlines do it... ever notice how once in a while they will ask for volunteers to take a later flight? Why should your hotel be any different? Go deep, plan for no-shows, and challenge your team to sell every single room in the hotel every time you are close to that 100% mark.
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