We all know who they are. The crazy guests that want to cancel their reservation but refuses to honor the cancelation penalty and did not buy travel insurance.
They stay on the line with your agents for what seems like hours. Everyone in the office starts to know them by name.
They either have an incredibly heartwrenching story or they threaten to take your company down in anyway they can.
They threaten chargebacks, reviews on google, online travel agencies, or complaints to the Better Business Bureau.
I decided long ago that it was better to just refund these guests money after thirty minutes on the phone because it just isn’t worth it anymore, even though this costs us tons of potential cancel revenue and angers my owners.
Why Waste YOUR precious labor on something that will never benefit you
After all that we would still have guests that chose to write nasty reviews on TripAdvisor, HomeAway, & Airbnb about our properties. This would tank our future listings performance when we had done nothing wrong.
Here’s how to stop that
We decided, based on a tip from Steve Milo at Vtrips, that we would just require our guests to sign a contract saying that once we refunded us they would agree to not bash us online & go our separate ways.
Even the crazy guests agree to sign this and get their refund.
If they write a bad review we have recourse to show this contract to the OTA and they all have a process for removing erroneous reviews. Problem solved.
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