• Careful What You Wish For: Attribute-based Selling Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be   

Excerpt from PhocusWire

Hotels are always looking for new ways to sell their inventory - often based on anything other than guest behavior.

They get surprised when these tactics don’t take off, or when they backfire spectacularly. This occurs so frequently, it’s hardly worth mentioning.

Which brings us to attribute-based selling.

As someone who sells hotel rooms for a living, I’m generally in favor of finding better ways to merchandise our inventory. Hoteliers of all stripes should continually look for opportunities to improve the guest experience, offer greater value and, if you can manage it, shift share from higher-cost channels (ahem, online travel agencies) to direct revenue.

I’m just not convinced attribute-based selling meets those criteria.

A number of reasons illustrate why:

  1. Current customer behavior suggests guests aren’t likely to use attribute-based selling (ABS)
  2. Hotels frequently have limited variety of distinct, differentiated room inventory
  3. Most importantly, ABS posses serious risks for rate integrity and long-term revenue capture
  4. OTAs are much better positioned to benefit than we want to admit

Oh, and all of these ignore the fact that truly effective solutions to this problem already exist.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a look in more detail.

Click here to read complete article at PhocusWire.