1. Reschedule, Don’t Cancel
As a result of the increases we have seen in booker cancellations from the Covid-19 outbreak, Bookassist has introduced a new ‘Modify Booking’ message to our standard booking cancellation process. We are asking bookers to support our client hotels through this difficult time by rescheduling their booking to later in the year instead of cancelling the booking.
This will help hotels to mitigate the effect that the COVID-19 crisis is having on cancellations by helping clients to retain the booker, albeit at a later date.
Rather than saying goodbye to these bookings we encourage these bookers to continue their patronage with our clients at a later stage when the Covid-19 crisis has passed and when normality has returned to the travel sector again.
2. Voucher exchange for non-refundable bookings
Given that the Covid-19 crisis has put bookers with prepaid reservations in a position where they cannot stay with hotels as intended, we have introduced a new feature that will help address the situation to the benefit of both hotels and bookers. The feature enables the exchange of a prepaid, non-refundable booking for a cash voucher, to the value of the original booking.
To benefit from this new feature Bookassist recommends that clients proactively contact their prepaid, non-refundable customers to offer the cash voucher alternative so that they can drive both goodwill with their client base as well as ensure that future occupancy and broader revenue opportunities are maximised when business returns to some degree of normality.
