Essentially what I'm hearing is get the deposit and then do a case by case determination.
So, deposit at time of booking (not something I want to do because we have guests who book a year in advance) or deposit when the cancellation period kicks in?
And one option of offering a voucher for a later stay. (Which is what my last minute cancel yesterday told me was the proper way to handle her cancellation.) Actually, I think that was the straw. Being told how to run my business after being told I shouldn't charge at all because I wasn't full and after being told she knew she would probably cancel but she wanted to be sure she had the room just in case..
Morticia said:
Being told how to run my business after being told I shouldn't charge at all because I wasn't full and after being told she knew she would probably cancel but she wanted to be sure she had the room just in case.
Now that's a person who's name should be listed on GuestAdvisor.com. How much trouble can we really get in if we start a blog that lists PITAs and policy-ignorers publicly? TA does it, so it seems turnabout should be fair play. I know there's a subscription service that hotels can use for frequent abusers of policies and facilities.
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There is such a thing for restaurants, something like rottenguest.com or the like. I whole heartedly agree, turnabout SHOULD be fair play.
Mort, our cancellation policies are exceedingly strict. 14 days out you lose your deposit, 7 days out you're responsible for the entire stay (both unless we are able to rebook, in which case you get your deposit back less a $25 handling fee). And we DO try to rebook and are usually able to, even at our hardship (taking a single Friday and Saturday night to fill in when we would normally have a 2 night minimum). Do we lost some bookings because of these policies? Definitely. Will this make us change them? No. We are busy enough with the type of guest we want here. I don't want someone who's booking with me "just in case" they can't get anything else. That is the height of rudeness as far as I'm concerned. We get people to book here who really want to stay HERE, not just in the area.
We do get a LOT of repeat visitors though, often one year in advance (the whole "sign me up for next year" thing as they check out this year). At first we didn't take deposits for them, but we got burned more than once. So we started a new policy, we take the reservation when you leave this year, and then we will contact you during January of the following year to see if you are still coming and take a deposit at that time. It's worked beautifully...it weeded out those who might have been prone to cancel on us by taking advantage of an "old friendship".
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