Sharing Policies and Encouraging Guests to Reschedule [Mini Video]

For your convenience, we've included a transcript of this video below.

Hi everybody, it's Sharon from the sales department, and fellow property owner, again. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about communications during this very special time in our industry. It is imperative that we continue to email back our customers, answer the phone, answer questions, and make some tough decisions.

Of course, our property, for instance, decided that we needed to close for over the next three weeks and I wanted to show you how we need to still provide great customer service by communicating properly with our guests. So I'm going to show you how to do that online and in ThinkReservations as well.

I’ll go ahead and share my screen. This is our website, and what we've done is we've decided to put, temporarily, COVID-19 up on the menu portion of our webpage. Feel free, if you've got pop-ups that you want to place to provide that messaging feel free. When you click on that menu option for us, it brings folks to the policies page where we spell out our policies and as of today, we are going to announce that we are shutting down until, at the very least, April 9th.

So what I did in ThinkReservations was to go to settings and email templates, and create an email template, so I can email folks independently at their reservation. But actually we invited them to rebook their stay. Our philosophy is they chose us and the region for a reason and we would like for them to join us at a time that makes more sense for everybody.

So we again in this Invited folks to contact us to rebook their time with us. If we wanted to track opens [of the emails] what we could do is download our customer list here in the Customers tab. Hit that download button and I'll show you what it looks like when you get the CSV file. And so with this file, I can sort by date and then pull out the names and email addresses of the folks staying within that three-week window coming up, upload that into an e-marketing website. We use Constant Contact, but there are others out there like MailChimp.

By sending it that way I can track exactly who has opened it and how many times, if that is of use or interest to you. You can do that within ThinkReservations as well. Of course, once you make that decision, you need to continue communicating that with your customers not only on your website, but on any social media channels.

So for instance, this is us on Instagram, just two or three days ago saying we were open, but as we all know 24 hours makes a big difference right now. So we are going to send to our Twitter and Instagram and Facebook family the message that we are closed over the next few weeks. So again, I wish you all the best of luck. I know we're all kind of in the same boat. There's a lot of resources out there. Take the time to start really learning about what we have to use coming up and keep communicating with your customers because this will eventually blow through and we're going to need to rely on them to help us recover from this. So fingers crossed for all of us best of luck, and we'll see you soon.