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Why You Should Make Cancelling Easier Than Booking

Why You Should Make Cancelling Easier Than Booking

Not many businesses focus on the cancellation process. And that's a big mistake.


Cancelling a booking should actually be easier than making it. It might sound mad but stay with me a moment and I'll explain why.


The vast majority of hospitality businesses spend all their energy on making the sale or booking. That's what their marketing and advertising is for and it is of course is something you need to do.


But we also know the chaos and disruption that a no-show can bring. If theres enough of them then your business is in trouble since you are left with empty tables or slots - and the lost revenue they represent.


When no-shows increase the obvious response is to blame the customer and impose some sort of deposit or fee. But these bring issues of their own, which I've addresses in this post


Make it easy for people to cancel and they are more likely to do it.


So, if you don't wan't to impose deposits for the reasons I outlined in that post, the real question become "how can you reduce no-shows?" And that is where having a strong focus on the cancellation process comes in.


I believe strongly that most people are decent and are not trying to hurt your business. They might even want to visit it some time in the future.


But people are lazy.


And because they're lazy they will not spend any more time on cancelling a booking than they will on making it.


So how can you make it easy to cancel?


Well first I say it should be easier to cancel. Remember you don't need to collect the persons contact information so the steps and the time involved should be much simpler.


You do this by reviewing every channel on which you are active and ensuring that at the very least you monitor each and every one regularly. Consider any channel you use, whether it can be used to make a booking or not, to be a channel that can be used for cancellations. This includes platforms like Instagram.



You also pick a handful of those channels and advertise them prominently. There should be no ambiguity for someone coming to your website about where they go to cancel.


There is of course more to reducing no-shows than just making the cancellation process easy. Experiments have shown that simple changes in wording can have a huge effect (one experiment reduced no-shows from 32% to 10% just by asking the customer to promise to cancel if necessary). 


But making the process easy is a huge linchpin to all of this. It's worth the effort to sit down and streamline it.




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