For an independent hotel, an agency, a small tour operator or a vehicle rental business, the phone is still the highest-value channel you have. It is also the only one you do not measure.
You measure your website. You know your occupancy, your average rate and roughly what your commission costs you. You almost certainly do not know how many people rang you this week and did not get through.
That is not carelessness. It is that nothing tells you. A missed call leaves no trace anywhere you look.
The sum nobody does
Take a small business and assume a handful of unanswered calls a day. Not a disaster — the ordinary reality of a small team with a lot on. Say five. Assume a fair proportion of inbound calls are genuine enquiries rather than suppliers, staff or wrong numbers. And assume some proportion of those would have booked.
Even on conservative assumptions the annual figure is uncomfortable, because the multiplier is your average booking value, and in a small business that value makes a handful of lost enquiries a week matter a great deal by December.
We have worked the whole sum through with an example, so you can swap each figure for your own. It is linked at the end. |
Why you do not know the number
Most small operators are running a phone system installed by a local supplier some years ago that has never produced a report of any kind. It rings. If nobody picks up, it stops ringing. There is no record that it happened, no missed-call list, and no way to tell whether it was one person trying four times or four people trying once.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. One person calling four times is a determined customer who will probably still book. Four people calling once each are four bookings that have gone elsewhere.
Three moments it happens
· You are dealing with someone, the phone goes, and you make the entirely correct decision to look after the person in front of you. The call is not answered and nothing records it.
· The team is on the floor, in the restaurant or driving. In an agency, everyone is with a walk-in. At a rental desk, everyone is out in the car park. The phone is covered on paper and not in practice.
· Out of hours. The largest single block, and the one people most underestimate, because it does not feel like lost business — it feels like being closed. Enquiries do not wait until Monday. They ring the next place on the list within about thirty seconds.
What it is actually costing you
There are two costs and only one of them is obvious. The obvious one is the booking. The less obvious one is that the customer who could not reach you often books you anyway — through an intermediary, where you pay commission on a booking you had already won. You lose the margin rather than the customer, and it never shows up as a loss anywhere.
That is the cost that makes the sums worse than most owners expect, and it is invisible in every report you currently look at.
What you can do about it without replacing everything
The first step costs nothing: find out your number. Any modern phone service will tell you how many calls came in, how many were answered, when the unanswered ones happened and whether the same number tried repeatedly. Just seeing a week of that data changes most owners' view of the problem.
After that the options are more modest than people assume. You do not need a contact centre. Most small operators fix the majority of it with three things: calls that follow you rather than ringing an empty desk, something that answers out of hours and takes the enquiry properly rather than offering an answerphone, and a callback list somebody works first thing.
That last one on its own recovers a surprising amount, because a call back at nine in the morning to someone who rang at eight the previous evening still converts far more often than not.
How to find your own number this week
If your phone system reports at all, look at inbound calls against answered calls for the last seven days, and break it out by hour. If it does not report — and many older systems genuinely cannot — that is itself the finding, and it is worth knowing before you spend anything else.
It takes about five minutes and it costs nothing. Almost everyone who does it is surprised, and almost everyone is surprised in the same direction.
CALL TO ACTION