Automating Guest Communications
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Thank you for your continued support over 2024. I’m taking the liberty of a glance back at what we’ve done together (with you) whilst sharing some behind-the-scenes stuff you’ll not generally hear about. Let’s start with something you mention the MOST in your feedback: our people!
Your services continue to be delivered by one of the most experienced, friendly and passionate travel tech teams on the planet. What we don’t know, we make our business to find answers quickly, so you get the support that saves you stress and time. Keeping our team engaged is made easy by their attitude to excellence. Your feedback provides us with areas to focus on, along with a sense of job satisfaction where we’re getting it right.
Crafting products that solve complex problems in an easy-to-use way takes weeks of research, design and refinement. We are fortunate to celebrate 20 years of working with our Product Manager, Eleanor, whose deep understanding of our tech and relentless customer focus is a critical addition to product development. Alongside her, we continue to grow our engineering team with new starts learning from seasoned leading engineers like Iain, who in 2025 will celebrate his 20th year at freetobook. We also saw four more engineers move into senior roles in recognition of their expertise on projects, leadership, UX and learning. We are a learning company and nowhere is that more apparent than within the engineering team currently trialling machine learning models in several areas.
Our new marketing team of Jess and Clara are a breath of fresh air. With their ideas and consistently high-quality content, they are helping us provide deeper support for you through webinars, case studies, videos, guides etc. Thanks to them, in 2024 we ran more webinars than any other year, with record numbers of you participating (500+ on a couple!), so thank you for your interest.
Bloom has simply blossomed this year (sorry, had to get that in!), it may have seemed like a bit of a wait, but it is testament to our pursuit of perfection. We scoured the internet for the very best examples of booking and sought to apply our own blend of simplicity and elegance. These booking pages sell for you by leading with your photos and refined accent colours. Your board basis and offers are presented to retain a balance and structure that keeps the booking flowing beautifully. Evidence of this can be found in the 25% increase in conversion rates, but there’s always more to do and we’re close to launching a pro version with embedded widgets, express check out, abandoned booking recovery and private rates.
You are consistently asking for customisation options to show the individual character of your businesses and bloom’s hero page provides the ideal opportunity. We encourage you to keep refining and updating photos wherever you can, it pays dividends (on bloom).
We made the easy decision to remove our old email system from freetobook this year. The way it worked was no longer reliable and when faced with maintaining it we knew that it would be effort and money wasted. Your overwhelmingly positive feedback on Messaging and a quick look around at the comms world today made it a no-brainer.
Your guests’ experience is enhanced by clearer, more timely, and engaging communication, with Messaging providing all that in spades. On top of that, you automate the mundane but keep control of conversations.
The industry context we are seeing here is one of increasing productivity challenges fuelled by difficulties in hiring and rising wage costs. This is where automation provides some answers by enabling you (and your team) to do more with less time.
New tools like our Guest App (currently on trial) will be able to remove some of your workload by helping with the guest check-in process etc. That’s just one example but we’re receiving your requests for many others!
Everyone will have noticed that we stepped up our security in 2024. The stats for online fraud growth are staggering, with no signs of slowing… quite the opposite. We’re all targets in this. Security is one of those absolutely necessary functions that is invisible to your guests until it’s breached. We continually evaluate the options, looking for stronger methods that are less intrusive. Thank you for your understanding and positive response when implementing these new habits.
Working with Stripe and Apple technology we built GuestTappy so you now have Tap to Pay on iPhone to accept contactless cards, Apple Pay and digital wallets in a few simple steps. This is new technology so only available in a few countries, but others are coming soon. Your GuestTappy app means you can take payments with just your iPhone and benefit from its built-in security and privacy protection features. Your GuestTappy app connects directly into freetobook making payments easier, cheaper (no terminal required) and more secure for you.
It wouldn’t be freetobook if we didn’t keep mentioning your Direct Bookings! We know that by giving you more control in the channel manager you can increase your direct bookings (and actually get less channel bookings!). Rates and availability are the two big levers so having done the rate side (a few years back) this year we moved to the availability. Your channel close-outs and restrictions page was the focus. You can now see twelve times more dates than before and with your occupancy and events also displayed you can scan for dates to close out. With the new bulk edit you can close out multiple key dates in seconds i.e. every Fri/Sat in high season. You’ll also see your active restrictions in the diary so you always know the state of play. We hope by making it easier to add, manage and monitor you’ll be more inclined to take control of your availability to increase direct revenue.
Payments continue to be an issue for most independent businesses, whether it’s their cost, accessibility or reach, and next year we’re aiming to improve that. We are also working on helping convert more of your website visitors into bookings, these are the additions to bloom (mentioned above).
The Guest App working with Messaging will lighten your load with better guest communication and self-help for your guests. There is demand for more connectivity to other systems like channels, cleaning apps, remote/smart locks etc and we’re trying to find scalable ways to solve this. Finding the right partners for you is always our goal.
Your referrals are a godsend, with over 60% of new accounts coming from the positive words you say when discussing us with other property owners. Please keep those discussions flowing and reviews glowing.
There’s much more we can do to make your businesses easier to run and more profitable but until then, have a great festive period… we’re looking forward to the new year!
Scan the QR code to download the app