We were very concerned to read the
comments by Rocket Man.
It is always disappointing when we
let down our customers, and we appear to have done so several times in this
example with Rocket Man – please accept our apologies for this. For this to
have happened three times in a row is thankfully not something anyone has come
across before, and is totally unacceptable and extremely annoying for you.
I will try to outline the cause of
the issues faced by Rocket Man and explain what we are doing to ensure that
this does not happen in the future.
The System
To give you the most accurate and up
to date availability possible, rates and availability are updated directly on
LateRooms by the hotels themselves.
How LateRooms hotels update rates
Hotels have two options for how they update their rates:
- Put in their room rates and guarantee availability against a room –
which will mean that you can book the room online or by telephone .
OR - They can put in rates which are available on referral. This means
that the hotelier wants LateRooms to call to confirm the booking
Why allow option 2?
It enables smaller hotels and guest
houses who may have one member of staff cooking, taking room bookings and doing
the house keeping to be listed on LateRooms. In these circumstances the hotel
will sometimes only update their availability at their computer once or twice a
day, and so will need a call from us to confirm your booking.
Larger hotels who are down to their
last couple of rooms will often put them on LateRooms as ‘on referral’ rather
than show full. This will mean you will often get rooms on LateRooms that are
not on other websites.
In short, it allows us to offer you
a huge range of smaller hotels, B&Bs and guest houses that cannot, and will
not, go on other websites – enabling us to offer you much more choice.
This is not, however, an excuse for a
hotel to not keep their availability up to date, or to not show their room as
full if they have sold their last room.
What happens to a hotel if they have
no availability?
If a hotel is showing a room rate
that they do not honour, we will log this shortfall. If this happens twice,
they will receive a call from LateRooms to discuss this issue. If the hotel is
a persistent offender, it will be removed from the site as this undermines the
level of service we provide to you, our customer.
What LateRooms is doing to reduce the number of times this occurs and
improve customer choice
To improve things further, LateRooms
will be introducing a symbol which will
show when a room has guaranteed availability. Making this information available
will enable customers to see which rooms can be booked online and which will
need a phone call to LateRooms.
We are also reviewing the options for larger hotels to not be able to sell rooms
on referral – it is always better for you if a larger hotel has to guarantee
room availability.
With regard to the variable levels
of customer service received from our call centre, we strive to ensure that all
our operators give the high level of service that LateRooms customers expect.
LateRooms strives to provide great
customer service and takes any reports of bad experiences very seriously. I
hope that this response underlines this. I’d be very happy to answer any other
questions you may have via email at: cmarketing@laterooms.com
