How to Respond if Your Booking System has an Outage

Figuring out who booked rooms and how long they will stay is the bread and butter of any hotel business. Many of these processes no longer happen with paper and pencil, and they haven’t for decades. Advancements in this way are useful and more efficient, but they leave you at the mercy of electrical technology that can fail. What do you do if your front desk staff is dealing with an outage?

One of the first steps should be to contact your information technology professionals. They can help you gauge how widespread the issue is, and what might be the best way to respond. That initial response will also help you figure out how to frame your communications with staff who may run into disgruntled customers, and with said disgruntled customers.

Print downtime reports, which should help you get a better idea of what rooms are vacant, what rooms are in use, and who exactly is in them. Speaking of guests, make sure to be honest about the scope of the issue once you know more from the IT professionals I mentioned earlier. Guests won’t want to hear it, but the circumstances behind a power outage are almost completely out of your control. Be prepared to hear a lot of folks make a justified plea for refunds and other concessions, and hopefully your front-desk staff doesn’t overbook trying to figure out how to maneuver in the meantime.

Give a timeline for when it will be fixed as soon as possible.  Guests who are at the hotel may be miffed at how the checkout process changes, or other parts of the operation like room service. If the web issue is something unique to your company, you have a different issue than if it’s a web issue impacting multiple franchises of the same chain. You also have an even bigger problem if it’s a cybersecurity issue given how quickly your guests might understandably be unhappy about the specter of their information in the hands of bad actors. (Delta recently had this issue.)

Make sure to contact all parties involved to get more information for your guests. The more you know and can communicate, the better you can placate some of the guests who are unhappy. Refunds for a small inconvenience tied to the check-in process might be appropriate, but that will have something to do with your company’s level of culpability where the system outage is concerned, and the burden of explaining that to the customer is yours.

Electrical issues happen. Your aim should be to make the best of a bad situation by being forthright in your communications, apologizing profusely, and giving concessions where possible. Guests understand that these things happen, and in no time, you should be back on your feet. Perhaps you cannot make all your guests happy, but some will appreciate constant communication and the other efforts you are making to fix an issue if and when it arises.