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I work for a luxury travel agency call center that is also affiliated with a bank. We tend to service wealthy clientele who will pay top dollar to stay at the nicest properties worldwide. Most clients know that if they want luxury, they will have to pay for it. But we also get clients who wants 5 star quality at 3 star prices…
A couple calls in, account holder (“Mr. Flake”) authorizes me to speak to his wife “Mrs. Flake” who is not listed. He goes off to take another call and I assume I will only be speaking to his wife from here on out and she will book with me. They are celebrating their anniversary, going to a well known island for vacation (where hotel prices have skyrocketed due to increased travel demand), want a hotel by the ocean, an ocean front room is a must, and it needs to be 5 star. Hotels that meet what they want are $1700+ a night and I figured since they want all that, they are willing to pay the price and I’ll make a good sale.
Well, Mrs. Flake doesn’t say much but asks me to wait and talk to Mr. Flake about what I recommended. Mr. Flake is having a whole entire conversation with somebody in the background. This goes on for several minutes, I advise I can put notes if they want to call back but Mrs. Flake kept insisting Mr. Flake was almost done and I am not allowed to hang up per our company rules. Mr. Flake finally joins the line again after 15 minutes and I advise the hotels I talked to Mrs. Flake about. I figured I would explain all the perks he’ll get booking with us and he’ll be enticed on the one with the best benefits.
Wrong. I’m only at the first of the three recommended hotels and before I can even say anything about the perks, he immediately recoils when I mention the hotel’s Oceanfront room was $2000+ a night and has me stop right there. I tell him there are rooms with different views for lower but he asks me to find a different hotel with an oceanfront room….all of the hotels in the area that meet his criteria are well over $1700. I tell him that, he sounds shocked and I offered to look at other properties and ask what avg nightly rate he doesn’t wish to exceed. He ignored my question and doesn’t give me a number. Make of that what you will.
He proceeds to have me check several other properties that were 4 star, not the 5 star that was initially requested of me, lower at $1000 avg nightly but still too expensive for him and he didn’t want to accept a room without any sort of ocean view, which was making things worse. His wife is dead silent through all of this. Not sure if she was embarrassed. The only hotel that somewhat appealed to him was at $680 a night and it was a three star property.
The call would’ve gone on forever but I managed to talk him into consulting with his wife and to call us when they were ready to book since at that point, it was clear he didn’t know what he wanted, his wife is not the account holder and cannot override his decisions (not that she would if she could), and no sale was getting made. I agree that paying $2000 a night is outrageous and if he would’ve been honest about his budget, I would’ve been willing to work to find a 3 star boutique property or even recommended a destination with luxurious hotels at much lower prices so that everybody was happy.
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