How should one go about tracking the consumer behaviour changes and accordingly, adjusting price –related initiatives?
Nayan Peshkar: There is no doubt that consumer behaviour changed last year – partly due to their new found confidence in rate shopping and partly due to our inability as an industry to have a long term approach to rate integrity. I am not so sure that new segments were created – we did see aberrations of behaviour prompted by the two issues mentioned above. Is this likely to create new consumer segments? Not in my opinion. I do believe that 2009 merely escalated the evolutionary changes that were coming the way of the corporate transient segments – Most bookings of the future will be from one electronic means or the other and will have some measure of rate shopping and comparison attached. Hence, RM professionals need to stick to the basics while qualifying if indeed there is a new breed of customers, whose behaviour is significantly different from the old ones thus requiring them to re-position the sell strategy for a hotel. We need to do the simple things right – start with the re-qu
