Afternoon Laura,

It’s a pain isn’t it?

One possible approach is for provisional bookings to have a life-span, possibly a month. Be very clear about this, and let them know in any prompt emails that their provisional booking will lapse if they don’t respond before X date. If they get back to you to explain that they still want the date but haven’t nailed everything down then you can make allowances. If they don’t respond then that slot is re-opened for anyone to book.

This may or may not work for you.

Dear GEMmers –

We are having a bit of an issue with tour bookings: we have lots of calls from teachers who want to make provisional bookings on specific dates and then take ages to get back to us to confirm.

The phone starts ringing in the first week after holidays when everyone is in planning mode and then they all go off to book coaches and so forth – but in the meantime we have slots reserved that we cannot then sell on. Sometimes teachers do not come back to us for months (even with prompts), by which time we could have sold the slot many times over.  However - we recently had someone come back to us who had just finished booking all their travel for an enquiry they contacted us about 4 months ago, so a lot of the time they are just taking a while to jump through all the required hoops before coming back to us!

We know we need to draw up a provisional bookings policy and we’d like to know how others handle the same problem.

Thanks!  

Laura Hilton

Visitor Services Manager

Clifton Suspension Bridge Trust

Bridge Road, Leigh Woods, Bristol BS8 3PA

0117 974 4664

www.cliftonbridge.org.uk

Facebook: www.facebook.com/brunelsbridge

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