Sign up for success: building member participation and loyalty with your reservation system
By Srishti Singh
It’s no secret that boosting engagement is a perennial issue for clubs. After all, it can increase the utilization of your club offerings. That can increase revenues while naturally helping to build loyalty at your club.
It’s easy to think of building engagement as something that takes a fresh multi-tactic campaign, or maybe the implementation of some new program. What’s easy to overlook is your existing systems and how they can be leveraged to help you build engagement. A great example is your reservations process.
Reservations hold the key
A premier reservation system gives your members the ability to book online or through the club app. That delivers the unrivaled convenience of booking a reservation from virtually anywhere and any time. That’s the kind of convenience that can help you improve your bookings and boost member participation.
Additionally, the right system can also help you streamline the management of facilities and your staff. That can cut across your operation, affecting the activities you offer as well as the management of your spa, rooms, and even marina. Let’s take a look at each and what the right reservations system can help you do.
Boosting the activity in your activities
A smart reservation system can really up the participation levels in the activities you offer. As mentioned before, it makes it easy for your members to sign up, and it also helps ensure participation by allowing you to send reminders. Those can happen via email, texts, and even push notifications through the club app.
That increased participation is important when you consider the opportunity activities create to increase members' expenditures as they attend an event or social gathering. Of course, getting them to attend activities increases their interaction with other members as well. That helps build relationships that help support further participation and loyalty to the club.
In addition to strengthening your members’ ties to the club, a smart reservation system can also help you manage your staff and facilities. The premier offerings operate on one database, connecting systems across your operation. This not only lets you take reservations, but also allows you to schedule staff for an event, a teaching pro for a lesson, and more. It helps you manage resources, too – whether that’s a golf simulator, a court, or a ball machine.
Revitalizing the spa
A well-managed reservations process is a necessity for the club spa. The right system can take the anxiety out of getting members’ reservations right. That includes easily handling packages and gift certificates. Better yet, it can help ensure a stress-free environment by allowing you to easily organize the resources needed for the scheduled treatments, and schedule the staff and facilities as well as track commissions and more.
Getting the rooms right
For your rooms, a well-rounded reservation system is crucial. It should allow you to offer online booking with real-time availability management to make it effortless for your members to book the room they need. Additionally, it should offer the convenience of charging expenses to the room – with those expenses flowing through to the room folio so you and your members have a consolidated accounting of all charges. The best systems also offer additional features like a GDS interface (to connect with services like Hotwire.com and Hotels.com) and yield base pricing management to optimize bookings and revenue.
Ensuring smooth sailing at the marina
For clubs that feature a marina, a smart reservation system can help streamline the operation. Premier systems will give you complete dock management with the ability to administer slips, moorings, and dry storage. You can also implement user-defined billing determined by slip type, length of boat, and more. And take advantage of other features like metered electric billing.
Booking better
The premier reservation systems operate on one database allowing you to easily tie all this booking functionality to your financial module. For example, with the Northstar complete club management software, charges can be automatically routed to your accounts receivable and members can see the charges once they login to the online portal or the club app. This is just one of many advantages of offering a solution built on one database.
It’s natural to think of a premier reservation system as simply a nice convenience for your members. But leading clubs understand the real potential it holds. From helping you optimize the way you run your operation to improving bookings, boosting participation, and building member engagement and loyalty.
To take a deeper dive into all the possibilities, request a demo of the Northstar complete club management software solution. You’ll be able to explore a premier reservation system. And you’ll discover all the advantages of a solution built on one database to help you connect and optimize operations across your club. Request your demo, today.