Dialogue: charges in perspective

For Hotels:

For some time now we have been calculating (and quoting) our hotel clients in terms of 'pence per room night'. This makes it easy for them to understand the cost of Dialogue, and they can then easily work out how many more rooms they need to sell to pay* for it (remember: we always stress that Dialogue should be seen as a tool for generating profit, rather than a drain on resources).

Here are some examples:

• A 250 bed hotel charging £100 per night: 5.1p per room/night (5.2p when Dynamic Display is included)
• A 100 bed hotel charging £250 per night: 6.6p per room night (6.7p when Dynamic Display is included)

One of Dialogue's key strengths is in the area of guest retention: another way of looking at (and valuing) Dialogue is savings on OTA commissions: converting from those bearing commission to direct bookings requires between 5 and 8 extra rooms to be sold each month to fully fund Dialogue. 

The other is in the area of what we term 'killer reviews'. A 'killer review' is a review that has the potential to massively impact on revenue if posted on a site like TripAdvisor. Dialogue massively increases your chances of being able to manage such reviews in private.

For Estate Agents:

Here our headline charges are a maximum of £125 a month (£170 including Dynamic Display), reducing to £85 a month for agencies with over 20 branches. So how many more properties does an agent need to sell to pay for Dialogue?

The average UK house price was £239,000 in June. The commission on a sale at that price would be:

• £5975 @ 2.5%
• £4780 @ 2.0%
• £3585 @ 1.5%

So: with Dialogue (including Dynamic Display) at £2040 p.a. for a single branch agency: the cost is covered by less than half a property a year at 2.5% and just over half a property a year at 1.5%.

But that's not all; Dialogue can pay for itself in one review: we encourage all our lettings clients to send the 'invitation to review' to their landlords at regular intervals. This is so they can address any issues before the landlord decides to change agents. Recently an estate agent client had just such a response, along the lines of 'I'm not happy, and I'm considering appointing another agent.' The agent in question was alerted by the review and able to restore the landlord's confidence. What was that single review worth to the agent?

*As all our clients know, we don't ask you to sign a contract for six months, and we haven't lost a client yet, so there's probably a message there somewhere. The six months with 'no contract' allow enough time (and experience) to reassure clients of the purely financial benefits that flow from membership of Dialogue. You can read what our clients say here.