Existing Customers Are Key To Recession Survival

I’m not really into this whole blog writing business. When Mark Ellis first asked me to contribute to our website blog I was, I’m sorry to admit, a little worried. What the hell would I write about? Who would be interested in my incoherent ramblings?

I immediately dismissed the idea of discussing last weekend's X Factor (Louis what are you thinking!), or Jenson Button's chances of winning the F1 championship. They’re perhaps not entirely relevant to what we do at Welcome, and those topics almost always cause arguments!

So, I thought I might talk a little about what it’s been like here at Welcome over the past 12 months or so. It’s been a tough old year for everybody in the hospitality sector, with publications like The Caterer filled with news of hotels closing and companies going into administration. We weren’t immune to the poor economy either, and there were a few hard months as hotels tightened their belts. Hoteliers were quite rightly nervous of investing in new IT systems when the future was so uncertain. Over the past couple of months, confidence seems to have returned to the market and I’m happy to say I’m once again very busy taking orders from brand new customers.

However, it was our existing customer base that kept us strong enough to survive the tough market conditions, and for this we whole heartedly thank every one of them. We’ve always had a strong focus on our existing customers and I believe it’s that focus that will keep us a strong and profitable company far into the future.

We’ve got some exciting new developments on the horizon for both our new and existing customers. Online booking is now becoming a buzz word, and after 6 years of development of our own online booking engine and 39,000 bookings, we are well placed to take advantage of that. Despite the success of Welcome Online, we are still thinking of ways to make it better and increase it’s earnings for our customers, there is so much potential there.

Not only that, we are developing links with many third party booking agents. With booking.com already in the bag and many more companies now willing to work with us, it’s a very exciting project.

Add to all this the work we’ve done to provide secure credit card storage systems like Welcome Secure, and our automated remote backup service named (surprise, surprise!) 'Welcome Backup', the future looks very bright for Welcome indeed.

Anyway, I’ll get back to work now, but thanks for reading!

Chris Willis 13th October 2009

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