The COVID-19 virus: How is everyone meeting the challenge?
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@José-Pedro-Pirralha
Jose, we realize that travel around most of the world is affected, so we’re not planning to add additional countries. I don’t know how we could draw a line beyond 1.Having said that, we hope the measures we offered to everybody will help. As far as I know, no other PMS has offered their current customers anything but advice.
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@Seth-Scalf
We did add two months onto the contracts. Was that not clear? When your pre-paid contracts run out, the next two months will be billed at the discounted rate.Stripe technology does not allow us to make monthly changes to an annual plan, so we had to put it at the end.
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I have been quite happy overall with using Tokeet but the way you are handling the situation is very saddening.
It is a good start that you are giving free service to Italy and giving 2 months for 1 year subscribers
What about the rest of your customers though? Estonia is in lockdown as are many other countries. Guest apartments and hotels are empty now - not just in Italy!!!
In Estonia in just one day 500+ offers were added to long term rental market because guest apartments have no more guests - remember, Estonia is a small country. This shows the magnitude of the impact of COVID-19 and the coming economic downturn is just starting.
I have all booking cancelled up to middle of May and I am quite sure the rest of the year will go sour too.
I understand that you have to cover running costs and so on but no significant discount/free service for customers outside of Italy?
And no discount whatsoever for customers who have not signed up for yearly service? Almost as if you want to punish customers such as myself
You do understand that the best potential yearly plan customers are the ones who are customers but not on yearly plan yet? The way you will get those customers to take the yearly plan is to lower your prices. Your product is very scalable, so your cost base is not significantly different whether the customer has 1 apartment or 5 or 10 apartments. For me, as an operator of just one 1 apartment the current price you charge has been on the very limit for acceptable. If I had 3 or more apartments, the cost would be reasonable and OK.
I suggest you lower the price for customers with 1-2 apartments - you will get more business that way without increasing cost base and it creates a sales funnel without the need to put much effort on extra marketing.
Have you considered your competition and what effects the global crisis will have on pricing for the services you offer in general? I predict, the prices will start coming down because the need for your services might stay constant but operators simply can not afford it for the time being.
It is easy for such customers (me included) to just stop using your services since there are no booking, no revenue to cover the costs of using Tokeet.
I suggest you make a minimum 50% discount for all customers until business picks up again. This way you will be able to cover your costs and not lose customers.
Otherwise you will lose all revenue from some customers, including me. I will wait for another week and if there is no solution, the smart move for me is to stop using Tokeet until business picks up again.
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A TIP for fellow Tokeet users - try to get your customers to rebook for another date/time in the future without changing the current booking, so the price and payout time will stay in tact. This way you will get an upfront payment and the customer is sure to come and stay with you. You can even try to give some perk or bonus (discount, extra day, some ticket or voucher for some local event, service) for the customer, so they would be more interested in that offer.
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@Glenn said in The COVID-19 virus: How is everyone meeting the challenge?:
@José-Pedro-Pirralha
Jose, we realize that travel around most of the world is affected, so we’re not planning to add additional countries. I don’t know how we could draw a line beyond 1.Having said that, we hope the measures we offered to everybody will help. As far as I know, no other PMS has offered their current customers anything but advice.
Other PMS’s are offering discounts and even completely free months.
Your response “drawing a line beyond 1” suggests that only Italy’s situation is worthy of help. Many people here have been personally effected by the COVID-19 virus and all other businesses have been working together to help each other out. This has meant offering services for free or hugely discounted until everybody gets back on their feet. Nobody wants to just break even or loose money but in times like this it’s inevitable.
I really just cannot understand how you would rather loose customers instead of offering a subscription holiday? It makes no sense. Moving forward Italy will have the worst economy and will not be able to afford to pay for Tokeet even after the pandemic is over. Other countries such as mine (the UK) have been offered help for our businesses, however this funding won’t come until late summer. This means that UK businesses cannot afford to pay for Tokeet until the summer. I’m so surprised your team hasn’t researched any of this, it’s real basic metrics which should be considered for any company running a subscription model. It would mean you retain the majority of your customer base instead of loosing them to competitors.
It’s almost as if you want people to leave. I’m so confused by tokeets reponse to all this. Could the founder / owner of Tokeet please respond to this thread as you have a lot of confused users here.
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Jaak,
I suggest you lower the price for customers with 1-2 apartments - you will get more business that way without increasing cost base and it creates a sales funnel without the need to put much effort on extra marketing.
I expect you will like what 2020 has in store for Tokeet customers like you.
Glenn
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Leigh, I understand your concerns and will discuss them with Kwesi on Monday. At this point I’ll just ask you to understand that we know there’s going to be financial impact across the industry that includes us, and we’re doing what we feel we can support at this time.
If you want to send any information I can verify about what other PMS platforms are doing for existing customers I’m interested. As far as I know, everything being offered as free or discounted is for new customers only and only for a short time. I understand why they’d do that. I don’t expect we will.
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I am particularly disappointed that you are not putting in places measures to support all your customers from every country, monthly and year subscribers. I highly recommend everyone cancel their subscriptions. Shop around, there are many options out there. Sure it might be a bit more expensive or not have all the features, but YOU have to look after YOUR business right now.
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@Milo-Lukic
Milo, we’d love to be able to be more generous with all our customers too. However, we are a startup that’s been in business shorter than many of you, and whether you exhort people to leave us or not, you must know that this virus is hurting everyone’s business in the travel industry.I’m leaving your post up to make it clear to everyone reading that we are not deleting negative posts just because it’s our board.
Most of you realize that Tokeet is the least expensive option on the market with this feature set, even after our first price increase in several years. If people have to stop using a PMS for a while, we understand. I advise you to check out the Tokeet terms and conditions for our data retention policy in section 6. I’m confident that those who are determined to ride this storm out are going to be happy with the upgrades and new offerings they see released in Tokeet this year.
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@Glenn said in The COVID-19 virus: How is everyone meeting the challenge?:
Leigh, I understand your concerns and will discuss them with Kwesi on Monday. At this point I’ll just ask you to understand that we know there’s going to be financial impact across the industry that includes us, and we’re doing what we feel we can support at this time.
If you want to send any information I can verify about what other PMS platforms are doing for existing customers I’m interested. As far as I know, everything being offered as free or discounted is for new customers only and only for a short time. I understand why they’d do that. I don’t expect we will.
Glenn,
This is my point. Surely you should already know who is offering what in the market place. As a company you should be researching the competitive market place.
I’m not going to mention your direct competitors products here as this could mean Tokeet could loose subscribers. However, they are actively targeting the tokeet community through direct phone calls, emails, facebook ads and on other social media platforms.You still need to look into the support staff you have, they are unhelpful, rude and unwilling to offer support. We mostly get one word answers to our questions like “no, not possible”. Instead of being proactive and offering suggestions we get brick walled or incorrect responses.
What people are asking for is a discount whilst the travel industry is impacted by COVID-19. Instead of giving free subscriptions to Italy you should have just offered a discount across the board. Offering an unfair advantage to Italy is what is angering your users in other countries.
You say everybody is effected by COVID-19 but your actions give out a different message, that you only care about Italy.
Obviously you can’t take away what you’ve given to Italy however people would respect Tokeet more if you offered a discount to their countries. I’m sure your investors would understand given the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic. 50% off would be a fair option until this is all over.
With regards to what’s coming soon, at present people are not interested in new features, they simply want to minimise their costs until this is all over. You need to stop the whole “you’ll love what is coming” routine as people have been waiting too long for features and now it’s angering them.
If you listen to the suggestions by your users (they are mostly unanimous) you can change the collective sentiment of your users from “can’t wait to leave” to “brand loyal happy customers”
Tokeet has carved out it’s own market segment, Yet you seem to be doing everything you can to leave this market and enter the premium market occupied by guesty and rentals united. Why leave a market that you are already dominating, it makes no sense.
