The Price Proof Sheet: Justifying your high-season rates to agents

When international agents are booking spaces for your upcoming peak season, your sales team needs more than vague green catchphrases to defend your premium rates. In this episode, Samantha Smits explains how your daily sustainability data is actually your strongest sales asset during contracting and reservation windows. Learn how to turn your verified resource savings, fair wage structures, and local community investments into a clean proof sheet. This simple tool gives agents the exact facts they need to validate your pricing to their clients, cutting out exhausting email threads long before the high season even begins. 

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The Sustainability Edge is hosted by Samantha Smits, your guide to turning sustainability into a competitive edge.

Transcript

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You are not the one begging or participating in some kind of race where people are trying to outprice each other. You are actually leading at this place because you are confident about your product, you are confident about the value that you are delivering. Hi, I'm Samantha Smith and welcome back to the Sustainability Edge, the tourism podcast. No Yargon, no fluff. We're breaking down sustainability and especially how to turn sustainability in a practical tool that gives you more profit, more time, stuff that's staying, and a business you can be proud of. Let's get started. Hello, hello again. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're talking about some kind of scenario that happens every single year to you during your contracting and booking windows. And here, agents are trying to reserve spaces for your upcoming peak season or the one next year. For these seasons, of course, your rates go up compared to the lower season. And you in your office, you get stuck in some kind of pricing arguments by telling beautiful romantic stories about your property or your destination. But at the moment, with the new European directive for empowering consumers for green position, agents are going to need more than just some kind of beautiful polished story. Before they confirm a booking, they need evidence that, especially sustainability-wise, anything you claim it's true. So today in this episode, we're going to look at how your tracking efforts that we've discussed before are going to help you build simple proof that justify any premium pricing that you will make for high seasons and using these clear facts to just justify. We're all familiar with the languages that are used in marketing, on the social media, in brochures and flyers, this beautiful story about your destination, the sunsets, the sand, or fiery parks or everything beautiful where people just can't wait to be there, and others are already including the beautiful narratives about how local community is benefiting and included, how wildlife is conserved. It looks fantastic on paper. But again, when an international agent is going to look at the rate increase that is for the high season compared to the lower ones, how are they going to justify this to their clients who are expecting complete transparency? Because the clients might look at the difference of maybe we're going to go in this month or going the other month, and that might just be the difference between the low season and the high season. And they have to see to understand why does it cost so much more in that month compared to this one? Except for the reason, of course, that there is less available, so it's more exclusive. So if at that point your sales team can only answer pricing questions with vague statements about, oh, but we are eco-friendly, we are being very sustainable, we help community, so we deserve more, then you kind of leave them at a major disadvantage. You are really giving them, yeah, making it difficult for them. Because you might know even better than me if you're longer in business than I am, sales is a little depends on a lot of quo of providing clarity. So if they cannot be specific, if they cannot give the clarity that's requested, you're going to leave money on the table to where another provider can give them the exact clarity and transparency that is expected. And this is also exactly why the EU came with this regulation of empowering the consumers for Green Transition Directive, because they are doing this for consumer protection. They want to protect any of their European citizens of making bad decisions because they're being lied to in a sales conversation or because they don't just got vague statements and have no specifics. So that is why especially the agents there are on the very strict consumer protection regulations, which are also affecting you as their supplier, because if you as supplier cannot help them justify their rates and come with vague sustainability claims as argument and cannot be specific why this actually is good news, huh, then I'm yeah, it's going to be very difficult for them to choose you when they feel like something is not right. They really want to see that such a premium high CSM price matches a verifiable standard of operational care. So to step out of this endless cycle of price arguments, you have to give your salespeople a tool that really treats sustainability as a premium management asset, a little bit of a fancy language, but that really helps them already as a sales argument, of course, but including the details when they when next questions get asked and to move beyond such a vague claim. So think about it when you come with some kind of price proof sheet as a document that translates all the work you've been doing behind the scenes or the work you're doing with a sustainability certificate or not, and you can just justify the exact things you've done behind the screens that are just making your basically the product you're selling, because if you sell a package or whatever, let's call it the product, much better as someone else, just because basically because there's much more positive impact included, it will help you justify those prices. It will have written down that everything in your supply chain is within the 50 kilometer radius. Instead of saying you just look after your stuff, you can show that all of your staff get paid, I don't know, some many percent, at least above minimum wage. You have all those policies, the Stefan book we talked about in the last episode, your staff is very properly trained, the percentage that stay in the community to prove that there is no leakage actually, all the plastic you have cut out, all the money that's going to the conservation, so that there's actually more animals for them to spot eventually, because if you don't conserve the animals that they come to see, there's nothing to see for them in the future, thus they won't come. Your goal is here to make it completely effortless, to make it as easy as possible for your agent to explain your value to their clients. Or, I mean, often often agents will in the beginning not even say they work with you, so then it seems that your product is theirs, even though they've chosen you, but you have to make it as easy as possible for them that you become the obvious choice by giving them all the data they need that their clients could ask about. And it can be so overwhelming to create all of this yourself if you don't have already a weekly tracking rhythm or if you're not working with a sustainability certification scheme. But this is going to be the future, it's already happening today. And think about when you're doing this, it completely changes the negotiation and the conversation that you're having with your agents, because at this point you are not the one begging or participating in some kind of race where people are trying to outprice each other. You're actually leading at this place because you are confident about your product, you are confident about the value that you are delivering, and you give them the data and the facts, and you're like, this is it, and this is why. At that point, you are actually building the argument that if you cut the price, it also cuts the positive impact that you are bringing. And of course, this would then a little bit what you hear all the time, but oh sustainability is more expensive, this and that. Again, it doesn't have to be the truth. You can, especially when you begin, you can really pick your battles, you can choose your passions, what you start with. But obviously, like with anything, what you put more money into will amplify, which means it will become bigger and grow stronger. At the same time, having this data at hand and available will give your sales team so much more confidence because whenever you're doing sales, I feel like the other can sense insecurity. And insecurity doesn't look good on your product because you have to fully believe in the help you provide and the product you're sell. So in your case, you fully stand behind the destination, obviously. You fully stand behind I'm showing my destination in this way, and I choose to show you these places and not these places. And I really believe these are the communities that have to benefit, and I really believe this is where the impact and the money should be going. It really shows you are confident in your value and uh and thus the price. And this really, really helps your sales employees to have the same feeling and to work with that same power. When they get an objection, they will not panic, they can lean on the evidence, and no one can argue with evidence. At the same time, this also helps you filter higher quality partners. I'm going to talk more about in the following episode about the perspective of USDMC. Looking at what agents you want to work with. I've already talked before about it from the agent side of the perspective. So here the verifiable sustainability data is going to become your ultimate commercial sales argument because it gives you the actual proof to justify your pricing and to show that actually more money means even more impact. Whilst of course also sustaining yourself. So here, take this blindfold of your sales team, start help them, give them the guidance to that they don't have to ask you how do I defend or rates or that they might even not agree with you. Just and that they resort back to the catchphrase of, oh, but we're eco-friendly, we're sustainable, and people care about sustainability. Yes, they do, but show us how are you sustainable then? What are you doing? Where's the money going? So these metrics are holding more and more power in many, many, many different ways. And here, let the truth do the selling for you. If my remarks here have triggered something within you, may it be curiosity, questions, feedback, really anything, go down to the show notes, find my website there to plan a introduction call with me, find me on LinkedIn, do reach out to me and share your thoughts with me. I would love to hear them and also to help you forward with this if you feel overwhelmed how to get on with this. And then I see you in the next episode. Thank you for listening and congratulations on investing your time today to think strategically about your future, to make sure you never miss a step to understand sustainability better, how to grow your competitive edge. Follow the podcast right now, and if this was helpful, please leave a five star rating. It will help other people like you to find these tools. I'm Samantha Smith, and I'll see you in the next episode.