The rise against “hate-selling” in the travel industry

A few weeks ago Rafat Ali over at SKIFT coined a new term. He was trying to book a trip and was continuously confronted with the phenomenon of hate-selling. Through a series of tweets he documented his experiences and the hashtag spread like wildfire through Twitter, with many people relating their own experiences. It had obviously hit a nerve. The main culprits it seems, being those in the travel industry.

So what is hate-selling?

It’s a particularly aggressive albeit in some cases passive-aggressive form of selling you a product or offering you a service in addition to your purchase in a way that makes you feel either guilty or excluded. Customers are faced with stern warnings of potentially dire consequences of restrictions or “ignore this at your own risk” type circumstances which may befall you if you decline the offer.

Ali refers to them as “buy now or else” prompts. Travel companies are using scare tactics to increase conversion. It’s almost as if they’re watching and shaking their heads and muttering through gritted teeth “just DO it you cheapskate!” as you consider your options and sweat a little while hovering the curser between the “accept” and “reject” button. In real time, a client wouldn’t be handled in quite the same way. “Well now that you’ve bought the bed you’ll have to buy the bedding, or you’ll be cold and have a terrible night’s sleep and may end up ill and in hospital as a result, but it’s your choice of course, just don’t say I didn’t warn you”.

Car hire companies offer the best examples, and seem to be annoying the most customers with this tactic. In one instance a company “offers” comprehensive insurance cover, but in case you are not fully aware of what you are declining, you are forced to decline the comprehensive cover option no less than three times, with each lead more threatening than last until you begin to think you may not actually be able to hire the car at all without accepting.

“Everything is slave to the conversion and anything to create that false sense of urgency, doesn’t matter if the site prompts claim aren’t exactly true, or even relevant. As far as strategies go, they are brilliant and have worked, but for power users like me who can see through these prompts, it is more than an annoyance, it inhibits the buying process. And in a mobile-dominated environment where simplicity is what leads to conversion, these tactics may only add to the frustration of buying in a smaller form factor” says Ali.

Based on the response to Ali’s experience, the public have wised up to the fact that they hold all the buying power, and frankly they would rather companies went back to the regaling the benefits of buying a product and choosing their brand, instead of being made to feel guilty for not spending more than their budget. Hate-selling is a sure-fire way of alienating your customers and compared to its opposite, The Blatant Oversell, when faced with the two evils – most people would choose the latter, purely because whether they believe what they are being told or not, when it’s all accepted and paid for they are at the very least being offered a sense of hope that they’ve made the right decision, as opposed to feeling resentful at being threatened into making it.

Hate Selling

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