In Reply to: Answer your bloody emails! posted by melbmeg on Thursday, 14. January 2010 at 17:17 Bali Time:
receiving end. We operate two small hotels in Sanur. Through this we get an average of around 60 email enquiries a day.
The bigger hotels and the operators of this particular site must be getting hundreds of emails daily.
Firstly there are the hassles of power cuts and the internet service not working. Sundays in particular are a waste of time because the internet can be so darn slow.
This normally means on Mondays we can be looking at answering around 120 emails. Answering these at the rate of around one every 4 minutes will take up 480 minutes (or 8 hours)
A number of genuine enquiries also get sent to the junk box because they are detected as carrying a virus.
For some obscure reason others come through with an invalid return address.
Others are simply impossible to descipher. Look at some of the spelling that happens on various internet forums and imagine someone who is using English as a third or fourth language trying to figure out what they mean.
The other problem that does happen often is we reply to an enquiry and the person responds with an email from a different email address.
Of course the problem could also be that the hotel staff are just too lazy to answer.