Are holiday seasons changing?

[Patmobile]

Like most other operators of holiday cottages we charge variable rates for our units depending on the season. The point of this seasonal scale of charges is certainly not to make as much as possible from families at school holiday time, but to extend the letting season so as to smooth out the flow of revenue from the business, and to try to make the assets produce some sort of return throughout the year, even at times when few people take holidays.

Presumably, perfection in this endeavour could be considered to have been achieved when all our cottages are priced in so attractive a way as to be full all year round. Of course it will never happen.

Nevertheless, I am wondering whether it's our pricing policy or a more fundamental shift in peoples' holiday customs that is causing the rather surprising effect I am noticing this year. I thought our Booking Planner was looking a bit "bottom heavy", that is rather more busy in autumn than expected, so I did a bit of very simple maths.

We charge the same rate in June as in September, but the occupancy rate for September will be 75% higher this year than June. (Bookings taken to date)

July and August are treated as the peak period on our scale of charges, but September is already 24% more booked up than July was. (We'll soon be bulging at the seams)

Here's the big surprise – June is charged at a mid-season rate and October at low season rate. Yet October is already, on bookings taken to date, 8% busier than June was.

If bookings continue to flow in for autumn in the way they are at the moment, these figures are going to become even more striking, and the graph of revenue flow will change from a bell curve to something longer, flatter, and closer to the ideal.

The question we now ask is, have we distorted the pattern with a pricing policy that works well in autumn? Or, are people taking holidays later than they used to?

If it's the former, it's the early season prices we need to fiddle with, but, if the latter, it's late season periods we'll have to rethink. And, if we do make changes, are we just going to produce more confusing distortions?

Anyone got any ideas?

Patrick

[Teamedup]

Please don't forget that people will book at times like October because it is cheaper and are prepared to risk the weather then.

And when it has chucked it down all week, then we just shrug and think it wasn't too expensive anyway that we had sort of been expecting rain and we had a good time anyway.

 

 

[Owens88]

I would be very interested in read the answers as well. We are just setting up 2006 prices.We only have the one property so I tend to judge by enquiries rathar than bookings. And we are still new at it so we don't have much history to go on.

Are your renters mainly Brits ? Could it be that we Brits don't alllow 'seaside' into our thinking until it gets warmer and that lets May / June slip us by ?

Or is it that October is felt to be generally better weather than Spring anyway ?  (I am just adding a Barcelona break onto our October half term visit and the Barcelona weather stats for Oct are better than spring, yet I know that Apr/May in our place on 66 were crackingly warm and sunny !).

Are you getting family bookings. Are school half terms changing ?

By the way. Nice web-site.

Good luck.

 

[Ejc]

One other thing to bear in mind is the creeping in of 6 term school years - where the year is divided up into equal blocks of terms / holidays. The "Easter" holiday may not fall at Easter - but schools would have Good friday / Easter Monday off if Easter was either late of early and missed the 2 week break.

 

 

[Patmobile]

"Are your renters mainly Brits ?"

Yes, almost all of them.

"Could it be that we Brits don't alllow 'seaside' into our thinking until it gets warmer and that lets May / June slip us by ?"

Our very popular seaside house is let almost solid from end April to late October. The country cottages are less busy before July.

"Are you getting family bookings. Are school half terms changing ?"

Yes, mostly families. Half terms seem to come in late Feb and late Oct.

Patrick

[Lizzie15]

I was puzzled by June bookings as well.We are fully booked from the beginning of July to mid October but only had 2 weeks booked in June,yet June is usually a glorious month-lovely long,warm nights as well as sunny days. The prices were similar.I had to turn away many September hopefuls,yet they weren't around in June!

 

[Coco]

We're B&B so it may be slightly different (don't necessarily know why!) and I set myself targets at the beginning of the year, on what I judge from last year, or from tourist figures in general should be busier months, just so that I can get an idea of how well or appallingly we're doing.  ie, will I be able to pay the bills and feed us, or will we be able to indulge in eating out occasionally, that type of thing.  Well for June we were over a 1000 euros down on my target and based on only 2 rooms, that's a lot!!!  July was much as expected, August was poor last year and this year has exceeded all hopes.  I just wish we had a couple (or ten) more rooms - we are turning so many people away every day.  however, September is already well in excess of my hoped target number of rooms let and October AND November are beginning to show promise (B&B tends to get booked no more than 2-4 weeks in advance, so difficult at this stage to tell but it bodes well )

[letrangere]

Patrick, for as long as I can remember we have holidayed in the French countryside in late September/October.  Not having children, we're free to travel whenever we want but this is absolutely our preferred time.  Of course, gite rentals are cheaper (at least until you all amend your pricing policy!), so much so we can afford to stay far longer than we could in July or August.  But it's also a lot quieter and sights that would normally be spoilt by crowds far more pleasurable. (You may have seen my remark about Sarlat on a separate post recently.)  Also, as I posted before, there are many corners of France that almost compete with New England for autumnal colours, I'm thinking the Dordogne valley in particular, so it's a glorious time to visit.

Admitedly, we are pretty easy going when it comes to weather but we've still found it to be far more reliable in early to mid-October than it would be in, say, May and certainly early September.  We've twice nearly lost the car in floods in Provence in September and taking a short May and a June break in the same area in recent years experienced rotten weather both weeks. 

We're committed out of season travellers no matter where we go but I know friends in the UK says they're happy to spend the summer at home, especially as the weather can often be more reliable nowadays.  Others don't want to leave their gardens during the all important summer months.

M

[Owens88]

So, reasons why the 'Autumn Shoulder' is more active for bookings than the Apr-June :

*Gardens-If you are going to enjoy your own garden in summer it needs a bit of work before then

*Autumn Sun is a top-up prior to the winter

*Second holidays come after the first

*The weather is better, or perceived to be !

Reading all of that it feels like grasping at straws !

*I think the notion of school holidays changing is a bit of a red herring. What might be more relevant is that the Autumn half term is chunky. At least a full week sometimes two, and not tried to any one date, whereas the April/May/June holidays are more 'bitty'.

Even that doesn't work for me as Easter is a long school holiday for everybody and generally an excellent time to be in France / Spain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[mascamps.com]

We thought long and hard about the seasons before we started and in the end realised that the likes of the Ibis spend serious cash on it and adopted their seasons.

This seems to work relatively well except that they tend to operate on a cross-France basis and therefore miss out on some regional variations. For instance: there's a photojournalism festival in Perpignan each year which completely fills everything for miles around yet immediately after it, there's a big drop in occupancy across the board which isn't reflected in prices. This lasts for two weeks or so 'til October which is when most of the local hotels close for the year and your occupancy is up again.

I'm not sure that pricing matters a toss for us for the most part. Here's why: we thought that we'd use one of our last minute availability listings to experiment with prices over a few months. In June we dropped the price right down to 30€ (from 47€) and found that we picked up very few additional customers (and very poor quality ones too: never bought breakfast or meals and had a high proportion of "awkward" customers). In August we thought we'd try the other extreme and priced the same place at about 20% above the usual price. That did drop the customers alright (so we're happy that our usual price is about right) but did noticeably increase the quality ie they did buy breakfast, meals, etc. and were generally "nicer" guests.

On the B&B forum there was a big debate about the seasonal pricing issue a while back (we're a bit too busy at the moment to get much of a discussion going). Quite a lot of people use a single price for the whole year whereas there's a fair number who run with two or three seasons.

Incidently, there's a major industry behind the whole issue of "load balancing" and oodles of software packages around (sadly, I suspect a bit pricy for the likes of ourselves). That's what the likes of Ryanair use to set their pricing so they'll price low in the off seasons (and for them the software effectively allows them to have thousands of "seasons" per year) because people aren't flying; in fact you need to price very little above cost to actively pull people in in the off season: it's the off season because they basically don't want to go then.

The only thing we need to watch is that the load balancing theories assume that staff are involved so in the really "off" off season, a company may price BELOW cost because that reduces the losses that they'd otherwise make (they still need to pay the staff, fixed costs, etc.). I can't really see any gite/B&B actually setting prices below cost even in the most off of off-seasons but it is the logical thing to do if it pulls in people who'd not otherwise be there as you then at least partly cover your fixed costs etc.

Notably different with their pricing as compared to gite/B&B pricing is that last minute booking prices are HIGHER than early bookings. I actually don't know why we don't do the same as the same logic would seem to apply for the high season: people need to stay, they have limited choice of place and limited flexibility in time. At present, we're all effectively following the big airline pricing model which is based around their need to fill the plane: the last seat is the cheapest because the plane is going and they might as well have £5 than nothing.

 

Arnold