Lay My Hat

Normally we get a lot of enquiries in the first two weeks of September for the next ski season but this month has definitely been slower so far.

This year has been our best year to date but perhaps we're facing a delayed credit crunch ...

How are other Alpine hatters finding bookings for next year?

I won't start panicking till November

Beanie

Sorry, wrong forum!

We could have let New Year's week 10 times over! I have one appt available for Christmas week, and one confirmed booking for February, and a couple more "definite" enquiries (the weeks stay available until I have their deposit cheques though!). I'm not panicking until 1st February. If there are good snow reports for the Vosges, there are a lot of last minutes bookings, us being the nearest ski area to Paris (amongst other more useless facts I have learnt recently!). The majority of our winter guests live within a 6 hour drive of here - we have had no British winter guests, you just don't see GB plates all over the place here. Dunno why. French/Belgian/Germans and Dutch make up the visitor population.

I must change the pics and text on the various listings sites, as well as on our site, for snowy things rather than walking/biking things.....

kteee wrote:Sorry, wrong forum!

Where did your post go Ktee ?

I'm certainly interested to hear about bookings generally as it helps give me a feel for whether there's any 'delayed' credit cruchiness going on.

Good news to hear that your summer season bookings are booming. Positive news is always welcomed in this current economy.

TTFN
Beanie

I deleted it as I realised that it was the Alpine section so not relevant and didn't want to butt in!

One of the problems of reading and posting on the iPhone (still flat on my back most of the time) as I don't get to see the whole screen!!

OK so far but I guess it depends on your benchmark...I think you were booked much faster than we were last year so your standard of what's "busy" might be different!

We have six weeks booked (the obvious ones) which I am pretty happy with. I think it's a bit better than we had this time last year, but a lot has improved since then in terms of our ads and responding.

The usual constant stream of new year enquiries even though we're marked everywhere as booked.

Quite surprised not to have sold the early January weeks yet as they've always gone fast before, often to Russians, and as they're cheaper, I thought they'd be popular this year.

But traffic to the site seems to be picking up, and I'm just sending out a newsletter to our previous clients - so we'll see.

Hi Fifi, that's interesting! I'd love to visit the Vosges one day

If we do get booked up sooner, I wonder if that's due to the fact that our resort is quite tiny compared to Chamonix so people have to get moving ...

I need to do some more analysis but in the past 4 years, early Sept is always busy with enquiries.

Saying that, we have turned a couple away for various reasons.

We've got 4 weeks confirmed so far, including the 2 week holiday period and they've all been booked for a while.

I haven't had the time yet to do much more to our listings need to get to that.

You raise an interesting point about your Jan weeks being less expensive than the rest of the season. I'm going to post up separately about this matter as it's an interesting debate ...

Thanks for the feedback so far.

Beanie

I don't remember the dates exactly - but I definitely remember last year you posted about having only one week left to book, and I thought "blimey!!! Already??" and had a little worry

How is traffic to your site? i.e. is it perhaps not being found as much as it was?

We did sell the 'spare' weeks in Jan last year and all of Feb, and right up to Easter in mid-April.

Except, we b*ggered up March in the end by turning away some early enquiries for the middle of the month when we thought we were going out ourselves. We ended up going out at the end of the month and were hoping we'd sell the two March weeks when we released them in Jan sometime (I think it was), but they didn't budge. Given the record snowfall - we were really surprised, but it was a lesson to us not to be quite so complacent.

For the 08 Season we were fully booked and in 07 we had just one week in Jan not sold.

I'm slightly nervous only due to the fact that we nudged our prices up a tad for this coming season as we hadn't done so for the previous two years. Local competition has done the same and Swiss fuel costs and insurance etc have increased by 30-40%.

Website traffic analysis is also on my list to get to although I have no clue on SEO - I wish I did.

Beanie

So far enquiries for September have been quiet, but August made up for it. I suspect that many of the weeks I would normally receive enquiries for have already been booked. I still have two weeks of the French Feb holidays vacant, but not too concerned as they book much later than the Brits any way.

All our skiing enquiries seem to be for New Year at the moment - everyone could sell nights then umpteen times over. We have several weeks booked in February but most of those were booked by Dutch in March. Hard to tell how things are going I think.

Advance bookings at 10 year low:

http://www.planetski.eu/news/831

I have heard the same pattern in quite a few places now - the big weeks are going but the others are slower than usual - people are waiting to feel more confident about both finance and snow.

We've more bookings for Summer '10 than Winter - plus two ski cancellations - one financial, the other health. New Year hasn't been a problem, but Christmas is sticking with punters either wanting 26 Dec. + or they're, um, unsuitable, and we're discriminating; sinful, I know.

The biggest difference is number of enquiries, maybe because this year we haven't plugged ourselves on any ski forum.

We're picking up secondary bookings for the summer as well, by keeping our availability calendars open - same as last year. It does make existing bookings twitchy, though.

MG

MG, not sure ski forums, particularly SnowHeads , make any difference at all. I've had three guests from there in 4 seasons, although one is now a regular, none are regular posters either. Not that we are allowed to 'plug' too much anyway.
Worst experience from SnowHeads was a raffle prize winner from the ski show,who got a free three night stay at my apartment, and a free private ski lesson with our friend from Eurekaski. She didn't even thank me afterwards.

I post loads on forums and have never got an enquiry from them. Too bad, if I did, I could kid myself I wasn't wasting time