Raising rates for 2016?

[AndrewH]

I've had the same comments tavi. I have no fixed changeover day as I appreciate that people will be looking for the best flight deals depending upon their local airport. I don't mind having the odd unbooked day or two as it does take some of the pressure off my property managers who otherwise are coping with stressful back-to-back same day changeovers throughout the summer. I wouldn't take a booking which left me with a hole of four to six days though.

With us it has to be back-to-back changeover in high season (the summer months) with a firmly fixed changeover day. Also we need to let in units of one week. It is not ideal for us nor for a number of our guests, who might prefer (say) a ten days holiday starting and ending on different days of the week. However, by allowing this flexibility, we would simply lose too much income to gaps and holes at this highly priced time of year.

We do lose some guests on account of this, who would otherwise have been keen to book, but villa demand is still sufficiently high to enable us to fill all the summer weeks without gaps. If the demand were not there, I think we would be more accommodating in this respect, because we are fully flexible in early and late season.

[Jonathan]

So we've had a couple of requests for 2016 now which were quite unexpected to be honest. Reading some previous posts I saw a lot of owners would review rates in the Autumn for the following year?

After some back and forth we've put our rates up by 10% across the board. Our short and week long off peak winter stays are up by 20% due to significant increased costs (moving more out to a cleaner and on-site meeter and greeter). These cover all the major listings sites. We're only increasing prices directly on our own site by 5% and 15% respectively. These rises are against a backdrop of:

- quite significant investment in the property this year (new downstairs shower room, external paint, new deck, imminent arrival of a log burner)
- we priced at the bottom end of properties nearby to kick-start the business in the knowledge we would be investing as per the above

Curious which way the wind if blowing for other owners at the moment?

We went on to Holiday Lettings and Airbnb this year because of falling bookings. I put the prices up to cover their charges and was surprised how much paople will p[ay without batting an eyelid. So, prices are up for next year, first time in five years.

Jonathan

[rosebud]

I have increased my prices for the first time in 4 years (apart from a small increase during the summer this year).

Hard to know just how much to increase by - I have been chopping and changing!

[Sam V]

I review my prices usually at the start of the year for the following two years. My problem is that the two neighbouring and identical properties are also rented so I have to virtually match their prices competitively. However, my bookings for 2016 are unbelievable, I'm pretty much booked out from end of March through to early September with only four weeks left available between them. I think this has got to be the ealiest I've ever been so booked for the following year. I'm going to have to get my listing rates set up into 2018 at this rate!