Lay My Hat

My 2017 bookings to date are poor, spanish mainland. I put it down to ha fee. I am not too concerned as i have just refurbed the villa and am enjoying it myself. Q a few fellow owners have stopped letting commercially. Also i do other things so made up the shortfall.

May and early June bookings are weak in our area- Summer and the Autumn are slightly more booked up than usual. We've seen quite radical changes in booking patterns in the past- this is yet another one.

Sudden bursts of bookings come through. This last weekend saw close to a quarter of last April's bookings taken, in terms of value, in 2 days. A similar thing happened in early February.

Short notice could be gathering steam due to Airbnb which tends to push people in that direction. Certainly, their vast advertising budget and plans to make losses until at least 2020 are disrupting the market.

The relatively low value of the pound could be depressing local UK demand but the odd thing is that even the larger holiday lets still have more than usual availability in May and early June.

These tend to have less flexible demand, are less dependent on the weather and face less competition from foreign offerings. Large family get togethers etc tend to be in the UK.

Bookings quite strong in May in my Umbrian villa, although it is virtually low season in Italy.

We are New Forest area & finding May & June difficult this year - I'm blaming Airbnb!

May and June are full with me in the Cotswolds, despite raising my rates quite a bit since last year, but July and August are definitely not flavour of the month!! Only one week booked in each and yet September is fully booked. It probably depends on the demographic of your visitor. Mine are mostly over 50's.

I seem to attract all sorts...families in the school holidays, younger families and older couples in term time. I have filled another May week since I last posted (through my own website - yay!) but I still have a couple of weeks free, including surprisingly the early May bank holiday week. I have opened up short breaks (3 nights up) at a good rate but so far no interest. I think May is perhaps an 'inbetween-y' month, not school holidays and not quite Summer yet.

Just took a weeks booking for an otherwise empty May. It,s been a long wait, hope another one at least will follow.

May and June look weaker this year but we have noticed that the smaller lets and those without so many extras are renting well.

This leads me to think it is not an advertising problem but something to do with the market. Short notice has, again, become more prevalent. I blame AirBnB, magnified by its incapacity to accommodate deposit payments and the pressure it is putting on the market to accept pricing by the night and one and two day bookings.

We have also noted, for the first time for many years, an almost total absence of TV advertising in January and February by the major holiday let booking companies- with the exception of AirBnB. However, in the last few weeks, AirBnB has appeared more often on TV along with a few Home and Away ads. Adwords bids have risen and more middle sized operators are joining in the fray.

If it were not for the fact we have seen some types of holiday let do very well, moderate results for May and June for the rest would have caused a major concern about advertising- we are still looking at this- it seems something is going on in the market. I suspect the majors are equally concerned and have decided to up their advertising to try to fill May and June. Although I thought the UK referendum could have disrupted bookings last year- it did not. The forthcoming UK General Election might have little impact- it could, even have a positive effect, particularly if substandard, execrable, campaigning repeats itself.

The plus side is that our rental receipts are up 20% over the first four months, with only April showing no growth. Advertising can be quite complex and, I suspect, is still a dark art. The impression is that if you find May and June not as busy as usual, a radical change of advertising may not be necessary. Despite this, we are constantly checking our advertising because things can change quite quickly.

A final note. We tried out buyer location focus advertising on Adwords for a few weeks late in 2016. It was the first time that the usually top quality well meaning Google advisors unintentionally steered us the wrong way- perhaps because they do not understand the complexities of this market. Google may change how it works, but we strongly advise anyone thinking of using this facility to think very carefully before doing so.

Thanks Charles, interesting thoughts. I have boosted a fb post to try to get a couple of May bookings but I'm not too hopeful as it's so close now. However at the very least the boost will hopefully raise my profile a bit and get a few fb page likes and website clicks.

It is possible the lack of TV advertising at the start of the year could be part of the cause of a change in booking patterns.

They may have been making the market as much as tapping into it. Go-it-alone holiday let operators normally benefit from the demand created by advertising because the ads prompt people to consider holiday letting but who may not end up customers of the businesses who paid for the ads.

Failing to advertise on TV early in the year could have benefited other types of holiday. Meanwhile, the money they saved appears to have gone, in part, into the coffers of Google.

Edit: I have done a bit more thinking about this. There seems to be a significant difference between selling and marketing on TV and Facebook compared to Google advertising.

The article in the link repeats quite a bit mentioned above but the focus has shifted towards this distinction: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/differen ... ublished=t

Interesting to read this as May is looking very poor for us, we still have the school half term in one property, unheard of. Our prices are about the same other than the addition of OD service fees. We now also uses AirBNB as well. We were full over Easter, I wonder if Easter being so late has brought forward people who would have waited until early May.

Hoping for some last minute bookings.

I have just rung around some contacts in other agencies and they tell me that bookings in May and the first half of June are significantly down on last year.

The rest of 2017 looks okay, so far, with Autumn showing more promise in our area. I'm increasingly convinced that when the majors do not 'make the market' early in the Year this sort of thing happens.

Google is only used by people already keen to rent a holiday let; demand created by TV advertising feeds into it. But that is where it appears some of the TV money has gone to leaving Google advertisers to spend more competing over a smaller market.

Fortunately Summer and Autumn demand has not, historically, been so influenced by TV advertising.

The state of the market is very interesting.

Major non seasonal advertising for holiday lets and cottages is happening in the UK almost to the same extent as the advertising that did not happen early this year.

A new article about can be seen here: http://www.holidayletsforsale.com/category/blog-post/ It's a bit long to post here.

It appears legacy booking services are struggling to come to terms with the vulnerability of brands in cyber-space and the way the market now behaves. Smaller services appear to be piggybacking on their advertising spend in a way that did not happen in pre World Wide Web days.

Hooray, one more booking for May. Current visitor (+ dogs) is so happy is staying another week. No mid-stay cleaning costs for me. Only one May week now left vacant. I'm very chuffed

May is almost completely booked at my cottage, June doing well ..one 5 day gap, Aug fully booked but July is lagging behind...
Strange...