Lay My Hat

I am getting round to thinking about setting prices for 2018. Do we increase our prices or keep them as is? Also, as we are in France the fall in sterling means earnings are taking a bashing but with most of our bookings coming from the UK I am a bit reluctant to price in euros in case we put people off.
What are your thoughts?

Dusty wrote:I am getting round to thinking about setting prices for 2018. Do we increase our prices or keep them as is? Also, as we are in France the fall in sterling means earnings are taking a bashing but with most of our bookings coming from the UK I am a bit reluctant to price in euros in case we put people off.
What are your thoughts?

We kept our prices the same this year, quoted in sterling, despite the change in the exchange rate. We get a lot of our bookings from the UK and don't want to put people off. I think we will probably not increase our prices for next year either, and just hope the exchange rate improves a bit. I guess I am working on the principal that 50% (or whatever) of something is better than 100% of nothing.

Keeping them the same as 2017 in sterling (most clients are UK based)
You take the rough with the smooth when it comes to exchange rates and unless you have improved your property by 20% ( the fall in sterling vs euro since Brexit) then I think you will have to "suck it up" as we all do.

Our prices have gone up around 5% for 2018 & we price in Euros now (changed a couple of years back), July/August is pretty much booked out for school-holiday dates so i dont think people are put off by paying in Euros or with a small price increase. Maybe experiment? You can always drop them or offer a discount if you feel you are loosing business.

We just changed from one price all year in 2016 and this year to seasonal rates for 2018. We had a problem family of four and OH made comment that 25€ per person per night felt wrong for August. The family, just to rub salt in, advised us we were selling the Gite too cheap. We'll take a punt next year and see how it pans out!

We aren't increasing prices on 2017 which were the same as 2016. The level of bookings doesn't suggest we are too cheap!

We price in UK Sterling as most of our customers come from the UK.

I'm not too optimistic about 2018.

We are in Italy and after holding our prices for 2 years, for 2017 we converted all of our listings to Euros and increased prices by 10%. We also added final clean as an extra charge and increased the damage deposit for €250 - €350. Overall for peak weeks, the price increase was 15%. We secured more bookings and our income increased by 20%. The other interesting point is that we have just arrived at the villa for our holiday and the repairs are a lot less than previous years. So maybe a different type of guest, who appear to have taken better care of the villa.

For 2018, we will be adding AC, after the super hot 2017 summer, I think most guests will see this as a must have. My amateur research suggests that guests pay more for accom with AC. We will increase our rates by 5% and add a fair usage policy for electricity... use more than x and guests will be charge for the excess.

Our bookings from Brits have been falling for years - out of 15 bookings this year just 2 group from the UK. previously the UK represented 75% of our bookings.

thanks for your replies, after giving it a lot of thought we have decided to keep the prices the same as this year and keep in sterling. We put them up last year and since most of our guests are from UK then its only fair that we keep that in place and take the currency loss on the chin.
I think hwat Ianthy says is interesting, I wonder whether charging more does bring in more careful guests. My feeling would be that the increase in security deposit brings it home to people how much they could lose if they don't look after the place. I do believe that holding a security deposit focusses guests mind.

I have just had a rethink on what I said earlier. We have two apartments on site, one 1 bedroom one and 1 two bedroom one. For this summer the 1 bedroom one has been half the price of the other, and has had 10 weeks booked. The larger one only 3.5 weeks - albeit we also had some weeks occupied by non-paying family.

I have decided that the difference between the two is maybw too great, and so have increased slightly the price of the smaller one - after all we still have the same outgoings regarding the pool etc. This may or may not result in people thinking it may be worth paying the extra for the extra space.

We will see how it goes - the increased price does give us the option of offering discounts if we find we are getting fewer bookings.

One of the things I am thinking of doing for next year is to offer a reduction on the 2nd (or 3rd) week booked. We are finding more and more people are booking for 1 week and I am thinking that offering a reduction for more weeks may encourage people to stay for longer. Not sure how I manage this on OD and TA but I can explain it to people who come direct.

Dusty wrote:One of the things I am thinking of doing for next year is to offer a reduction on the 2nd (or 3rd) week booked. We are finding more and more people are booking for 1 week and I am thinking that offering a reduction for more weeks may encourage people to stay for longer. Not sure how I manage this on OD and TA but I can explain it to people who come direct.

We offer a small reduction for two weeks. I have to manually change the quote in OD. I forgot to on one occasion and instead gave cash to the guests!

ianthy wrote:We are in Italy and after holding our prices for 2 years, for 2017 we converted all of our listings to Euros and increased prices by 10%. We also added final clean as an extra charge and increased the damage deposit for €250 - €350. Overall for peak weeks, the price increase was 15%. We secured more bookings and our income increased by 20%. The other interesting point is that we have just arrived at the villa for our holiday and the repairs are a lot less than previous years. So maybe a different type of guest, who appear to have taken better care of the villa.

For 2018, we will be adding AC, after the super hot 2017 summer, I think most guests will see this as a must have. My amateur research suggests that guests pay more for accom with AC. We will increase our rates by 5% and add a fair usage policy for electricity... use more than x and guests will be charge for the excess.

Our bookings from Brits have been falling for years - out of 15 bookings this year just 2 group from the UK. previously the UK represented 75% of our bookings.

Interesting comments. We have barely raised our prices since 2006 when we started. Our more expensive villa does far better than the smaller one. We are thinking of either converting prices to EUR (although HomeAway / OD are making it extremely difficult) or putting GBP prices up.

I've always shied away from putting prices up - don't want to kill the golden goose so to speak. But competitive villas in the same area are a good bit more expensive, 10% to 15%.

Still thinking.