2007 Bookings Down? A rental site owner's view.

[Mountain Goat]

No, it's not me, and I'm not plugging, but the owner of one of the listing sites we use has sent us an email today, in response to clients reporting flat summer bookings. Their site produces high SE ratings for our keywords, although their emphasis is on France and Spain, and we therefore feel a bit out of the very personal touch they offer (which includes site visits to owners in France/Spain). They produce a high number of enquiries for us but conversion to bookings remains elusive (2-3 in last 12 months). He is also an owner near Cannes. They are clued up technically. You may find it interesting:

A number of clients are voicing concern about numbers of enquiries for this season.

Of course **** and I are always neurotic should our internet presence slip - I know that many of you monitor google and the net and let us know if you see problems . . . We are not aware of any but we are always trying to look over our shoulders . . . If you know of any troubles on this front please let us know. Our www.web-stat.com graph is healthy, although it is noticable that MSN has lost out wholly to Google.

Firstly, however, this week is a half-term week in England. This means that people who travel will be away at the moment travelling and not looking for the next booking that they might make.

There are various factors:

1. I have been warning for years of the dilution of the rental market by the numbers of people who have bought. Barclays Bank in Antibes was warning me about this three or four years ago.

2. I understand that clients who let in Antibes have taken a 9 month student let in preference to entering the holiday market this year.

3. In England we face ever higher property prices and a crash is always imminently forecast: this makes buying in a foreign market attractive and now is potentially the time to sell - we have achieved property sales in the last four months and can assist you if this is of interest.

4. Increasingly people are booking last-minute rather than months ahead - so please don't commit suicide yet!

5. In Mallorca clients told me how they achieved a better success by being able to respond to flexible and midweek bookings so that people can take better advantage of cheaper mid-week airfares - and we might be able to achieve better success for you if we are able to stress this. Perhaps when
sending your availability dates to ********* you might say in
addition "mid-week and flexible bookings encouraged" or wording as you think appropriate. The market is saddled with Saturday changeovers.

MG

[enid]

Thansk - very interesting. We have Sat changeovers for high season but are flexible in low and mid - it's hard to know what to do about that as different departure points have good flights on different days. I do think people are booking later as they have heard that there are lots of available properties - they may miss the quality one sthat weay!?

[Hells Bells]

MG, very interesting, particularly regarding the flexible dates. I prefer a Sunday changeover , but this winter, I've had some Saturdays and currently are back to Sundays, however, I don't have one spare day in the calendar.All the off-peak periods were booked by people wanting short breaks. Now, I have one booking for the summer so far (Sun-Sun), but was flexible last year so we'll see what happens. overall, I think I've gained on the income front by being flexible rather than lost out.

[Alan Knighting]

MG,

Overall I think I agree with the owner of your listing site.

It is my impression that there are many more properties available these days and I do think that people tend to make their bookings much later than they used to in the past.

Like Enid, I have Saturdays as my hand-over days. I’m rarely asked for mid-week to mid-week so I’m not convinced it makes a difference but I will concede that it could.

I’ve gone over to longer term booking with a good measure of success. It’s a much smaller market place but it’s one which is not addressed by many owners. My larger cottage is booked for the whole of this year with three-monthly renewal provisions thereafter. Just this morning I had to turn down a booking for my smaller cottage (April through to November) because I have a couple of holiday bookings for it.

Fluffy

[Mouse]

I certainly agree with 1, and I think this will have an impact on the market in certain areas. Maria posting something along similar lines a few days ago.

Point 5 was v.interesting to me...as this year I have had a overly large number of requests for bookings of long weekends or 4/5 days......so it's food for thought.

The debate on flexible booking dates would probably run forever and a day as its the eternal dilemma - do you risk losing a couple of weeks income by being flexible on dates.

The first year we were (as we got to the market late), we were lucky as people tended to book back to back, and we only lost 2 days income.
The 2nd year we started doing that and took a tuesday to tuesday booking...all the rest booked sat-sat tho'! So we lost out.

I would be very interested to hear if anyone else has consistently had success working on flexible dates?

Mouse
x

[Hells Bells]

Mouse , I can only comment on two seasons, winter 2006 and 2007. Last Winter was my first season, I was glad to get the bookings regardless of length, and only kept to one week bookings for the February half-terms (France and UK). I was fully-booked from 4th February until the 4th April , apart from 5 night stretch which we used ourselves. This winter we have been fully-booked from 15th December, until 7th April, apart from two separate weeks in January, and the dates we have kept for our own holiday. From 25th Feb, nearly all are flexible breaks,a 7 nights midweek arrival, and 4 and 5 night breaks. As for Summer we only had guests in August last year.

[gpck]

Our condo is in Kissimmee, Florida, and we always take short bookings - mostly from Americans who stay from 3 days upwards. When we get an enquiry for dates we can't quite do, we reply offering what we have available and quite often they are flexible enough to fit in with what we have available.

We are also used to people booking at the last minute as the Americans usually can't book their time off work very far in advance.

We've had very few bookings from the UK and those we've had have not been Saturday to Saturday as, has been stated people are taking advantage of cheaper midweek flights...

[ginelli]

Before choosing my changeover day for my place in Turkey, I spent a couple of evenings researching the days when most people in my market (in this case British) would be arriving.

This is my first year and it seems to working. The majority of my enquiries (the British ones!) are respecting the changeover day.

[Giddy Goat]

Our property is in south-west France, where there are any number of travel options, so the situation there is different, and we are lucky in that respect. However, in the main season (June- early Sept) we have a fixed Thursday changeover. This was because of the availability of our caretakers, rather than for any other reason. It hasn't ever posed a problem though, and we still tend to get booked up quickly - perhaps it has even worked in our favour, as invariably the flights and crossings from the UK are cheaper mid-week.

Out of the main season we accept that we have to be more flexible - we'd lose out otherwise on May half term hols (it's only this particular half term I think that might attract families to the area) and on potential gusts* who might wish to stay for say, five days (that's our minimum, beyond which there would be very little profit,) ten days or whatever. Our caretakers are able to be more flexible then too, so it works out for us.

It demonstrates how the local market varies according to so many factors.

Edit *typo - guests with flatulence?

[Hells Bells]

My Sunday changeover was purely selfish. I can't get there until Sunday if we drive, and a charter to Turin goes on Sunday too. The budget airlines are really expensive on Sats in the ski season, but more affordable on Sunday. Our manager also likes to have Saturday off with her hubby. Having said that she took two bookings for me this winter, both Sat-Sat!! It means we have to leave a day early from our holiday in March.

[ginelli]

Hey GG. Good to see you around. When is this year's May half term anyway?

[Giddy Goat]

Hi Gino - good to cyber see you too!! How are bookings going - it's been a little while since you last reported I think? Well, I hope!

UK May Half term will be from Mon May 28 to Fri 1 June.

[ginelli]

I'm happy with the response but not 2 weekers or longer. I've just started a new thread about it under this category.

Would love to talk but am being kicked off computer now. We'll have to continue soon.

Night

[Jimbo]

We do Sat- Sat but we had a number of Irish guests last year whose budget flights arrived on Friday. They all booked and wrote nice things in the visitor's book even though some of them had to B+B for one night and we didn't adjust our price.

They're YOUR gites and YOUR arrangements and YOU make the rules. If it's possible to be flexible, fine, but if not, then you have to stick to your guns. Obviously, if bookings really start to slide, you may have to think again. But we bought our gites to fit into our life-style. If it ever became necessary to make too many adjustments, it would be time to bail out of the rental business.

Jim

[Ben McNevis]

They're YOUR gites and YOUR arrangements and YOU make the rules...
Jim

hmmm... I had a little rant about this last year and having just come back from our half-term ski holiday I'm foaming at the mouth again...

Sorry, Jim, I really don't agree. It would be fine if the gite-next-door was Monday changeovers, yours was Saturday and another down the road was Sunday, but as a holidaymaker, if you want to go to France, you HAVE to change over on the Saturday because virtually ALL accommodation is Sat-Sat.

And that means that
1. If you need to break your journey with a motel stop, they're all full on Friday night so you end up sleeping in the car or paying over the odds for an expensive hotel.

2. You hit the monster traffic jams in both directions

3. If you're flying, you can't take advantage of the cheaper flight days

Incidentally, we didn't stay in privately owned accommodation this time because we wanted ski-in/ski-out with indoor pool, sauna etc and that was quite hard to find on our budget, so we ended up booking with the French holiday company "Eurogroup". The big problem for us was that the last hour of the journey took about 4 hours simply because it was Saturday. In fact the last hour of the 4 hours was within the resort village in the last mile. The snow had started just as the Belgian tour coaches were leaving and hoards of cars were arriving. Luckily we got out of the coaches' way just before the crashes started. Three parked cars got wrecked and it was another three hours before the coaches finally got away.

On the next morning, we had to collect our pre-ordered ski passes and hire skis. Unfortunately, so did everyone else. That was another half a day wasted.

And this is the mayhem that goes on week after week through the ski season. I can't understand why the acccommodation owners won't respond to the demand for non-saturday changeovers. We would be more than happy to pay extra - they could make more money and have happier customers.

I think that France and the Saturday changeovers problem needs a whole new thread to itself. My experience of flexible changeovers is good. You don't lose many booked days and you can justify charging a little extra.