A wet summer season and the cost-of-living crisis are the perfect storm to put spanners in the booking strategy. Customers are opting for shorter stays and shorter lead-in times, putting fear into parks.
We have some tips and insights to help you increase your current revenue opportunities and get on the best footing.
Are your entry-level units selling out?
It wasn’t too long ago that I was on the hunt for high-end luxury lodges and caravans to overhaul an ageing fleet. Demand was high, and top-end accommodation was selling months in advance despite a higher-than-average price point. Entry-level accommodation was the last to go. Our consumer is a fickle beasty, and the trend seems to have completed a 180.
Those beautiful lodges that were top of the list now face a quieter summer, and the ageing fleet unit has the most popular price point. Consumers won’t give up their holiday, but they are choosing more carefully. Secondary spending will most likely take a hit with a more spending-cautious consumer on the rise.
It’s not all doom and gloom, and we can do it without the need for a flash sale. I’ve always been deeply deeply offended by a flash sale. In fact, it was one of the first bits of strategy I ripped out when in my last role as a Holiday Sales & Revenue Manager. Flash sales always give me the impression of a failing high street store desperate for that last bit of revenue.
If we can assume that our entry-level accommodations are doing well and we need to sell the higher-graded units, should we not look at freeing up those already booked to resell them?
Upgrade Opportunities are a great way to maneuver our bookings to get the most out of the market and the fleet. We can simply use the drag-and-drop feature of the EliteParks booking matrix to play Tetris and free up spaces for extra breaks—which yes, we should absolutely all be doing. But that doesn’t solve the upgrade itself.
Using AI and the power of ElitePark’s newest feature, Booking Upgrade Journeys, we can easily identify the who, the what and the why. The new feature solution will (after setup, of course) scan through your bookings and identify who is eligible for an upgrade based on your current occupancy and availability. At the same time, it will work out how much that could make you, the additional cost to the customer and what accommodation the bookings can move to.
Let’s make it simple—say it identifies 10 Bronze caravans that can move to 10 Silver caravans for an extra £50 per booking—£500. But it isn’t just about the £500. We now have 10 Bronze caravans we know are in high demand at £800 per break, so there’s an additional £8000. So now we potentially have an extra £8500 in the pot. Oh, and we gained an additional 3 bookings at £800 each because we played Tetris!
There was no flash sale and an additional £10,900. For little to no effort.
How do you get in the best position?
Before we even look at pricing, how’s your product performing? Analysing your accommodation booking trends over the last few years is crucial. Have you got enough of the right accommodation or too much of another? It’s a fine balancing act. During the pandemic, four beds were big business, with generational holidays taking place, leaving the two beds empty. The pet-friendly accommodation is still a strong game, but just because it’s pet-friendly doesn’t mean it needs to look like a kennel.
Increasing your pet-friendly accommodation numbers can lead to increased bookings. The number of times I was sneaking dogs past housekeeping to get sales in drove me to change a huge proportion of the fleet to pet-friendly accommodation, which allowed for continued revenue growth and much fewer angry housekeepers.
Now for the big one – the price. It’s a volatile game to play. The price is too high, nobody wants it, and the price is too low, it all sells too fast, and you have no movement. Entering the world of yield can be a scary prospect. Do you know what your SDLY-1 figure on every grade looks like? How do you start pricing for the following year?
Pricing tactically is a long game. Let’s say, from analysing your performance over the last five years, you see a 10% uplift YOY on your nightly price—great. But as your accommodation fills up, your product becomes more valuable, and how can you incentivise your customers to book before they leave if the price remains the same throughout?
Rebookers are the key to getting the baseline in. Are you offering a time-sensitive offer for them to take part in it? That will get you a good base of bookings to work with. Incentivise your team to sell those bookings at reception and post-departure. My reception team earned fantastic uncapped commission to do just that. Can you guess what happened? Our rebooking rate went through the roof, they started following up their departed guests as leads and converting them to bookings with outbound sales calls – yes my sweet receptionists became the sweet sales spot. They built relationships with their customers and, in turn, increased our loyalty base.
But now that we have the baseline, how do we get the yield? Easy. Tactical Pricing allows your pricing to automatically adjust both up and down based on your occupancy levels on the arrival date and the booking date. Set your baseline and then build up your strategy. Start simple, and as you gain confidence, explore a complex strategy per park, per grade, per day of the week.
Simply:
- Base Price 10% increase on last year (standard base price)
- 12 months before arrival minus 10% off the base price
- Six months before arrival, add 20% on top of the base price
- Six weeks before arrival, add 30% on top of the base price
Before we look at the occupancy levels, we need to determine where we can be more granular in our approach. The best bit… Your end users and website won’t show the increase or decrease in price; it will all happen naturally.
Proactive Outbounding isn’t just for Sales.
We can approach this in two ways or take a blended approach. Your Holiday Sales teams don’t need to be incoming order takers. With a little bit of guidance and training, they can become as hungry as your Holiday Home Sales teams—and we know they are hungry for the sale.
Combining two powerful tools, EliteAnalytics and EliteCRM, is easy work. EliteAnalytics can visually show us at a glance where booking periods aren’t performing as well as they were in previous years. Now we know where we need to look at who we are missing. It’s time to tap into our existing customer base.
- Look at who stayed with you in the same period previously.
- Have they booked for this year already?
- Target marketing to warm up previous guests.
- Get your Holiday sales team to give them a call with an offer just for them.
- Use the objections your team might face to reposition your marketing message and strengthen your offer.
Combine your marketing and holiday sales team… Good luck. We know how much Sales & Marketing loves a good collab!
We will never make bold promises to guarantee additional revenue, but we will do everything we can to help you generate those opportunities to increase your revenue.
Calum Gray | Partnerships Manager | Elite Dynamics
Book a demo of EliteParks, or schedule a call with one of The Elite Team.