Jason Living explains why hospitality owners leave money on the table: they don't adjust prices when demand spikes, they depend too much on Booking.com and Airbnb instead of getting direct bookings, and they lock in rigid policies that turn guests away. Use a channel manager to control which dates go to which platform, raise rates for events like the Britney Spears concert in Scarborough, and stay flexible.
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What is the most common mistake that you see people making in the industry when they're getting going?
One of the big mistakes, particularly coming from the property side, is not understanding that you need to actively manage your price. Your pricing should be very dynamic. You know, if they start putting their price up, it's because they've seen an increase in demand. Now, you may not have seen that increase in demand yet. You can pretty much guarantee if they have, you will. So you can afford to start pushing your prices up even before the demand hits. Yeah. So that whole dynamic pricing thing is something that's particularly people who come from the property investment side is something that's. That's sort of wholly new, I guess.
If as a service accommodation owner who's listening to this and thinking, well, how do I even get started? The example and the story that I can give you from a hospitality point of view, is based in Scarborough. My family business has got a farm stay, hotel, guest house, cottages here in Scarborough. In 2018, we had Britney Spears play in Scarborough and it was announced in January and the event and the concert was sold out pretty much within 24 hours. So, being a bit proactive, you go on, you instantly close out any dates to the online travel agents via your channel manager. So whether you're tokit or free to book or whoever. So that totally blocked off the dates on there. So you're guaranteed to get your direct booking. And then what you do is you put the rates up, because you know that when that gets announced, there's two things that people do. They book the tickets and they look for accommodation. And if you're savvy and if you've got a good presence, then people will naturally come to your website and book with you. And then all you need to do is just, again, like what Jason is saying, assess it every week or every month. And the closer it gets to the date, if you still got availability for those dates, you just start to slowly put the price back down to what your normal rate is, and then you start to open it back up to the ota. So, like Jason said right at the very start, make these booking.com make Airbnb work for you and not the other way around. So if you have got anything that needs selling last minute, put up on those and I can guarantee that you will get those bookings. So that is exactly it. You said there's a number of mistakes that you see people make. What's maybe one of the other ones that's on top of your mind, apart from pricing and knowing your Market.
Well, I guess the other thing actually very much feeds into the marketing side. As I said, starting as a sort of first port of call, booking.com Airbnb will get you a level of bookings. I think where people make a mistake is that they think they can completely rely on those for all of their business and they're going to consistently get 70, 80, 90% occupancy just from being on those platforms, on those OTAs, you know, so the difference between, you know, being 70% occupied and 80% might mean you're doubling your profit.
Like I say, if you can, and we spoke about this before, we came live on the call, if, you know, you build your house on somebody else's land, it's going to fail if you just rely 100% on booking.com and Airbnb. But what happens if they turn around one day and close your account? Simplest of things, and then you're stuck. And yeah, it's always good to be like you say, be proactive, trying to increase your amount of direct bookings, because at the end of the day, you're instantly making at least 15% more money, more profit, which over a singular booking may not seem all that much, but if you base it over a year, that's a hell of a number.
And I think people look sometimes at their operational side far too much from their own perspective in terms of what suits them, in terms of when do I want people to check in and out? When non refundables, deposits, cancellation periods. Because in an ideal world, from an operator point of view, you want everybody paying 100% when they book, you want them paying a deposit, you want them all turning up between 3 and 4 in the afternoon and all leaving between 10:30, 11:30 in the morning. If that's the way you approach your business, then effectively what you're doing is you're massively constraining your demand.
That's a great bit of advice that I think so many people overlook. But at the end of the day, if you're not appealable to your guests, then they're never going to come back and they're never going to talk about you. When if they just spayed a bit of attention to the people that have already given them money, that have already built up, that know like and trust, then you could make much more money and have much better guests.
