How to work out when your "Slow Season" is

Welcome back, everybody. So I've got a little treat for you today. Recently I did a little bit of training all about 10 different ways how you can get ready for the slow season. And I thought, well, what better to do than to chop these tips up and share it into the daily podcast because they are so actionable and things that you can be doing right now in today's episode is a little segment of that. Now, depending on what you're listening to, you can go back or go forward to find out the episode that suits you best.

But this is all me helping you.

About bookings in the slow season. So make sure you've got a pen and paper to hand and get ready to take action.

So, first and foremost, what's really important with your slow season is you have to work out when your slow season begins. And that's really key to this. Now, there's a ton of context around the first tip. The first bit of context is that we are dependent on where you are in the world coming out of COVID coming out of lockdowns, and again, loads of people have reopened at different rates and people have gone back into lockdown depending on where you are in the world and what that's meaning and what's that resulting in. And I think a lot of people, if we particularly just focus on the UK for a second, I think a lot of people are realizing that typical season, what you may think a typical season is actually being extended a little because again, there's, there's a lot of people who are still wanting a vacation, have had, had a chance of a vacation. And I believe that what you'll notice is that seasons will expand from what you would normally class as a, as a season. But it's really important that you decipher when your season, your slow season, is going to begin. Now, how can you decipher what that is going to be? So, first and foremost, the most telling sign will be your calendar. So you can right now go to your booking engine that you use, whoever that property management software may be, and it will very quickly tell you at what point do your bookings dry up. And like I say, we've had loads of people put in different, different answers in, but let's just say it's November to too much. So again, you've got to indicate to your when that may be. Now, if you aren't sure if your bookings are looking kind of tidy for the time being, and you know it's looking good up until the end of the year, but you're Starting to see little blocks here and there. For example, midweeks. If your weekends are looking healthy but the midweek is looking a little bit bare, then again that will be your indicator that midweek is where is where your slow seasoning. And then start looking into January and February. I think one of the most important things and we are going to get into pricing because I asked a question on Sunday on the email list, what is your biggest concern? And pricing was by far the biggest reply when it comes to pricing and availability. And I just want a quick yes or no with everybody in the chat. So if you can get your typing fingers ready. Hey everyone, taking a quick break to let you know that today's podcast is brought to you by the amazing Hostfully.

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Have you opened up your availability and your pricing into 2022? Yes. So it's a couple of questions around this. Okay. Overwhelming. Yes. So next question is what dates have you opened up the pricing and availability too? So you can just put January, February, March, April, May, June, whatever the date, the latest that it goes into. Okay, cool. So end of Phil's going right into 2023 which is fantastic. Okay, cool. So the most important thing that I would stress at this point and again we'll delve into it a little bit more as we go is make sure that you are bookable. So open up your calendar to as far as you possibly can on, on your pms. Definitely direct. What I, what I love to do and what I love to encourage is and this all depends on who you have as your property management software. And just so I'm aware For the room. Does everybody know what I mean when I say property management software? Yes or yes or no? It all depends on who you're with. But what I encourage everybody to do is when you're looking at your calendar for the rest of 2021 and into 2022, I would be closing off your availability to the OTAs anywhere over two months in advance. So right now we're coming up to the 1st of September. I would be going in from November, December, January, February, March, April, May. And I would close off the availability to all of your OTAs on there and just keep them, keep them direct. So as you go, you can do it every week, you can do it every month. However you want to do it is you can just open it up and keep open up. So when it gets like the middle of September, you'll just make sure that the middle of November onwards is open. Now, the reason for that is obviously we want to encourage as many guests as possible to book direct. If you look at how people book on these online travel agents, and let's just focus on the top OTA at the moment, the one that's got all the press, all the attention, Airbnb, you look at the booking patterns and they're booking on the OTAs, especially on Airbnb, a lot later. So the reason why you will do this is that if by closing it off anything over two months to the OTAs, then you're really keeping that exclusivity for anybody who wants to plan ahead. So, for example, the main date that I'm looking at and thinking at is the Christmas. There's people in here that open for Christmas that are already booked up. There's maybe some people in here who, over the course of the last couple of weeks, have decided for the first time you're going to open up over Christmas. So their dates in particularly this year, when this year is all about reconnection, when this year is all about meeting up again with family and friends, you know, because they maybe not had the chance to last year because of restrictions that they're looking at, looking at going away. So these are big dates and you can get big prices and big, big rates of this. I would hate for you to put it on the OTAs now and have to pay 15, 20% plus commission when you know you can easily book that out yourself. And we'll talk about marketing tactics later on. So that's the first sort of things that I'd be doing. Number one, work out when your slow season begins. Different for everybody. Number two, make sure that your calendar is open into 2022. And, you know, Phil's even gone 2023, which is fantastic. And make sure as well that you are closing it off to the OTAs. Now, I will caveat that by saying there will be some PMSS that don't allow that. Obviously you can do that, but if you're with a pms, that does definitely take advantage of it.