How was Bid and Stay initially trialed?

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Increase Your Bookings with Bidnstay: The Ultimate Last-Minute Accommodation Solution

13 Mar 2024 · 1 min

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This YouTube video (March 13, 2024) features Mark Simpson discussing the founding of Bid and Stay, a platform for auctioning last-minute holiday accommodation. The founder converted a farm into holiday lets and, wanting to avoid empty properties, experimented with auctioning last-minute availability on eBay and promoting via social media — which produced bookings and validated a market need.

Questions this video answers

By auctioning last-minute accommodation listings on eBay and promoting them via social media, which resulted in a couple of bookings.

Chapters

What is the reason that Bid and Stay has been founded? Okay, so I actually came into it, we converted the farm into holiday accommodation and I would sit there thinking that place is empty and that place is empty this weekend. How can I get them let the very last minute because the weather looks good, sun shining, I'd rather have people in there than it sat there empty making no money. So it's, I'm a runner and actually I was out running in the morning and I thought I just need to be able to auction this off and have a place to auction it. So I actually started auctioning it in on ebay but going on social media and letting my network know that we'd got some accommodation going to the last minute on ebay and actually took a couple of bookings through that. Nice something for this. I think there's a market for this. So yeah, that was, that was one way.