Why Staycation Bookings Will Still be The Norm in 2021
28 Jul 2021 · 10 min
Mark Simpson explains why holiday hosts should focus on staycation guests within 1-3 hours' drive through late 2021. His family's Spain-to-UK trip cost £600 in tests and faced repeated delays from Randox Health, making international travel too complicated for most people right now. He's promoting Boostly Content Creator, a tool that generates 30-40 monthly social posts for £5/month.
Chapters
Before we start today's episode of the Boosted podcast, I have got some exciting news to share with you. For the month of July, I am giving away one month trial of the boostly content creator. Now, you may be asking and you may be thinking, well, what is the boostly content creator host that I have come into contact with in the five years of doing Boostly? And when I say to them, you need to be posting every single day on social media, you need to be emailing, emailing your guest and your list, they always say to me, I haven't got the time. And I can't think of a better month to promote the boostly content creator than July. Because right now everybody around the world is busy, busy, busy, busy. And they haven't got the time to think about the marketing or the social media or the emails, when in fact the best time to do marketing is when you're at your busiest because that means that you always have a pipeline coming through. So I created the boostly content creator for busy hosts. Now what do you get? Every single month you get 30 to 40 pieces of fresh social media content that you can use for your social media channels. LinkedIn, Instagram, et cetera. You also get video templates which are designed to stop the scroll on social media, which is really powerful. Email templates designed by expert copywriters that are working so well. Georgina Bearman messaged up in our Facebook group to say that she used one of the email templates and got free bookings, direct bookings instantly, which more than covered the cost. You also now get website headline generator tools. You get a money back guarantee and you can cancel anytime. The price is only five pound a month. And right now when you sign up, you go into the boostlycontentcreator.com you add to your basket in the coupon code section, you type in July and you get the first month free. Now that is only available for the month of July. After that it's five pound. If you don't want to continue, you can just cancel at any time. But please make sure that you go and you use the boostly content creator. My goal is a month in the month of July is to get 1,000 new hosts to register and sign up. This is how powerful I know this tool is because the email templates in itself are providing a massive return of investment and I would love for you to come and join. This is for new members only. Just go to boostlycontent creator.com add it to your basket, put in coupon code July and I'll see you on the other side. Right now we've got that out of the way, let's get on with today's podcast episode. I'm going to share with you a story and this is going to be the story is around my thinking and my prediction why staycations will still be the main driver of your bookings for the rest of 2021, maybe into 2022 as well. So, as you may be aware, me and my family, Laura, Alfie, Charlie, Frankie, we like to travel. And at the present moment in time, we are in Spain. We've been here for a little while now and we decided to take adventure home because we haven't been back to see family and friends in a long while. So we decided to fly. And bearing in mind Spain is in an amber list country, we decided to fly back for two weeks and because we're coming from an amber listed country into the UK, we had to isolate for 10 days. But you can pay the government a little bit extra money and you can test to release early. All in all, the test itself came to around about £600, so it's very expensive and we didn't even have to get them for Alfie, Charlie or Frankie, which would have been even more expensive, as you can imagine. Now upon leaving the country, we had to get an antigen test which was about €40 and then you had to fill in all the forms. Once we got into the country, we were instantly called and contacted by Track and Trace and the, the fast just began there. So we decided to spend a little bit extra money doing the test to release, which meant that for six days we had to be in Middlesbrough, which is great, got settled in Middlesbrough, had our day two and day eight tests waiting for us upon arrival, which no problem, did our day two, took it to the Dropbox, came back and isolated, no problem, got our results back on day three. Great. We used a company called Randox Health and that's important. Randox Health. I want you to go and do an AT search on Twitter, so type in at Randox Health and just go to see their mentions and you'll see that what happened to me has happened to many other people. So day two of being in a country, Spain announces that everybody going back into Spain needs to have a negative PCR test, which meant even more money to spend. But we'll get to that in a second. The problem is day three. Day three, Randox Health tell you that your day five, which is your test early to release test will get sent out separately. They have to do so because this is a rule by the government. Whatever this rule is, nonsense rule. Day four happens. Very happy after England win in the quarterfinals of the of the Euros. Watched the game. Fantastic. Really good. Watched it with the boys. Fantastic. Loved it. Day four, no test arrive. No problem. Call Randox Health in a queue for an hour. It'll be with you tomorrow, sir, guaranteed. Day five, no tests arrive. Called up. Sorry, sir, logistical problem. It was guaranteed to be with you on day three. Six. Day six, nothing. Day six, the queues get longer. Two, three hours, nothing. Day seven, nothing. We call up, sorry, there's been a massive issue. Really apologize. We'll refund you. At this point, it's getting very frustrating because we have got other families, see other friends, could be moving around. Day eight, test to release again. If anybody was watching my Instagrams, you know that at this point it got very mundane and very annoying. Very quickly we did our day eight test, we drop it to the Dropbox. No test came back. And this was just a recurrent recurring theme. And this is just our experience. This doesn't need to even mention the thousands of other stories that are just on their Twitter now. And that's just with Randox Health. Randox Health is one of hundreds of recommended test companies that the government have put upon this. Now, this is just our experience and bearing in mind, we had a place to go stay. We handbooked accommodation with family to go stay with the PCR test and the test that you have to do have to be done 20, 48 hours before you arrive in the country. If anybody's taken a PCR test, you know that it can take up to 24 to 48 hours to get your results back and you can't even get on the plane without them. Now put this in your guest shoes. Now, if you rely on people to fly into your country and there's restrictions, I mean, granted, you may not be in, in the uk, you may be somewhere else in the world, but just right now, Spain, there's been countries, Germany and France have said, listen, don't travel to Spain. The cases are rising. It's putting so many people off from traveling country to country, doesn't matter, it's driving or wherever. And we, we just had the plane experience. So you couple in all of these factors now, you could go and book a holiday, you could go and book accommodation, you could go and book your car rental, you could book your insurance and all those things and it could literally get down to that. Your PCR test doesn't get back in time, which means you cannot get on that flight and board and you lose thousands. So yes, there's going to be changes and yes, the more that the world gets double vaccinated and rules and restrictions are lowered because everybody is vaccinated and this just becomes part of the new normal. Yes, this will change. But right now, from July, August, September, October, November, December, if you are still insistent on relying on foreign travel into your country to rely on your guests, please do look to change it. Staycation is going to be the continued boom between now and the end of the year. You need to take advantage of it. Please do look Facebook groups. Please do look at amending your listings, Please do go look at amending your website, look at your avatar if you're struggling with all of that. Louise at Rental Tonic Louise Brace at Rental Tonic. She, she is a fantastic at helping you uncover a new avatar or a new guest profile. So louise@rentaltonic.com do go check out but this is the time to do so. We had a shocking experience with the government and the testing. We had an amazing experience with our family and our friends that we eventually got to see. But my plea to everybody is that if you are still relying on foreign travel coming into your country for your guests, do look to change. Whether it be business or key workers, people traveling, looking for work, etc, there are there, the guests are there. The potential is that everybody in the world has got a story of how they've pivoted and changes. So please do listen, please do take heed and hopefully this message reaches you in time. If you are a host who is listening to this or watching this on YouTube, please do share it. Share in a Facebook group, LinkedIn, share it amongst friends in your communities etc and other hosts. Email WhatsApp, whatever. Please do share it. I'll try and get this message out but this is definitely not going to go anywhere or anywhere back to what it was in 2019 on January 2020 anytime soon. So stick with it. As I've always said, if you've got this far, congratulations, you're gonna make it. But just keep doing the staycation boom. Keep trying to focus on anybody within a one to three hour radius of you, whether it's for work or leisure. And that would be what I would be focusing on on a marketing basis. As always, I'm here to give you the tools, the tactics, the training, but most importantly the confidence that you can go and get these bookings. So if this is the first time that you're tuning into an episode, do go back on the back catalog. There's 297 videos and podcasts that you can go back on, and we're very closely going to be hitting number 300. So thank you for tuning in. Please do make sure you do download, subscribe, hit the like button and share. And I'll be back tomorrow with another daily podcast. So thanks for stopping by and I'll see you tomorrow.
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