Your source for villas, apartments & holiday rentals in Spain and the Canary Islands
The January figures are in
The travel market traditionally sets great store by what happens in January. It is a peak period for people selling holidays and is treated as a signpost for the year to come.
Sadly, 2012 doesn’t look like being a vintage year.
With an exciting update rolled out to España Breaks in time for the traffic rush, we were feeling pretty good.
The hard work was looking solid as our search improvements kicked in and bagged us even better exposure and ever higher visibility in the search engines.
The net result: Traffic dropped 10% on the same period last year and lead generation fell 8.5%. What on earth is going on?
The market has changed
This result wasn’t entirely unexpected. As January rolled, chatter in the travel industry wasn’t good. Analysts were reporting a sector-wide drop of 10-12% and for some it was far worse – Thomas Cook was reporting a 33% fall.
The primary reason is the ongoing squeeze on household spending – people are broke. This feeds into a general lack of confidence and, as we remarked before, until business starts hiring and investing, things won’t get any better. A drop in inflation and a resolution to this Keystone Cop-style Euro crisis would be a fine start.
The net result for ordinary people is that they’re clinging to cash and delaying their holiday decisions.
Click to read the full article at Hitwise
Experian Hitwise published some excellent figures this morning showing a general shift away from January being the peak season, as people defer booking until later in the year. For some it’s because they’re worried about the future. For others, they hope to get a better deal by leaving their bookings until later.
Save, save, Savecations!
It’s tongue in cheek but apparently savecation is the latest word to enter the travel lexicon. Silly – yes – but it does reflect what people want this year.
They want a deal. They want more for less. They are driving a hard bargain.
We know it can be pretty depressing for owners when lots of enquirers seem to start a conversation by beating you up on price. To save your sanity it is best to simply expect it from the outset and be proactive by running regular offers for selected periods. The rest of the travel market is already heavily discounting to shift inventory.
Our deals page, as ever, does a lot to elevate eyeballs on an advert. It’s well worth using.
What we’re doing next
We already had plans in place for 2012 and we’re certainly not getting distracted – we moved to a larger office for good reason.
In broad terms, 2012 will see us throw more resources into marketing the site. You’ll shortly see a whole new section packed with fun, fresh content actively spotlighting and promoting the greatest holidays in Spain. Writers are the new heroes of our business.
We’re also ramping up the way we handle deals and newsletters.
In an age of Twitter and Facebook, why an old fashioned newsletter? Because newsletters remain the strongest driver of traffic in an online business – and with 28,000 subscribers, we want to do it better. We’re combining this with consumer discount culture to create a new Daily Deals section; it’s topical, it works and it gets holidaymakers interested.
As ever, watch this blog for updates.
Happy renting!
Soaring pool heating costs don’t have to cause misery
We had a useful discussion this week with Lawrence Pemberton, owner of a highly successful property in Lanzarote.
He explained the dilemma he has with the soaring costs of pool heating, a problem a lot of owners are having to deal with as energy prices climb.
To keep a pool permanently warm during a guest’s stay can be enormously expensive. The cost can also vary wildly depending on time of year, the weather or even guest taste. (We’ve all met the person who shivers in anything colder than a hot bath.)
The temptation with this issue is to make pool heating an “optional” extra and we agree the logic makes total sense when looking at your property budget.
But we think optional extras are the wrong approach.
Unavoidable extras annoy people
The point is widely proven in the rest of the travel industry. Lets think about some examples.
Think first about all inclusive holidays whose popularity is growing; they are popular because people like the simplicity and ability to budget for their break. Love ‘em or loathe ‘em – customers like the model.
Conversely the companies who attract holidaymakers’ ire year on year are low cost airlines.
Their unavoidable “extras” and opaque, tiered pricing annoys people to distraction. They only overcome the bad publicity with headline grabbing low rates and vast marketing machines, neither of which is a luxury the average holiday rental owner can afford.
Option 1: Go All Inclusive (recommended)
Customers like simple, transparent pricing. Period.
It makes you easy to book with and the lack of quibble over whether the pool will be warm or not avoids friction. A good relationship with guests is built right from their initial enquiry so it is paramount you get off to a good start.
The solution when calculating your rental prices is to assume your pool will be heated during every guest stay, then amortise the costs over the entire season. Build this into your prices to create a simple, all-in, price.
Option 2: Work backwards by discounting
This is messier but may offer a halfway house.
Calculate prices with heating costs built-in (as in option 1) then offer a discount when guests ask NOT to have the pool heated.
Why would anyone want this? People love discounts – that’s the reason they hate extras! So reverse the psychology by incentivising guests to reduce heating bills.
With this technique, some guests staying in the hottest periods can easily convince themselves heating isn’t really necessary when it’s 30 degress outside. Some will take the discount and ditch the heating. It’s the same result – better presented.
Happy renting!
(Thanks again to Lawrence, ever a hard working and inspiring owner, who’s made Villa Madera in Lanzarote a huge success.)