Many hotels shared with us that they experienced the best summer in ten years.
Occupancy and night rates reached an all-time high.
Good time for hoteliers to take some time to enjoy it after months of nonstop running.
The demand is now slowing down in the northern hemisphere and there is a lot of discussion about the upcoming recession.
I'm not going to make any predictions today. But there’s one thing we can be sure of: no recession could be more devastating than the COVID pandemic.
Nevertheless, let's brainstormed some ideas to keep your occupancy rates high in the incoming months/years:
What? The whole world is moving towards remote work but the hospitality industry is somehow ignoring that.
Maids are not going to clean the rooms remotely but a revenue manager can work perfectly well from home.
As well as the advantages you’ve probably already heard of, there is one more: You unlock the potential of your on-site offices.
You can repurpose these spaces and assign them a new function.
It's hard to run a highly profitable hospitality business while focusing only on this segment but it can suppliment the mid and low seasons.
Create special packages and decide what % of rooms you want to dedicate to long stays.
If you are based in Spain or Portugal, we can help you get more bookings from remote workers by leveraging our distribution channels.
Hospitality is not only about selling rooms anymore. Very few hotels have adjusted to the new reality and even less use PMS software to leverage the potential of hybrid hospitality.
There isn’t a clear winner, but the most progressive hotels recommend the following PMS:
The lack of functional event spaces is our (Surf Office’s) biggest limiting factor when it comes to organising corporate retreats.
If hotels had more facilities, we could send secure more large group bookings.
The difference between what clients expect and what hotels offer is massive.
The few hotels that understand that get 90% of our groups. You can check out these tips to better understand this market.
Reach out to us if you need help making your hotel more “offsite friendly”. We’re more than happy to help.
Gone are the days when Booking.com profiles received the majority of bookings.
Niche OTAs are becoming way stronger and direct bookings are way easier to acquire.
You’ve been hearing this for years, right?
A great approach is to dedicate 2-3 hours every month to researching new channels. Believe it or not, it will pay off.
Neighborhood coworking is a massive trend and is something that hotels can quite easily execute. One of the best examples is Zoku in Amsterdam.
They converted their lobby area into a very comfortable coworking space and sold a daily pass for €35 that included an amazing lunch.
This lunch was enough to tempt skeptical remote workers to pay for a coworking space.
There are many remote workers who come irregularly just to change the work environment or cowork together with some friends or colleagues.
Now is a good time to sign long-term contracts.
Agencies and OTAs are optimistic after a good summer season and are open to signing long-term contracts (or contracts that guarantee you a certain volume of bookings).
Consider these options. They work as a kind of insurance.
Even though things will take a downturn next year, you already have some bookings guaranteed. Surf Office offers such contracts to selected partners.
This blog post was originally published by Hotel Nuggets, a monthly newsletter about trends and tips from the hybrid hospitality.
I created the first coworking and coliving space for digital nomads. It went well until it didn't. We closed it and I started to focus on building a productized service for companies that organize offsites.
This one went better and together with an amazing team I work on it on daily basis. We built a solid booking channel for hotels, I talk about it quite often in the Hotel Nuggets newsletter.
Around 2019 I started to play with an idea of building a coworking cabin. My plan was to operate hundreds of them across Europe. Then Covid came to say hello and I pivoted this project into Epic Monday - a site full of resources for people who are planning to start a glamping business.
Once I'm passionate about something, I deep dive into the topic, run tons of experiments and sometimes come with monetization ideas (not always, unfortunately).
Hoodpicker started as simple survey, then I created a tool to compare neighborhoods in Lisbon and now it's a set of tools for people who want to invest into real estate in Portugal.
I constantly research ideas that combine hospitality, real estate and tech. And share them in my personal newsletter. You can subscribe now:
I don't like to have calls but happy to discuss your project over Linkedin or Twitter chat.
PS: If you live in Amsterdam, we can meet at the next Cowork& session or Travel Massive meetup.
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