As soon as the Royal wedding was announced, the sound of holiday forms being filled in grew to a cacophony in every office across the land, as the realisation that with 2 bank holidays, Easter, and the Royal Wedding, by taking the correct 3 days off, these magically transform into 11 days off work. So for 2011, this has created an interesting phenomenon. While Easter always lowers business levels in London (April this year was the worst performing month by quite a distance, except for August), this combination of Bank Holidays and Easter, has given Conference planners, and the Venues themselves a bit of a headache when it comes to pricing, and forecasting for the month. The flipside of this is that March and May are looking like they could be pretty healthy as companies push their corporate events and meetings into these months to make sure they can maximise attendance. With the late announcement of the Royal Wedding (ie most of the pricing, strategy and budgets where already set for next year), will Venues in the UK go back and re-do their business plans and pricing for q1 and q2 2011? I think there may be a good opportunity to maximise revenue in March and May, as conference demand will most likely shift from April. Are you going to take advantage of this in 2011?
While I am on the subject of Bank Holidays - the movement of Easter every year almost always causes issues with forecasting for Hotels across all parts of their business - Will it fall in a "good" way or a "bad" way this year? Will business continue or grind to a halt as the slew of Bank Holidays takes hold? there is always a whiff of uncertainty around the planning of this part of the year. For hoteliers and revenue management professionals in particular, putting Easter in a the same spot every year would provide a welcome respite from the uncertainty about that time of year, and enable stronger planning. This is pie in the sky thinking though - Easter will always move back and forth through March and April.
Have any of your major conferences/events decided to change their dates as a result of the Royal Wedding? Will the royal Wedding provide a boost for wedding business as couples look to get married on the same day as the Royal Couple? Is April the month to really try and get the business in from overseas where easter is not a big factor - for example the Russian market? Time to dust off the crystal ball once again!
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Hi James,
ReplyDeleteExceptional date mapping should be a norm in forecasting where STLY date ranges change as per Easter, Ramadan, school holidays, and the occasional royal nuptial...
If you have a pattern of occupancy for a holiday period, or even where a like for like business condition exists (same high occupancy of rooms & space, high space demand, low rooms etc...), then there should be no reason why you cannot factor this into your foreast scenario planning. Business conditions need to reflect demand patterns on multiple dates, not just saying map May Day holiday to May Day, what if you wanted to include all holiday dates in your system to weight the average for a trend analysis...?
I am sure that the compression on the London rooms market for the Royal wedding will display no difference to other high demand rooms periods, with similar impact on space too, apart from the premium hoteliers will be trying to acheive. I have heard the first stories of hoteliers looking to book out low paying groups for what was expected as a relatively low demand weekend...
Lawrence
Hey Lawrence! Many thanks for the post, and all very valid points. Hopefully all of our hotel clients are pretty good at doing all of those things that you describe - especially on the rooms side where RM is so advanced.
ReplyDeleteWhat I was going for was more along the lines of the Conference Market, which is not as advanced in some cases in terms of yielding and RM. The long period of holiday days may make it harder to convince corporate meetings planners to hold their events during this month when so many UK residents will be taking a prolonged period of Holiday. This should have a knock on effect, and with some of our client hotels already indicating strong business on the books coming through for March and May, April still remains a bit of a mystery where conference demand is concerned.
Many thanks for the comment - a great insight. We could do with a few more here! Got an opinion on this subject? - drop us a line, it is always good to have some healthy debate!