How your events calendar can bring you profit

As a hotelier, the ups and downs of revenues will be a familiar sight, with certain times of the week, month or year being much more favourable for commerce than others. If this isn’t familiar then it should be. How are you affected seasonally? How are you affected hourly?

Working in hospitality means that elements of your offering will be impacted by flexible demand, which means that you need to drill down to look at the finer details. It should be a case of working out what you can do during periods of low demand in order to put revenue in places where it customarily hasn’t been. Is there anything that you can do to shift the calendar in your favour? And how can you work with others to achieve this?

Trade in hospitality can vary due to a wide variety of reasons. There are the obvious busy periods of school holidays, Christmas, and New Year. And then there are the quieter areas, such as January and early February, October and November, where revenue streams are hard pressed, trickling rather than gushing. These issues are widespread and whilst the specific dates of the troughs may vary, practically all hoteliers will have troughs at the same time in their calendars.

Making the most of your locality

Look at your locality. Certain times of the year are much busier in certain parts of the country due to local attractions and events. Take Cheltenham as an example, an easy one for us to touch on as our offices are just a few miles from the race course. In early March the hospitality venues in the area are inundated with booking requests, as they experience a huge surge in demand that corresponds with the Cheltenham Festival, one of the key dates in the national horseracing calendar. Every year thousands upon thousands of race-goers descend on the surrounding area (this year was no different with more than 260,000 attending), flooding the place with trade.  

But what can hoteliers do at this time to boost trade even further? A traditional ‘shoulder night’, to coin an industry phrase, is Sunday. Fridays and Saturdays tend to look after themselves, but rooms on Sundays are often empty, which means opportunities missed. In the run up to Cheltenham Festival, which stretches over four days from Tuesday to Friday, the Monday and Sunday before are particularly lacklustre when it comes to bookings. What can you do to change this?

Look to what’s around you. What is going on that you can exploit? How can you work with others to achieve some measure of success? A good example of this, would be trying to do what we call ‘stretching the envelope’. The Festival provides a bounty for hoteliers in the region, but this bounty can go further. Stratford-upon-Avon for instance, is about thirty miles from Cheltenham. The catchment area for the racecourse is considerable, with people willing to travel to attend, and thirty miles is well within it. Stratford also has a racecourse and it traditionally holds racing on the Monday of Festival week. This is something that hoteliers should be looking at and pondering what they can do. Why not, as an hotelier, look to exploit both the interest in horseracing and Stratford’s locality to draw in custom during a shoulder period? You could, perhaps, look to offer a racing package, which provides complimentary tickets to the Stratford racing and tickets to the first day of the Cheltenham Festival. It might involve some outlay to arrange, but you would be filling rooms that would otherwise be empty, whilst also generating trade in the hotel restaurant, bar, spa or other amenities.

Cheltenham and the surrounding area is fortunate that it has the Festival in its events calendar. But what if your region doesn’t benefit from this kind of attraction? Why not create your own event?

Create a community event

A good example of this is the Great Bath Feast, which has now become a very popular (and large) event.

The general premise is of a collection of local businesses, all getting together and working out what they can do to inject something extra into their revenue streams. Great Bath Feast emerged as the solution, and is a concerted effort from a variety of hospitality venues and businesses to attract people to the local area. It is a series of events including breakfasts, brunches, lunches, dinners and food fairs, targeted at a specific demographic. This encourages people to come to the area out of season, making it an attractive place to visit and increasing trade as a result. It’s held in October creating a huge buzz at a time that’s usually quiet following the passing of summer. What can your region do to emulate this? What can your street do?

Working together

A common example of filling in one of the trade troughs is a happy hour in a hotel bar. The idea behind this is to generate business during a time, say between six and seven o’clock, that’s usually a slower period. It’s a simple concept and relatively easy to do, with the attraction of low priced drinks drawing in tardy customers and encouraging them to spend. However, this simple price mechanism isn’t necessarily applicable to your hotel establishment. You may have to look further afield for inspiration and take a different approach.

By working together, a specific location can create excitement and interest, giving the area more allure. Hospitality venues and hospitality businesses should look to pull together. If there are several bars and hotels in an area, rather than holding individual happy hours, can they all hold a happy hour at the same time to bring in a large influx of trade? It would be a better proposition though to create something that’s event led rather than price.

On an individual basis, can you as a hotel look to create an attraction for your Sunday nights? Be creative. Do you have a university nearby? Why not see if the philosophy lecturer will agree to a philosophical evening on the last Sunday of every month? Perhaps book readings, author signings, guest lectures or musical acts?

Choose something that has sufficient appeal. Think about the demographic that you’d like to target and make the considerations accordingly. Who would you like to attract? How can you go about doing it?

Look to your rivals. Realise that they’re probably suffering the same issues and work together to overcome them. Rather than seeing them as competition, regard them as partners that you can work in harmony with.

The collective mass is far bigger and will therefore have a much larger impact than everyone working on an individual basis. Several businesses pulling together create a more appealing prospect, in terms of both custom and general interest.

National press are more likely to cover something the size of the Great Bath Feast than an individual hotel’s event. Whilst regional press might be interested in an individual hotel, a larger happening will enable them to get behind it, showcasing what’s going on and trumpet the event to a wider audience.

The hospitality tapestry is much bigger than your individual establishment. And the seasonality of your trade is far more in depth than the seasons. Remember both these points, remove the troughs from your revenue and bring in that profit!