How to fill your last minute availability for summer?

This time of year is the busy period for almost all holiday accommodation businesses. Schools about to break up and families start to enjoy the summer wanting to create memories. The internet offers a fantastic opportunity for late bookings. Here are a few marketing ideas to help you fill up your last minute availability.

Understand your audience

The key with any marketing is understanding and knowing the audience your properties are right for. What types of guests do your properties attract? What locations do they come from to stay in your rentals? Having this information to hand means that you can choose the marketing avenues you use and target guests who are likely to book.

Competitions & Special Offers

Running a competition for an extra day when booking or advertising a special offer to get a discount over a certain period can incentivise more bookings last minute. When you get this close to summer customers are looking for a good last minute deal. Having these offers and discounts in front of the right audience can give them a nudge to book your properties.

Offers don’t have to be money off the rental price. You can include some holiday extras as an alternative to attract your audience to book. These could include a complementary transfer from the airport or a welcome hamper or a discount on a meal out. What do your guests who book really value when staying at your holiday rentals?

Channel Listings, Social Media & Emails

If you have adverts on channel websites updating the description with late availability listed at the top can highlight to people viewing your properties. In addition trailing more niche websites which are specified to your audience could provide more bookings. By targeting by locations or type of guest on niche websites your properties can be listed to the right audience.

Placing your offers on social media channels is an easy way to communicate to an already engaged audience. Via these channels there are paid adverts as well, the opportunity to reach more as you can set targeting options to place the adverts in front of the right people. On Facebook you can also display adverts in customers feeds on Instagram and on other website through the Facebook audience network.

Sending emails to previous guest and newsletter subscribers highlighting last minute availability and offers provides more marketing reach. An ideas you could trail is a recommended a friend scheme where by if you received an offer through advocacy you offer them both a little something. Email are a great way to customise your marketing messages to different target audiences depending on the properties you have available.

Did you know iPro can help?

Our system can provide you an array of tools which will help fill your last minute availability and increase your occupancy for this busy period. Here are some of the features in iPro you might want to consider.

Vouchers & Discounts

Want to advertised discounted rates for late bookings or send out a voucher code?

In our system you can customise the type of offer you send. iPro has the ability to take a set amount off a booking through to a percentages off the price. This feature in the system gives you control of the voucher available to customers. You can set the dates, which the voucher is valid to making voucher available to certain guests in your system. If you have set a voucher in the system you can clearly see the dates you have selected to run the offer in our property calendars.

Property Availability Calendars

In the iPro Platform shows you an overall picture of your occupancy per property and for all the properties you have. It intuitively allows you to search availability to book, block out and hold dates for potential guests.

Emails

Our Customer Relationship based system allows you to directly email guests who have previously booked. If you are looking to send an email via your Mailchimp or other marketing automation platforms. You can easily download a contact list from your system to enable you to email customers the latest special offers.

The iPro booking system has many more features which can help book & manage your properties last minute availability. It is a scalable system which you can use anytime, anywhere.

Want to find out more about our online booking system? Book a demo or call us +44 (0)1380 819474.