Ah the eternal problem of Friday evening! The scenario is always the same.
The week is going well: you receive your business customers with peak demand on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And also on weekends thanks to your leisure customers who mainly stay with you on Saturday evenings to spend a weekend in the region.
But Friday evening remains in difficulty :
– your business customers do not want to book it , because they much prefer to go home during the day on Friday to quickly enjoy their weekend.
– your leisure customers prefer to pack their bags at home on Friday evening and leave peacefully for the weekend on Saturday morning .
So how do you fill your hotel on Friday evenings?
This is the question asked to me by Claire, director of a 3-star establishment in a tourist town in Île de France. This freshly renovated hotel presents that often observed Friday evening slump. Several ideas have already been implemented, notably pricing tests, but certain other levers have not yet been launched (particularly for team reasons).
Here are 7 ideas to maximize the performance of your Friday evenings.
Please note: this article is part of my 52 week challenge . This case is real but for reasons of confidentiality the name of the gîte and the city are not mentioned.
1 – Impose a specific length of stay
The first unstoppable lever for filling your hotel on Friday evenings is to make good use of the constraints linked to length of stay.
In your PMS (or Chanel manager), you have the possibility of forcing the sale (refusing sales) depending on the length of stay desired by your customer.
In other words, the guest's reservation request is not authorized if their length of stay is longer than what you requested .
Example of length of stay
For example, with a stay of 2 nights, customers wishing to book for 1 night only will not be able to reserve your hotel. This optimization lever can be scary (because we refuse some sales) but it is very powerful.
What is the point of lengths of stay?
This constraint, placed on sales, is interesting when you have a day for which demand is greater than the number of rooms you have available. This date fills up very quickly and you continue to have requests that you cannot honor until the last minute.
For these days, your interest is to only accept, out of the few rooms you have, the most interesting clients for you .
And the most interesting customers for you are those who will reserve this highly requested date with another (the day before or the day after) . Because this stay for two will allow you to help sell these less popular neighboring dates.
And so by placing a stay constraint of at least two nights on your key date you filter the right reservations.
Length of stay: also useful in other cases
The logic is the same for Saturday evenings. If your Saturday night has a demand greater than your number of rooms, and only in this case, place a length of stay constraint of two nights on Saturday.
So customers who wish to book on Friday and Saturday will have the opportunity to book, but not those who only book on Saturday evening.
You only retain reservations that maximize your overall performance . This constraint can be lifted within a certain period before the arrival date to still ensure a full Saturday evening.
2 – Adjust your sales price on Friday evening
Another solution is to work on your Friday night price to more easily attract the little natural demand that exists in the market .
This price work can involve a price reduction or the launch of a promotion. It all depends mainly on the sensitivity of your customers, and your intention to communicate about this new price (a price drop can remain more discreet).
Be careful to avoid wild price changes
When you carry out a promotional operation or a price reduction, it is crucial to give yourself an objective upstream and to check the performance of the operation downstream.
For what ?
If you lower the price and your sales remain at the same level: you have not gained any additional turnover and have even lost some. This is therefore not an operation to be reproduced.
In the same way, it is possible, following a price reduction, to increase your sales but not enough for the final turnover to be higher: in this case, you have more customers for the same turnover. business, it is not interesting, because your variable expenses increase.
To measure this performance the crucial indicator is your revpar. If your revpar increases thanks to the promotion, well done! Otherwise, you must estimate why and not repeat the operation in a similar way.
3 – Boost group leisure demand
To fill your hotel on Friday, groups are also an excellent solution.
The idea here is to boost your leisure group activity which travels on weekends . The first point, relatively obviously, is to offer a more attractive price for groups who include Friday evening in their stay request.
But it is also possible to have a prospective approach for family events such as weddings, for example. Offering a discount for wedding guests who wish to book on Friday and Saturday is a win-win for all parties, and one that never fails to appeal to the bride and groom. At the same time, you can ask the bride and groom to be “announced” on their mini wedding site (small website that all brides and grooms use today to indicate all the information related to the wedding).
Another example of prospecting: have you ever thought about being present at the wedding fair in your region ? Hotel chains do it and I have always wondered about the absence of independent hoteliers. However, it would be possible to partner with 3 or 4 hotels to finance the stand and offer an interesting offer on site for brides and grooms who wish to consider a wedding.
For example, Accor offers 10% on a cancelable and refundable reservation to guests of the bride and groom in exchange for registration in the loyalty program.
4 – Look for a crew to host on a recurring basis
Airlines have a recurring need to accommodate their crews, in certain cities, during stopovers.
Obviously, this demand is not present in all cities. Without an airport, there is no crew.
The profitability analysis for establishing the price of a contract like this is very specific and could be the subject of another article (leave me a quick comment if you are interested): this is what which is called the displacement calculation.
My point here is rather to favor crews who will help you fill Friday evenings : either by accepting a lower price or by adding services or with a more complete service which will validate the contract at your place. You should know that companies put several establishments into competition, so competition can sometimes be tough on certain issues.
5 – Fill your hotel with weekend service packages included
Creating packages is a solution particularly suited to weekend leisure customers and which must be exploited to the maximum in a context of busy Friday evenings.
Several possibilities are available to you to create attractive packages that will fill your hotel:
– Either offer a thematic stay of two nights with an additional service. for example: detox stay with two nights on site and a massage on Saturday
– Or propose for a two-night stay including one or more associated services for the smooth running of the weekend: for example taxi from the station to the hotel and set of transport tickets to get around
– Finally, you can also team up with local colleagues to offer a tourism package : two nights on site + guided tour of the city
At what price should these packages be sold?
The customer obviously needs to feel like they are getting a good deal.
Through this group purchase, he must have access to a more attractive price than if he had purchased the whole thing in detail.
So depending on the package you choose, you can, on the one hand, make a small gesture on the price of your nights and ask the other parties (in exchange for the expected volume) to do the same.
Be careful, however, to check the legal conditions of certain gifts (on transport tickets for example) and if you have any doubt, present it as a kind gesture rather than a reduced sale price.
Key factors for the success of this method
The success of this type of method will lie on two crucial points: the attractiveness of your offer on the one hand and on the other hand on the promotion you make of it . Even with the best package in the world, if it remains confidential, your performance will remain disappointing.
How to promote the package?
To promote your package here are several possible avenues:
- first of all, use your partnership with the professional who offers a service in the package so that he too communicates about the operation.
- for your part, your communication can be based on your own website ,
- emails aimed at your loyal customer base ,
- social media accounts ,
- reminding people who have already booked on Saturday to offer them the Friday/Saturday/service package,
- the incentive for your receptionists with a gift to be won for the one who has sold the most packages,
- etc
6 – Offer a discount or free service for Thursday customers
This solution is probably not the one that will produce the most drastic effects in filling your hotel, but it still deserves your attention, especially during school holidays.
Give your weekly guests an incentive to stay a little longer and book an additional night with you on Friday evening.
For example, you can leave a note in the room on Thursday, with an exclusive offer to extend their stay by one night. Or use your CRM database directly to announce the offer to customers in advance.
The offer may consist of a price reduction or an improvement in service: free continental breakfast, free Friday activity or free taxi ride to the station.
7 – Work on your presence on OTAs
This point is important for all periods of your calendar but it is even more so during off-peak periods, when the stakes are high to fill your hotel.
The points to work on and improve are the following:
- check the consistency of your value for money versus competitors (price versus rating)
- make sure you arrive in the TOP 5 results in your city
- consider the relevance of boosting your positioning (the famous booking thumb for example)
- finally, if possible, make all of your prices available, even non-cancellable prices.
We will conclude this article by returning to Claire’s problem. Among all the most judicious solutions proposed for its establishment are: boosting leisure demand, particularly group demand (point 3), working on CRM (point 5 and 6) and boosting its positioning on OTAs (point 7)
And how do you solve this Friday evening problem? Do you have any other ideas? Write it in the comments below.