Here is the transcription of the video:
Hello and welcome to the J’poster Complet channel! Let me introduce myself, my name is Clémentine and I am a pricing and revenue manager at J'poster Complet. So, today, we are going to talk about a fairly important subject: it is history , the importance of your history for setting your prices . So, those who don't have a history, don't worry, you can stay on the video. One day you will have some history, that's no problem. There is always a way to do this without the history. We have plenty of clients who are starting out and who have no history, and we make do. There is no problem. You have the market to help you, you have the competition and then you will have to follow. But for all those who have history , it is extremely important, finally, we must not neglect, we must say that history is almost a RARE . Finally, it must be used and exploited.
So already, why use and exploit it? This is to actually know what you have done in the past and really realize your performance over the past year or the past months and in fact, to see the challenge for the following year. There is no reason that if last year you achieved a certain occupancy rate and average price that you cannot do it again this year. Afterwards, there are plenty of elements that can have an upward or downward impact, but in principle, there is no reason why we cannot do less. So, really the goal of using your history is to be able, when setting your strategy, to say to yourself: “Okay, well this year, I'm going to be able to do better. So how much better can I do? » Once again, always studying your market and your competition.
Then, we will be able to see just as quickly at a glance what worked and what did not work. Say to yourself: “Okay, well there you go, last year I tried this strategy. Well clearly, it's a flop, I have to try something else. » And on the contrary, say to yourself: “I tried that and in fact, I had a great performance, perhaps compared to the year before. » It also allows you to quickly realize periods where we may not have lowered prices enough.
I'll take an example: we're coming out of September and October which, for cities for example, are quite busy periods where there are a lot of business travelers, people traveling for events, conferences, etc., where the trend is quite dynamic with fairly high average prices and a fairly high occupancy rate. And for example, in the month of November, well we obviously enter depending on the city, but we will say in a majority, we enter a period that is a little more slack, more complicated. And in fact, by looking at the history, we can quickly realize whether the average price has not been lowered between the months of September, October and the month of November, and on the other hand that the occupancy rate has fallen . This means that there, clearly, the customer was in fact, quote, afraid of lowering his prices in the month of November which fell into a slower period. But by not lowering its prices, its occupancy rate fell and unfortunately, performance was not there. And these are things that we clearly observe. So here, we can easily see by actually looking at our historical data that, at that time, in fact, we performed less well than in previous months, whereas quite simply if we had decided to lower our price to achieve a higher occupancy rate, well we could have had a better performance.
Then, another element that is important in the history is to take into account its unavailability . So, there can be all types of unavailability. We have the very classic case of the owner who goes to get his property back for a period because, well, he goes there during the summer, during a family celebration, where he lends it to friends. There may also be the case where you had your water heater which blew and, well, by the time it was replaced, well for 3, 4 days, a week, well the item was not available for sale. So that too, you have to take it into account from one year to the next, to keep it in the back of your mind, to say that yes, last year I had such a rate of occupancy, such average price, but be careful, I had a period that was unavailable. And to be able to analyze everything, there is still a very GREAT importance of the data. If your data is not good, is your analysis not good, in fact, in the end, all your conclusions will be flawed. So, in terms of data, you must not take, for example, last year your price per traveler and compare it this year with the net price that you will put on your channel manager. . There's something that won't stick, you'll really be comparing cabbages and bananas. So, it's not possible, it really needs to be reworked.
At J'poster Complet, we have chosen to recover the stay , to keep the cleaning in the stay and to withdraw the commission and the tourist taxes. And then, if necessary, we can recover the average length of stay . We take our household and we divide our household by the average length of stay and there, we find approximately our unit price in sec, the one that was put on the channel manager at the time. And so, you really have to really compare two comparable things, otherwise, you really are going to be wrong.
So at J’poster Complet, we do it like this. And what's more, I was talking to you about unavailability. We also made the choice to create reservations at €0 when there was unavailability. So that in fact, it does not go up, well, it goes up or it does not go up, but it is not taken into account in the occupancy rate and in the calculation of the RevPAR because once again, It will distort the data.
I'll take an example: we're in the middle of high season, you sold your 3-bedroom apartment at an average price of €400 for the month of August, and you say, but that's great, great! In fact, next year, in August, I want to sell it for at least €400, or even more, since I'm telling you that logically, we can do better than the previous year. We can always try to look a little better. Except that in fact, if in your month of August, you had only sold three nights in the month of August during the period of August 15 and the entire rest of the month of August was taken by the owner, in fact, it won't be possible to do it again. Because we were in the best period of the month of August and here, we are in fact completely on distorted data. So, you will have to take this unavailability into account, either isolate it, keep it in the back of your mind in any case, but really compare comparable data. That’s something that’s super important.
There you go, I hope you enjoyed this video. Don't hesitate if you have any questions and then see you soon on I'm posting Complete! 🙂