Big Events - Mixing Business & Pleasure

ORIGINAL BLOGGED BY THEBOOKRUNNER.COM - Stephen Turner

As some of you might know, last weekend was V festival and along with enjoying some great music on Sunday with Catherine, we enjoyed some great returns on our serviced apartments.
 
While we sat back, relaxed & watched the main stage including Emeli Sandé, Ellie Goulding & Clean Bandit, our systemised and outsourced business created us an income with none of our time.
 
While Jason Derulo played ‘Wiggle, Wiggle, Wiggle’ and our little one wiggled in Catherine’s belly, we didn’t have a second thought about our business as we knew we had set-up everything for it to run smoothly without us.
 
Our serviced accommodation business currently takes me approximately 4 hours to manage a week, 2 hours meeting with our Property Manager, discussing mainly growth & scaling, and another 2 hours responding to investors/finance companies, analysing the figures and answering a few questions from the team. I’m still working to get this time down so I can manage all three of our businesses in this 4 hours and I am aiming to achieve this in the next couple of weeks.
 
This is what is possible, with focussed work and a clear vision, for anyone who wants it. You just need to choose and commit to doing it.
 
Anyway, getting off my ‘Inspirational Iguana’, my ‘Motivational Monkey’ (I couldn’t think of any better animal alliterations like ‘High Horse’) back to V weekend and what it generated for our business:

• 100% Occupancy in Chelmsford & Colchester
• Almost £7K in guest bookings for the 3 nights
• Averaging almost £200 per night across all properties and locations
• Our biggest booking was £1580 for 3 nights (full capacity)
• One sick guest requiring new bed sheets – there’s always one!!!

 
In summary a great weekend for our business that required some thorough preparation to ensure it went smoothly. To help those that are running SAs or considering this strategy, here are my Top 7 Tips (DANCERS) when it comes to big events in your area:

1. Dates:  Find out the dates of all big events in your area (and close by – we had people stay in Colchester going to V Festival in Chelmsford), put them in your calendar and diarise to repeat each year – along with the date the organisers release the event dates and ticket sales (these maybe different)
2. Availability:  You can either then block the dates until nearer the time or increase prices as soon as you find out so you can ensure you are fully booked up
3. Nick Advertising: Ok, not stealing it but piggy-backing off it. Use the events marketing, for your marketing. When they release information, share it along with a link for customers to book your SA, hashtag the event in to posts and advertise it within your email campaigns. (We didn’t need to do this as we were fully booked for the weekend well ahead of time.)
4. Communication: Effective communication with your guests is needed. This includes repeat communication informing them that your apartment is not a place to party, especially as soon as they book so they are aware that charges will apply for noise complaints, mess and damages.
5. Enjoyment: For the guests & the business. A polite reminder just before the event, reminding them to respect your apartment and the neighbours, not to bring the party back with them (“Leave V at V” were my Property managers words) and to enjoy their stay.
6. Repeat Business: Try to tap up repeat business straight away asking whether they would like to secure their stay next year at this year’s prices, or create a follow up reminding them of their stay and the event with a different offer to book.
7. Systems: Our guests had signed contracts before they checked in, were made aware of check-in details, emergency numbers and details of their stay before check-in. Their credit card details were on file, we had a system in place for the cleaners to report damages or excessive mess. We also had the process in place to invoice the guests for the damages that resulted in payment the same week, follow up systems for the guests to be encouraged to leave reviews and finally the system in place to ensure after a busy weekend, all apartments were available and ready for the bookings on Monday as if nothing had happened.

 
So that’s my DANCERS – 7 top tips to having a successful SA business during a big event.
 
As always, I hope you find it useful and you can take some learning to implement in your business. Please ask any questions or share how you get on with big events in your areas.
 
Enjoy your week everyone,
 
Steve