Spring, demand based pricing and bargains

From nature to surge pricing in one deft hop. The secrets of how it works and how to get the best deals on your holiday ahead of the crowd.

Spring is really starting to show now, the daffodils are still looking resplendent at The Stables, my mission for the autumn is to plant some more!

The Blackthorn hedges are just going over but have kept the bumble bees pottering nicely for the last fortnight, and the perfume is just magic. It is lovely to see the hawthorn in leaf with buds merrily swelling - I have money on them being in flower before May with this mild weather.

The sunny evenings always remind me just how fabulous Rutland is this time of year, someone said to me the other day it is like the Cotswolds but better value and not full of tourists, which was an interesting take, and I can see where they are coming from, but the topography and heritage is so varied, I think it undersells our tiny corner of England!

View over the Eye Brook reservoir which historically kept the steel works at Corby supplied with vital water.

Easter flew by, more sogginess, but farmers everywhere are reminding me that when it eventually stops raining we will be at the beginning of the drought. Cheerful, I know, but they have a point around blocking weather patterns - and El Nino years.

This year has been declared and El Nino which typically means that any changes to the weather are more extreme due to higher ocean temperatures. So the rain is more persistent for longer (wetter!), the temperature is warmer, the winds are stronger (yes it feels very much like someone has turned on a hair drier here - thank you Kathleen), and when it stops raining, and it will we will be in for a longer dry spell. Which can only mean it is the perfect time to book a UK holiday - Forest fires on the continent and all that!

I am often asked for a price for a cottage on any given week and reply “I don’t know!” this is not because I am probably thinking about something else but also because our prices work on demand based pricing. It has had a lot of coverage in the media lately. At the moment bookings for UK holidays are slow, so the demand based pricing software is putting in the lowest prices it can on our website, when the sun comes out, if demand increases, it will move our prices in line with the market - so we are neither too expensive or too cheap. It is an interesting conundrum as a business whether to do “demand based” or not, but with over 70% of the market using this model now, it is difficult to see another viable route which doesn’t leave us looking “out of step”.

The interesting thing for me, is that it offers the opportunity to book at the best price by thinking ahead. At the moment the average booking is made 6 weeks ahead, as people feel there is a level of certainty that far out. In 2022 people were booking 9 weeks ahead! In general people are booking shorter breaks too, you will notice, that depending on your check in day you can often have 7 nights for not much more than 5 nights - again a quirk of the software, but we think it offers guests great value, so haven’t tried to “fix” it. The thing we hear from guests most often is:

“we had a wonderful time but didn’t have time to do X because we loved relaxing in the cottage - so had a very chilled break.”

Sunset view at Castle Chase

People taking a more last minute approach means if you are looking at UK holiday, and you KNOW your available dates, and you are looking at June, July or August there is a great opportunity to grab a bargain at the moment, as the demand based pricing says you are ahead of the crowd in your thinking. You can get the best prices, once others have started to think about it, and look for places to stay., the demand based pricing is seeing that, and starting to move the prices around.

Table ready for family and friends at The Stables

If you are thinking of booking with us (Yippeee - we are delighted!) you will also get the best prices by booking direct through our website. Air b n b, booking.com and cottages.com all charge us chunky commissions as well as the booking fee you pay, which we just can’t absorb (they also drive the demand based pricing model!!). So we look at it the other way and hope that by booking direct it means our guests have a bit left in their holiday budget to do something fun or eat somewhere lovely as an added bonus, which puts more money back in to the local economy rather than rewarding shareholders. We do like a win win!

You can book with us Here