It’s been a very busy year, we've released 13 updates made up of over 1136 ‘commits’ which are in turn made up of thousands of lines of code additions, tweaks and changes. We’re delighted to see continued success from all of our clients and can’t wait to develop new features to help everyone market, manage and optimise their holiday rental businesses next year.
The volume of data we process each day means we are able to build up interesting visualisations, trends and we get to observe the performance of both our platform and our client’s sites. We’ve put together some of the more interesting parts of our anonymised data below:
Booking Pricing
The average price of a holiday rental booking in 2015 according to our data was £1202, the peak average price was in June at nearly £1700.
Booking Volume
Bookings peaked in January with customers booking their Summer breaks, there are two other small increases during June (with people booking Winter breaks) and late Autumn for the following Spring.
We’ll be employing this data in the future to help produce rate maps, this will help to show how far in advance people are booking at any point in the year and identify shifting patterns in the demand for any given day of the year. Coupling rate map data with average pricing data and other signals will allow us to suggest price increases and decreases that will help to optimise overall property occupancy.
Property Diversity
A multitude of clients have joined Scrumpy this year meaning we’re now producing websites for a variety of different types of property including a Treehouse, a Railway Carriage and Ski Chalet’s. The most popular type of property on Scrumpy in 2015 was a typical ‘House’, followed very closely by the ‘Lodge’.
It will be interesting to see this data change over time as the demand for unique holiday experiences increases as the market grows. We are already seeing owners expand into glamping, building small cosy lodges in their grounds and constructing unique experiences such as the fantastic new ‘Railway Carriage’ from Lavender Hill Holidays.
A Sneak Peek at 2016
Next year we’ll be launching a number of new features including - chargeable extras and services, further additions and improvements to our channel management system and dozens of other features, usability tweaks and overall improvements. We welcome any of your ideas that could help minimise paperwork, optimise existing business processes or make your lives as property owners easier and your businesses more successful.
We’ve got an exciting new project that's going to help massively increase the reach of our clients properties, increase the number of incoming enquiries and your overall exposure. It’s underwraps right now but we are aiming to launch it mid 2016!
Referral Program
Dont forget that we’ll give you 10% of the business generated by any clients you refer to us off your scrumpy bill. We are seeing a good uptake already with several clients reducing their monthly bill. Our referral program even offers the possibility that we could end up paying you each month! If you know of anyone with a holiday property whether they’re just starting out or whether they are an established agency we’d love to talk to them, just forward their details onto us at: info@scrumpy.co.uk.
Happy Christmas!
From all of us here at Scrumpy, we would like to wish you Happy Christmas and every success for 2016! We are going to be leaving the office on Wednesday the 23rd at around 1PM, but we’ll be back on the 4th of January at 9AM.
We are still monitoring our emails during the Christmas period, system uptime monitoring and automatic error detection systems are in place to notify us of any issues and help us maintain our 99.9% uptime.
We look forward to seeing you in 2016 for what should be the busiest month of the year!
Merry Christmas!