Six numbers worth working out before you price next season

Ask most operators how the season went and you get an honest, useful, entirely unquantified answer. It was busy. July was mad. The weather helped. We were down on last year but the good weeks were better.

All of that is true and none of it tells you what to charge in April.

There is a version of the end-of-season review that is about draining pipes and locking sheds. This is the other one: the hour or two with the numbers that decides what next season looks like commercially. It is the part most sites skip, not through laziness but because the figures live in three places and nobody has the appetite in October.

This is a short list of what is actually worth calculating. Six numbers, what each one changes, and how to get at them without a finance background.

Do it now, not in January

There is a narrow window for this, and it is open at the moment.

Right now your season data is complete, or nearly. You can still remember which weeks were difficult and why. And the January booking rush, when next summer's reservations start arriving in volume, has not started.

By the second week of January, two things have gone wrong. Your memory of the shoulder weeks has faded into a general impression, and you are taking bookings for a season whose prices you set without ever looking properly at the last one.

The review is worth more in September than it is in February, and it takes the same amount of time.

Numbers that describe a season, and numbers that change one

Most reporting tells you what happened. Total revenue. Total bookings. Nights sold.

Those are worth knowing and they settle arguments, but they rarely change a decision on their own. Revenue was up 6% does not tell you whether to raise midweek rates, whether to keep paying commission, or whether the shoulder season is a pricing problem or a marketing one.

The six below are chosen because each one points at a specific decision.

1. Occupancy by month, not for the year

An annual occupancy figure is close to useless.

Say you finished at 62%. That could be a site that is completely full for eight weeks and nearly empty either side, or one that runs steadily around two thirds full from April to October. Those are opposite businesses with opposite problems, and the same headline number.

Break occupancy down by month, or by week if you can face it. The shape is the finding.

What it changes. A sharp peak with thin shoulders is a demand problem in May and September and a pricing problem in July and August. A flat curve at 60% is a demand problem everywhere, and the answer is more likely marketing than rates. You cannot tell which you have from the annual figure.

2. Direct share versus channel share

What proportion of your bookings came through your own route, rather than through a listing site?

Most operators guess this, and most guess high. Bookings that arrive by phone after a guest found you on a marketplace feel direct and are not, at least not in the sense that matters.

What it changes. This number sets the value of everything you might do about commission. At 80% direct, a commission conversation is a rounding error and your effort belongs elsewhere. At 30% direct, it is the single biggest lever you have. The commission calculator will put an annual figure on shifting even part of it, using your own numbers rather than a generic percentage.

It also tells you something uncomfortable and useful: if you cannot produce this number at all, you have been making channel decisions blind.

3. Average booking value, and whether it moved

Total revenue divided by number of bookings, compared with last year.

Then split it, because the aggregate hides the interesting part. A rise can come from higher rates, from longer stays, from bigger parties, or from more extras. Those are four different things and only one of them is a price increase.

What it changes. If average value rose while occupancy fell, you may have priced yourself past a segment you wanted. If it fell while occupancy rose, you may have discounted business you would have got anyway. If it rose because stays got longer, that is worth knowing before you set a minimum-stay rule that breaks it.

4. Extras revenue per booking

Total extras revenue divided by total bookings.

This is usually a small number and it is usually the easiest one on the list to move, because it needs no additional guests, no additional marketing spend and no additional pitches. The same bookings simply carry more.

What it changes. If firewood, hampers, pet fees and hookups are collected on arrival rather than sold at the point of booking, the number is almost always lower than it should be. Guests spend more when they are already in a buying frame of mind than when they are tired and arriving at seven in the evening. If you are running well under a pound or two per booking, that is a route to more revenue that does not require a single extra guest.

5. Booking lead time

The median gap between the date a booking is made and the date the guest arrives.

Take the median rather than the average, because a handful of people booking eleven months out will drag an average somewhere unhelpful.

What it changes. Two decisions. First, when you open next year's diary: if half your summer books before March, a diary that opens in February is leaving money on the table. Second, whether and when to discount. If most of your August is sold by the end of February, a March discount is a gift to people who had already decided to come.

Lead time also varies by accommodation type, and often sharply. Pods and lodges usually book further ahead than touring pitches. One number for the whole site can hide two very different patterns.

6. The weeks you were completely full

Count them. Nights or weeks, whichever is easier.

This is the number nobody calculates and it is the most direct evidence you have about pricing. A week at 100% occupancy is a week where demand exceeded supply, which means the price was below the market-clearing level. That is not a failure, and running full is a perfectly reasonable goal. But it is pricing headroom, and it is measurable.

What it changes. If you were completely full for six weeks, those six weeks can carry a rate increase without losing volume. If you were never full at all, a rate increase anywhere needs a much more careful argument.

There is a second finding buried in this one. Most sites have no record of how many enquiries they turned away when full, which means the size of the unmet demand is invisible. If that is you, the fix is not analysis, it is a habit: note the turn-aways next season, even roughly. It takes seconds and it is the only way to know how much headroom you actually had.

Where these numbers come from

Four of the six come straight out of reporting: occupancy, revenue, average booking value and channel split. If you use Keydesk, reporting covers those, and the booking ledger exports as CSV when you want to do something the reports do not.

Two of them, lead time and extras per booking, usually need the underlying booking data and a spreadsheet. That is true of most systems, not just this one. Export the ledger, add a column for the gap between booking date and arrival date, and take the median.

If your bookings live in a spreadsheet or a diary rather than a system, all six are still available. They take an afternoon rather than an hour, and the afternoon is worth it.

None of this needs accounting software or a finance background. It needs your booking data in one place and somewhere quiet to sit.

What to do with the answers

Resist the urge to change six things at once. A season is one data point, and if you adjust rates, minimum stays, channel mix and your opening date simultaneously, you will have no idea next October which change did what.

Pick the two clearest signals. Usually that means the months where occupancy was weakest, and whichever of the six numbers surprised you most, because the surprising one is where your assumptions were furthest from reality.

Then write down what you expect to happen. Not formally, just a line in a notebook: raising August midweek by eight per cent, expect occupancy to hold. Next September you will have something to check against, and the review gets sharper every year you do it.

If you want a more structured version of this, the operator scorecard covers twelve measures across direct revenue, pricing, booking admin and data readiness, with a printable sheet and a 90-day plan. This post is the fast version of the same idea.

For the pricing decisions themselves, how to price campsite pitches by season works through building a seasonal rate ladder with a worked example.

The other decision this window is for

There is a second reason this time of year matters.

Late September to early November is also the least disruptive window to change booking systems, for the same underlying reason: your forward book is at its annual low and next season's reservations have not started arriving in volume. If this review turns up numbers you could not produce, or that took a day to assemble from three places, that is worth noticing while you still have the room to do something about it.

When to switch booking systems works through the timing properly, including how to find your own window rather than taking a general recommendation.

But start with the six numbers. Most operators find at least one of them is not what they assumed, and that alone is usually worth the hour.