At OwnerRez, we track a lot of data about your bookings -- where they come from, when they were made, how many guests were there, how many nights they stayed, etc. We believe that you own your data and should be able to export it at any time, so we provide Excel and CSV exports of all main data elements -- Bookings, Quotes, Inquiries, Properties, etc.
We're taking a step further and providing reporting views for these statistics about your vacation rental properties, analysis that will give you actionable metrics to help increase bookings and increase profit per bookings. This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts about how to slice and dice your data to get a look at different perspectives.
Today, I'm going to show off the booking statistics and occupancy reports, particularly the Days in Advance and % Occupied reports. You can find these reports in your account under the Reports tab -- the Bookings statistics and Occupancy reports. Separately these reports are full of good information, but together they can help analyze your current bookings and future bookings to see if your rates are about right, too high, or too low.
The Days in Advance report provides a measure of how many days before the arrival date the booking was booked. It shows the average number of days between booked and arrival. A last minute booking might be 2 or 3 days, while a large planned event might be booked months in advance.
Here's an example report for this year:
Notice the variance between properties in the same month, and between different times of the year. Larger properties tend to book farther in advance, because larger parties have more planning to do and think farther ahead.
Very high days in advance numbers (note those 150-200 days in the example) indicate that your prices might be too low. If people are booking hundreds of days ahead, you're probably the lowest comperable price in the area, so you can increase that price. If its nearing high season and you haven't booked up, you can always discount the rates back down to fill up the calendar.
In this example, the owner would be well served to add a super high season in summer and nudge up the holiday rates.
The % Occupied report shows the percentage of booked nights to not booked nights. You can break this down by different time periods to give an idea of which months or years book more solid than others.
Here's an example report for this year:
This is a pretty typical level of occupancy -- more in the summer on season, less in the winter except holidays. Notice how the same properties with high days in advance from the other report (names removed to protect the guilty) also have high occupancy percentages. This confirms that raising the rates is a good idea.
You can also see that dead winter months are lower (Jan, Feb). This could be a good target for discounts and/or newsletters encouraging repeat guests.
