When do guests book a holiday home in Belgium?

How far ahead a guest books

Half of our requests arrive more than eighty days before the stay. The average sits higher, at ninety-seven days, and that gap tells you something: a handful of guests look very far ahead and pull the average up. The latest request came in two days before arrival, the furthest three hundred and fifty-five days.

Broken down, it becomes more useful. Four of the sixty-four requests came in within the week before arrival, nineteen within the month and thirty-five within the quarter. Twelve guests were looking beyond six months. Last minute is therefore a small minority here, and not a channel you build a strategy on.

That has a consequence for your calendar. If it only runs six months out, you miss the furthest group without noticing, because a guest who sees no dates asks no question. No notification arrives for a request that was never made, and that is what makes this kind of loss invisible.

One honest caveat about all of these figures: there are sixty-four of them. That is enough to base a median on and too little to compare one month against another. A single busy property can shift the picture, which is why you see medians here and not percentages to two decimal places.

Three nights, and a bigger group than you would expect

The typical stay runs three nights. The average is 3.8 nights, again lifted by a few long stays: two of them ran nineteen and twenty-one nights. The most requested length is two nights, which accounts for twenty-five of the sixty-four requests.

A full week was requested seven times, roughly one in nine. Setting a seven-night minimum therefore rules out nearly all the demand we see. As a seasonal rule for July and August that can be a deliberate choice; as a fixed rule all year round it is not.

Our hosts are largely set up well for this. A hundred and thirty-eight of the two hundred and twenty-two properties online ask for two nights as a minimum, sixty-six accept a single night and fifteen ask for three. Only three properties ask for more than three nights, and three nights is exactly the median of the requests.

Group size is the surprise. The median request is for ten people and the largest for forty-three. At the same time, eighteen of the sixty-four requests were for two people, so this is not a smooth curve but two audiences: couples for a weekend and large parties. Eighty-three of our properties take ten guests or more.

Friday is the arrival day

Thirty-three of the sixty-four requests start on a Friday, which is more than half. Monday follows with ten and Thursday with nine. Saturday, the day the rental world often treats as obvious, gets five. In a country where people come for three nights, that makes more sense than it appears at first glance.

The calendar links say the same thing, and they count occupied nights rather than bookings, because a link also blocks whatever a host closes himself. Across the coming twelve months, Friday and Saturday together account for 38.2 per cent of those occupied nights, whereas an even spread across the week would land at 28.6 per cent. The weekend is therefore not only when guests arrive, it is also the centre of gravity of the stay itself.

What our hosts allow lines up well with that. A hundred and fourteen of the two hundred and twenty-two properties allow arrival on any day. A hundred and eight limit it to a fixed set of days, and a hundred and five of those have Friday in that set. Three properties do not allow Friday.

Twelve properties allow exactly one arrival day: eleven times Friday and once Saturday. For a property let by the week that is a defensible choice, and it does cost demand. If Friday is not on your list, it is worth checking that once on purpose rather than leaving it as it stands.

What that means for your calendar and your rates

Through the calendar links we see eleven thousand three hundred and sixty-eight occupied nights across the coming twelve months, spread over a hundred and eighteen properties. Note what that figure is and is not: a link also blocks nights a host closes himself, so these are occupied nights and not bookings.

You read the spread across the months with that same caution. October sits at fifty-two per cent of days occupied and September next year at sixteen, but that is mostly distance rather than season: a calendar fills up as the date comes closer. What sits on top of that is still visible: May stands out against April and June, and July and August both run clearly above June and above September.

For your rates, the horizon is what counts. A hundred and twenty-one of our properties online have no seasons entered and work with one fixed rate, which works perfectly well. Of the hundred and one that do have them, the middle one reaches four hundred and sixty-one days ahead, but thirty-two stop within half a year and ten have expired entirely.

What happens then is the most annoying kind of error, because it stays invisible. Your listing does not go dark, it falls back on your base rate. A guest looking in March at a Christmas week then sees your low-season price and requests it at that price. So enter your seasons at least a year ahead.

Frequently asked questions

Read next