Spring holidays finish on Sunday 11 October and Term 4 begins on Monday 12 October. For the second time in a fortnight your visitor changes completely. The families go home, and what replaces them is couples, retirees, cyclists, event visitors and midweek travellers who have been waiting for the school holidays to end.
At the same time something less visible happens. Parents who have just spent a fortnight travelling sit down and start thinking about Christmas. October is when summer gets booked, and the week the holidays end is when that thinking begins.
Peak summer bookings in regional Australia are commonly locked in eight to twelve weeks ahead. For Christmas and the first week of January, that means October and early November. If your December and January availability is not published and bookable now, you are not in the consideration set for the period that carries your year.
1. Publish summer today. Dates, rates, minimum stays, what is included. Not a waitlist, not an enquiry form. Bookable. This is the single highest value job of your October.
2. Rewrite the top of your website for adults. For the last month your headline has been talking to families. From Monday it should be talking to couples and midweek travellers. One paragraph, ten minutes, and it changes who feels welcome.
3. Email the people who just visited. They liked you enough to come. Tell them summer is open before you tell anyone else. It is the warmest list you will ever have and it costs nothing to use.
4. Sell the quiet. Mid October in the South West is one of the best times of the year to be here and almost empty. Spring weather, no crowds, no school holiday pricing. Say it plainly.
Your booking system calendar: Open December and January and look at what a customer sees. If dates are blocked, unpriced or missing a minimum stay, fix that before you spend a dollar on promotion.
A simple past guest email: Three sentences. Thanks for visiting, summer dates are open, here is the link. Send it this week while the memory is fresh.
1. Publish and price your December and January availability
2. Update your website headline and hero copy for an adult audience
3. Email everyone who visited during the school holidays
4. Post one piece of content selling mid October as the quiet season
5. Update your Google Business Profile hours now that the holiday period has ended
The businesses that complain about a slow January are usually the ones that were not bookable in October. Availability is not an administrative task. It is the first step of the sale, and most operators are late to it every single year.
You have a warm list, a fresh set of photographs and a region that is about to get quiet and beautiful. Publish summer, tell the people who just left, and change your language for the audience arriving Monday. Three jobs, one afternoon.
Worried your summer will fill late again? If you want this looked at properly, book a strategy call.
Call 0477 435 422
On Sunday night the South West empties. On Monday morning it refills with a completely different person, and almost nobody changes a word of their marketing to reflect that.
Six things to do in the handover week.
1. Make summer bookable, not enquirable
There is a large difference between summer availability that exists and summer availability someone can pay for at ten at night. Peak bookings in regional Australia typically land eight to twelve weeks out, which puts Christmas squarely in this month. Every day your December is not priced and live is a day you are not being considered.
2. Change who your website is talking to
If your homepage still leads with families, kids and school holidays, it is now speaking to nobody. The person arriving from Monday is more likely to be a couple, a retired traveller or someone riding the Cape to Cape next weekend. Rewrite the first paragraph. It takes ten minutes and it changes the whole read.
3. Use the warmest list you will ever have
Everyone who visited in the last fortnight already knows they like your business. Email them this week, thank them, and tell them summer is open. Not a newsletter. Three sentences and a link. This is the cheapest booking available to you and most operators never send it.
4. Sell the emptiness
Mid October is one of the best times of year to be here and one of the quietest. Warm enough, green still, no queues, no holiday pricing. Plenty of people would choose that over January if anyone bothered to tell them it exists. Make the quiet the offer rather than apologising for it.
5. Reset your hours and your profile
If you extended hours for the holidays, change them back on Google before someone drives out to a closed door. While you are in there, add the photos you took while the place was full. A profile updated in the same week as the season changes looks like a business paying attention.
6. Look at what the fortnight actually taught you
Which days filled, which offer people took, what everyone asked at the counter, which post got saved. Twenty minutes of honest review now is worth more than any amount of planning in December, because this is the only recent data you have about how real customers behave with your business.
Your action for the week
Publish your December and January availability so that a stranger could book it tonight without contacting you. Then send three sentences to everyone who visited in the last two weeks telling them it is open.
Weekly South West Visibility Ideas is a series for tourism, accommodation, and hospitality operators across the South West of Western Australia.
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