Foreign Perspectives

Whilst we’re in the midst of the peak of the holiday season at the moment, as usual we’re also in the peak season for noshows and cancellations.

The cancellations are understandable. It’s very difficult to get booked in locally at the moment so people grab the first place they see even if it isn’t in the location they really want to be. Then they’ll cancel later if they get something closer to their ideal spot. For instance, earlier today out of the 66 hotels within 30km of Perpignan, just 2 had rooms available and we know that one of those only had rooms available because of cancellations earlier in the day (‘cos one of them is us). If we were braver, we’d delibrerately overbook the rooms as the larger hotels do to allow for the expected high level of cancellations.

However, the noshows are usually puzzling. Just last night we received an e-mail from a group that look like they’ll not be arriving now to confirm that they were coming and that they were looking forward to seeing the area. If they’d cancelled yesterday, it would have cost them nothing, now it’s going to cost them getting on for EUR 150 and we’re sitting with several empty rooms.