Ready or Not, Here it Comes...
Our First High Season
After buying the hotel in August 2017, we were still learning the ropes as we prepared for our first high season. In Costa Rica, high season is defined as the time between about U.S. Thanksgiving and just past Easter, or when it’s winter in the northern hemisphere and summer in the southern hemisphere. The northerners are antsy to get somewhere warm and sunny! During high season, room rates and occupancy are at their highest, so a successful high season is crucial for a successful year.
Marketing
In our first months of ownership our occupancy wasn’t great (read: horrible!), and after losing ½ our units from the storm, it was super important to fill the remaining rooms through high season. That required a major marketing effort on our part.
First, we worked with a Chicago-based digital marketing agency to redesign our whole website and improve our SEO (search engine optimization). We also had someone come take new pictures of the hotel, and we updated all the online travel sites (like Expedia and Booking) so that when visitors wanted to find a luxury Costa Rican hotel, we would begin to show in their searches.
Next, we started working to improve our travel agent relationships. Travel agents had not worked with our hotel in the past because Gomer (the previous owner) was horrible to work with. We set out to change that as we believed a lot of business could be generated through the travel agent channel. We contacted all of them and invited them to come for a FAM trip (a FAM, or familiarization, trip is where a hotel comps a night’s stay and dinner to a travel agent for gaining familiarity with the hotel).
One of the few things Gomer had done well was to establish the hotel’s reputation on TripAdvisor. It was the #1 ranked hotel in our region of Costa Rica when we bought it. (And still is!)
However, we realized our TripAdvisor profile needed improvement too. In addition to updating all the photos and the hotel description, we subscribed to TripAdvisor’s premium service which adds a direct link to the hotel website in the profile. Without this subscription, potential guests who find a hotel they like on TripAdvisor are typically directed to Expedia or Booking to make a reservation and the hotel loses 15-20% of the revenue via commission. The direct link greatly increased the chances that potential guests would make their reservations directly with us.
We also found that in TripAdvisor, Gomer had received some unfavorable reviews over the years and had responded in a way that struck us as rude. Mark realized he could re-write Gomer’s rude responses to these old reviews. Even though those past negative reviews had to remain on our profile, we now stated that the hotel was under new ownership and visitors looking at reviews should disregard those old comments because we were now ‘different’. We set a goal of never having a less than a 5 star review.
Operations
After being at the hotel for a few months, we also reviewed all our operational processes. Many things were working smoothly-if it’s not broke, don’t fix it, right? So even though we might have wanted to change some things that we didn’t like, we decided to wait and work on more pressing issues. The changes we made immediately were focused on the guest experience.
The food at the hotel was already excellent, but the wine selection was disappointing. We got a new wine supplier and revamped our wine list. We arranged for our supplier to come and present a wine tasting so that the bartender and servers (and us-someone had to do it!) could explain the new wines with the food pairings.
We revamped our guest check-in and check-out procedures to make the process faster and easier for guests. We added items to our breakfast and lunch menus. We revised our list of activities and adventures that guests could choose. We also created some special packages like a honeymoon package, dining package, adventure package-everyone loves a good deal, right? Those packages coupled with the marketing and the new operational things got us set up for welcoming guests for our first high season.
Friends and Family
One of the best parts of that first high season was that so many of our friends and family wanted to visit and see what we’d bought. I mean, you know someone that now owns a hotel in Costa Rica, you want to go visit, right? This presented us with a small dilemma.
On one hand, the hotel was our home, and just as you’d invite friends or family to visit your home, we struggled with how or even if we should charge them. On the other hand, it was also our business and source of income, and especially for those wanting to visit in the high season, when rates are the highest, they would be occupying a room that might otherwise gather full rates. We ended up charging our friends and family, but with deep discounts. It still felt awkward for us to see them checking out at the front desk at the end of their stays.
In that first high season of 2017-2018, we were delighted to have a revolving door of friends and family visit.
Our friends Meg and Lex from Colorado visited in November. Then Jack and Natalie from Illinois visited in mid-February.
My 50th birthday happened to fall smack dab in the middle of high season-early March. Four more of our friends from Illinois decided to visit then for a long weekend to help me celebrate and to see our new “home”.
March also coincided with our college kids spring break. Our daughter was finishing her senior year and asked if she could come with some friends for her last college spring break.
I hadn’t seen my kids since Christmas when we were back in the U.S, so of course, there was no doubt. We had to find a place for them all to stay and decide what we might charge ‘poor, starving college students’ who couldn’t afford a luxury spring break stay. (The answer – not much).
Our son chose to visit with just one friend for the week of his spring break. We were completely booked the first night they arrived, so they slept on the massage tables in the spa! My best friend and her two daughters came to visit during that same week for their spring break.
A few weeks later, for Easter, we blocked the entire reservation calendar for some of Mark’s family to visit which occupied the whole hotel for that week. And 2 weeks after that, another couple of friends came to visit for a long weekend.
Having all our friends and family visit was a relief for me as I was super homesick that first year. We had such a great time having everyone visit, showing them around, I barely did any work while they were there, and I was very sad each time someone left.
Although our first high season wasn’t a financial success, we were successful in other ways. We enjoyed time with our friends and family, and we learned how to run a better, busier hotel. We saw the importance of greater marketing efforts and started to see some results of the work we had done in that area. Finally, the operational changes and staff training had our team prepped for the next year.
We were now ready to close the hotel for 5-6 months to rebuild and remodel. Hopefully, we’d be ready to face our second high season welcoming more guests after a successful closure and remodel.
We’d soon see.
So basically a family reunion in the furthest of places! How wonderful you were able to do that though, the memories must be awesome.
Marlo, I am still amazed that the hurricane gods chose to visit that FIRST YEAR of your ownership! Oh man. You really went through it. And half the hotel was ruined. But you pivoted so well–you knew exactly what to do, w/ marketing, new photos, TripAdvisor, fam trips, discount packages. So amazing you guys managed to survive all that (plus all the family visits, haha--just kidding). Really, you guys are survivors for sure.