The season looks fine on pace. Is it really?
Room nights on the books, a weekly booking pace, a cancellation rate and the late trade that always turns up. The model turns a pace into an occupancy range, and shows that the cheapest way to fill the season is not to sell more of it.
Operations Intermediate Monte Carlo Pro engine
After you install, this is the model to open.
Will the Season Fill?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
This one runs on a Pro engine, and every free install includes five full-quality runs on your own numbers, shared across all five Pro engines rather than five for each. After that, Pro is $199/year.
The answer
- Misses its break-even
- 48% of 20,000 seasons fall under the 78% occupancy it needs
- Median occupancy
- 78.2% against the 78% needed: a coin flip, not a plan
- Room revenue
- $259K to $316K P5 to P95, mean $287K
Twenty-six rooms, an 84-night season, 2,184 room nights to sell and 940 of them already on the books nine weeks out. At the current pace of 82 room nights a week, a 9% cancellation rate and the 210 late room nights that always turn up, the season lands at 79.5% occupancy against the 78% it needs. That looks like a season that is fine. Click Run.
Occupancy averages 78.4% with a median of 78.3%, a P5 of 70.7% and a P95 of 86.2%, and the falls-short flag comes back at about 0.48. The season is a coin flip. Room revenue averages about $287,400 with a P5 of about $259,400. Two things here are worth more than the headline. The first is that the cap on room nights sold never binds. In ten thousand seasons the inn never sells out, not once, and the mean occupancy is identical whether the cap is in the model or not.
That is a finding rather than a modeling footnote: the constraint on this business is demand and not rooms, so every conversation about adding capacity is the wrong conversation, and nobody has to worry about turning people away. The second is where the leverage sits. The tornado ranks booking pace first at 0.82, cancellations second at -0.43 and the walk-in trade third at 0.34, and the second run turns that ranking into a decision.
Take deposits. Change the cancellation rate to a triangular 0.03, 0.05 and 0.09 and rerun: occupancy rises from 78.4% to 82.2%, the chance of falling short drops from 0.48 to 0.19, and revenue rises by about $14,100. Nothing about the marketing changed, nobody sold another room night, and the season went from a coin flip to 80 chances in 100.
A deposit policy is worth more here than nine more weeks of the pace you already have, which is not where anyone looks first. What the model cannot see: it holds one pool of room nights, so it cannot tell you that the weekends are already full and the Tuesdays never will be, and that is exactly where the last fifth of a season actually lives.
It also assumes the late trade is independent of the pace, when a quiet season is usually quiet at both ends. To make it yours, take today's real figure off your booking system, set the pace from the last six weeks rather than the last six months, and set the cancellation range from your own history rather than from the rate you quote.
The model
It arrives on a tab called Template: Will the Season Fill:
| Rooms | 26 |
| Nights in the season (count) | 84 |
| Room nights available | 2,184 |
| Room nights already on the books | 940 |
| Weeks left before the season starts | 9 |
| New bookings per week from here (room nights) | 82 |
| Cancellation rate across the whole book | 0.09 |
| Room nights booked by the time the season starts | 1,678 |
| Room nights held after cancellations | 1,527 |
| Walk-in and late room nights during the season | 210 |
| Room nights sold | 1,737 |
| Occupancy | 0.7953 |
| Average room rate ($) | 168 |
| Room revenue ($) | 291,812.6 |
plus 2 more rows on the sheet.
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- Should weekends be staffed like any other day?Weekday and Weekend Are Not the Same Business
- What is the standing recipe costing you a tonne?The Cheapest Blend That Meets the Spec
- Will the changeover fit inside the weekend?How Much Buffer Does the Changeover Need?
- Same average fill. So why is one supplier a risk?Which Supplier Is More Consistent?
- Two crews average the same. Is one of them better?Four Shifts, Ranked Output, One Question
- Does the new layout help on every shift?Layout and Shift: Which One Moves Output?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Monte Carlo simulation.