Given the ludicrous hotel prices and lack of staff my two questions are how much money are they making and where is that money going?
The prices had dropped pretty substantially for Saturday, they were around £36 per person for a group of 4 in ATH I think if you booked on Tuesday - some of the "lowest" prices they've had in a good few years.
"Low" prices are great if you need to attract guests to stay, but at the same time you need to have the support in place to provide the service promised to guests. At present, they are nowhere near being able to achieve it in the hotels. We booked a few days earlier at £49 a person, so the best part of £200 on a one night hotel stay. I would still be miffed at forking out £80 for the state of the things last night.
As for where the money is going, I don't think it's as simple as saying that it's because it's going to new developments elsewhere. It's very clear there's a massive, and I mean massive percentage of staff within the hotels and F+B on park that are agency staff. Whilst the staff themselves will be paid the same as direct hires, the agencies will be demanding a cut too. Due to the present situation, that's probably something absolutely extortionate. Add to that the job world being very much an employee's market at the moment where people can just walk out and back into another job if they're not a fan - the increased costs when you factor in having to train every new starter must be absolutely insane.
Of course the agency hires are a very knee jerk, short term panic response. That's because the obsession is to keep the hotels going in the same way that it have before - maximum occupancy for the highest possible cost. However, as the hotel situation is clearly getting much, much worse as the season progresses, there needs to be a real long hard rethink about where they go from here:
- Occupancy - Accept that the current setup does not favour filling the hotels. They do not have the capacity, or the experienced staff to do so at present. Mothball some floors if you have to, but things are completely unsustainable as they are.
- Staffing - Carry out a full review of why they can't get the staff they need as direct hires, so that they can work to run down the reliance on agency staff. They're likely spending considerably more on them than they would on a pay-rise for direct hires to encourage new starters. Their only way out of this is to properly benchmark staff wages and provide pay, benefits, transport options and working hours that are more suitable. As I mentioned, it's an employee's market, and they need to accept that, engage with their current staff and leavers to see their reasons for leaving and try and fix this long term.
- Appeal to different markets - They should be looking at things (to bring back a Covid phrase) -"flatten the curve" a little. At present, they have a spike of people visiting on weekends and school holidays, and probably run at a much lower occupancy and therefore profit on off peak days. If they make progress in sorting out the staffing, what could they do to encourage people to stay during some of those off peak periods? That's where things like more adult settings for relaxing comes in, instead of almost all communal areas being a kids club at present.
- Increase revenue per guest - The park has managed to come up with some really great ideas to increase revenue, whilst dropping capacity. The hotels should be thinking in the same way. Spa and dinner packages for couples? Waterpark and theme park breaks for groups of friends when the unis are off?
- Management Support - They need a whole top team who is very experienced in the hotel world to cover the place 24/7. As Ian mentioned, the current team in general seems to be very young. They need to have experience in there to be able to properly identify and manage issues when they crop up. At present, any problems seems to result in panic stations, with little methodical thinking into how to get try and pull things back from the brink.
There's already a situation where a large percentage of guests are returning for either free or having things substantially discounted because their previous stay was so poor, further impacting revenue. There is
zero point in doing such discounts/free stays if the issues they experienced the first time round are not rectified, or as we saw last night - getting progressively worse.
@AstroDan spoke to a guest in the long bar queue yesterday who had their stay for free last night following a poor experience the year before. So that's zero profit on the room and little profit from their spending on the likes of the bar because they can't get served. You've gained nothing as a business from that compensation, because all the guest has seen is the same things are happening. They're even more unlikely to return again and they'll be making sure their friends know how poor value the place is too. It's doing the complete opposite of what that free stay was intended to do.
Sure, lots of this will cost a lot of money to implement. But the longer this goes on, the longer to alienate your customer base. They needed action years ago to stop the rot, but Covid and Brexit has accelerated the decline to the point where they really do need to make some big, substantial changes and some really blue sky thinking to turn things around.
