Spotlight on the South-West

Many of the UK’s coastal regions have been outperforming 2021 across website sessions, transactions and revenue for the first 5 months of 2022. Heading into peak holiday season, we take a look at how hotel website performance for hotels in Cornwall, Dorset and Devon has surpassed pre-pandemic levels in the first five months of 2022.

BUMPER MONTH AT THE START OF THE YEAR

It seems that January was a busy month for booking stays with hotels in the South-West region recording bumper website sessions, bookings and revenue – in fact the highest since the start of the year.  Average order value for website sales was highest in April at £727, compared with a monthly average of £522.38 in 2020 and £769.74 in 2021. With the staycation market expected to remain buoyant for the near future and the traditional peak months ahead, coastal properties are expecting to see similar results over the summer.

Average monthly website sessions for hotels in the South-West region were also at their highest right at the start of the year, with hotels recording an average of 20,680 in January. 

On-line revenue also peaked in January with an average of £115,600, compared to an average monthly on-line revenue in 2020 of £61,928 and £90,833 in 2021.

RE-INVESTING ON-LINE 

While hotels had unsurprisingly cut back on advertising in 2020 and 2021, advertising spend is slowly returning to pre-pandemic levels for hotels in the region. In 2021, an average of £6550 was spent on Google Ads online advertising. This year to date a total of £4090 has already been spent on-line with an average of £1030 in January alone as hotels try to drive more business directly and less via OTA’s.

The South-West has some of the best holiday locations in the UK and the region is well placed to benefit from UK staycations while British holidaymakers choose to continue stay closer to home ahead of the traditional summer season.

If you would like to benchmark your website and digital marketing performance against other hotels in your region, sign up to Hotel Benchmark for your free reports.