Following on our theme of "what are people booking now" we are looking at booking variances across a few different dimensions for the period from boxing day to now vs 2019 (as I think you will all agree 2020 was just little bit unusual)

All 3 graphs are showing variance this year vs 2019.

Booking Variance by Season​

Firstly, looking at season there is a clear shift, to more Winter and Xmas (period) bookings.

Explained in part by the next chart which breaks down this variance into weeks until departure (lead time).

Variance by number of weeks to departure​

In this graph we can see two distinct zones (the period to the right after week 40) is quite low volume so the trends can be safely ignored. This is showing quite clearly a shift to shorter lead time bookings, probably driven by consumer confidence in what’s going to happen in the longer term.

Variance by Region​

The regional view is interesting there are some clear shifts present here too. We probably need to ask why a few more questions to understand what’s going on here. Some of it will be explainable by shifts in regional stock volumes.

Other possible causes could be people less willing to travel further or it could just be related again to the season they’re booking in, i.e. people travel further generally for their summer break that the winter.

These shifts to shorter lead time bookings could be seen as positive by the industry. If these shifts are driving incremental bookings i.e., bookings we might not otherwise received, then we can reasonably still expect the longer lead time bookings to come at some point.

Here at Sykes that is what we are seeing in terms of increased occupancy for Winter with the view that Summer will come later and be strong for demand.​

As I have constantly said, we operate in a supply constraint market.

In next weeks blog post, we will dig a little more and attempt to answer the question on incrementality.

If you would like us to deep dive on any area or have questions, please post in the comments

About Sykes​

The data and techniques shared in this article were produced by the development team at Sykes. If you are a talented Data Scientist, Analyst or Developer please check out our current vacancies.

In this post we are having a look at what people are booking right now. For bookings made since the start of the month we are looking at how they break down in terms of region and season.

In terms of season we can see most people are booking short lead time (the remaining few months of this year and the Winter months of 2022) these two bubbles combined account for nearly 54% of our bookings.

Regionally, The lakes, North Wales and Cornwall are our most popular destinations right now.

In our next post we will dive into this a little further and look into how this compares to previous years

About Sykes​

The data and techniques shared in this article were produced by the development team at Sykes. If you are a talented Data Scientist, Analyst or Developer please check out our current vacancies.

This article attempts to give an insight to how we deploy code at Sykes, using Bitbucket and AWS

About Sykes​

The techniques shared in this article were produced by the development team at Sykes. We are always pushing for more automated and more secure builds in our CI process. If you are a talented Data Scientist, Analyst or Developer please check out our current vacancies.

The experience of our customers on the web is a top priority for us and is one of the ways we stay competitive. Our goal is to match customers to their perfect holiday cottage experience and delight at each stage along the way. Getting the data pipeline to fuel this innovation is key and, in this post, we explain more about why and how.

This article gives some insights into the latest #FridayData post from Sykes Cottages' CEO Graham Donaghue. I'm hoping the article is equally interesting for both football and data fanatics.

About Sykes​

The data and techniques shared in this article were produced by the development team at Sykes. We have used a combination of various open source technology including ChartJS, PHP, GIMP and SQL. If you are a talented Data Scientist, Analyst or Developer please check out our current vacancies.

This article is potentially useful for you if you would like to know more about the latest #FridayData post from Sykes Cottages' CEO Graham Donaghue. There is something for you here if you're a manager wanting to know a bit more detail or potentially a bit more technical or a data worker who is interested in the techniques we used to create the viz and mine the data behind it.

About Data and Analytics at Sykes​

The data and techniques shared in this article were produced by the Data and Analytics team at Sykes. We have used a combination of various technology including Tableau, Python (NLP) and SQL. If you are a talented Data Scientist, Analyst or Developer please check out our current vacancies.