Covering the season without growing headcount: what to prepare a month ahead

The season does not give two warnings. It starts when it starts, with the booking that lands on a Tuesday in May and the three behind it, and the team handling them is exactly the same team that answered four emails a day in February.

What follows is what can be up and running before the first peak. None of it gets built mid-season: it gets built when there is time, and most of it works again next year.

Why hiring for the peak does not add up

The arithmetic looks simple: if July brings three times the work, you hire people for July. The trouble is that the peak lasts weeks and the structure lasts months.

Hiring for the peak leaves you with structure for the trough. In November you have the same payroll and a third of the volume, and that gap is paid in two places: on the payroll itself and in the awkward conversation in January. Not hiring has the opposite cost, and a less visible one: someone who asks about a room and gets no answer within two hours books somewhere else, and does not write to tell you.

There is a third route, and it is the one that works: cover the role all year and change what it contains month by month. It sounds like a shortcut and it is not. It is what lets the person already know your booking engine, your cancellation policy and your tone by June, instead of learning all three with a full queue.

What makes this sector different: the incident has a clock on it

A shop that takes a day to answer an email loses a customer. An accommodation business that takes a day to answer a flight change loses a night, and sometimes earns a two-star review.

Here almost everything that comes in has a clock on it: a late arrival, a room that is not ready, a transfer that never turned up, a name change on a booking that leaves tomorrow. None of those cases accepts «I will get back to you when I can». And they arrive through four places at once —email, the portal you sell on, the phone and direct messages— sometimes in two or three languages, mixed in with pre-booking enquiries, which are the ones bringing in new money.

That mix is the real problem with the peak. It is not the volume: it is that inside the volume there are two-minute jobs and two-hour jobs, and with no written criteria whoever is answering treats them all the same, in the order they arrive.

What can be running a month ahead

A month before the first peak, with the season still quiet, four things can be closed off. Each one is an afternoon's work.

• The answers that repeat. Take last season's conversations and group them by question: availability, the price of a specific date, cancellation terms, check-in and check-out times, parking, pets, extra beds. There will be fewer groups than you expect. Write the answer in your own tone, including the bad version: what you say when there is no availability, and what you offer instead.
• The edges of the cancellation policy. You already have the published policy. What is almost never written down is what sits next to it: what happens with a cancellation due to illness, what happens with a date change into a more expensive season, up to what amount a refund can be issued without asking. Those decisions are yours and they take five minutes in April. In August they take an hour, with the guest waiting.
• The real figures, not the published ones. Which room types overlap, which rate is published on each channel, the cut-off time for an unannounced late arrival. If whoever answers does not have that in front of them, they promise whatever the website says and the problem comes back the next day.
• The list of what is not decided without you. Write it as cases, not as a principle: a discount outside the rate card, an overlap between bookings, a complaint that mentions a third party, a group, a company invoice. Anything not on that list gets answered without asking.

With those four written down, bookings and incidents can genuinely be delegated, since whoever handles them applies your criteria rather than their own. That is exactly what a customer support role covers.

Last-minute bookings

The last-minute booking carries the best margin and gets the worst handling, since it arrives when everything else is already at full stretch.

It has one feature worth exploiting: it is almost never a complicated question. It is «do you have anything for tonight?», «how late can I arrive?», «does the price include breakfast?». Those are one-minute answers when they are written down and fifteen-minute answers when they have to be looked up. And when the person answering is the same person at the desk with three guests in front of them, that booking is lost without anybody counting it: it shows up on no dashboard, since it never came into existence.

So the first work to delegate in season is not the hardest work, it is the work that cannot wait: pre-booking enquiries, changes, cancellations and the incidents that arrive in writing. The rest can hold for an hour. That cannot.

Reviews, which arrive once everybody has gone

Reviews are the second half of the season and almost nobody budgets for them. They show up after the guest has left, when the team is exhausted and nobody feels like rereading a complaint.

Two things work here, and neither is complicated. First: answer all of them, the good ones included, with a reply that is not the same reply four times over. Second, and this is the one worth money: write down what people complain about. Three reviews mentioning the same noise, the same photo that promises more than there is, or the same breakfast problem are not three opinions. They are a fact about your operation that someone is handing you for free.

And there is a link that goes unnoticed: a good share of bad seasonal reviews are not about the accommodation at all, they are about nobody answering. That gets fixed beforehand, not afterwards.

What we would not delegate in your position

Two things, and they are worth saying plainly, since this sector is full of broad promises.

Pricing and cancellation policy are not delegated. In season, one badly granted exception becomes a precedent before the week is out, and a review shortly after. The criteria have to be written and they have to be yours; what gets delegated is applying them, not setting them.

Nor is service inside the property itself. Whoever greets the guest at the door has to be at the door. What gets covered is what arrives in writing and by phone, which is most of the work and almost all of the work that ends up undone.

In low season: redirect the role, do not close it

When volume drops there are two exits. One is closing the role: there is no lock-in, so you can. The other usually works out better, and it consists of changing what the role contains.

The same person who handled bookings in August moves in November to what never gets done in season: reconciling with portals and agencies, going through invoicing and outstanding payments, updating the listing and the photos for each room type, squaring rates and availability across channels for next year, answering the backlog of reviews. That is real work, and it is the work that explains why in April you find discrepancies nobody can trace.

The advantage is not only financial. It is that in May nobody has to be trained. Whoever handles the first peak has spent months inside your operation, knows your odd dates and knows which room cannot be sold with a cot in it. That is not something you can buy in June.

If what holds you back is committing to something that later does not fit, the terms —replacement at no cost, no lock-in— are written out on the guarantees page.

Where to start

If the season is a month away, the order is: repeated answers, edges of the cancellation policy, escalation list. Three afternoons, and they hold for every season after this one.

If what you have is an uncovered role and an approaching peak, measure a normal week first: how many conversations come in, through which channels, how many go unanswered and how many arrive outside office hours. That number is what decides whether you need a dedicated person all year or a temporary reinforcement, and how their work splits between peak and trough. How that gets set up in a seasonal business is covered on the travel and hospitality page.

What does not work is deciding it in July.