Price drop on over 1.5 million pitches

I really don't know where you've been looking BB. There's a peak now due to Scottish and English school holidays but there's been a trough since early September withe same prices  and prices go down again to the same prices from November till the Christmas holidays.

I've rarely known a Saturday to be different from a Friday? Apart from when a peak seasons starts?

This might be a silly thought but doesn't dynamic pricing work both ways? It seems that it certainly increases prices as demand grows but if the Club is having to make all these offers it doesn't seem to be working in the other direction? I can perfectly see that this big Club "Promotion" is to grab the attention but would there be a need if dynamic pricing was working? Perhaps the offers are larger than the variation in the dynamic pricing movement?

David

Yep, I’ve said from the start that DP is a reflection of supply and demand so prices can go down as well as up. Perhaps this price drop is simply DP in action while making a headline splash about it. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Agreed, if 'last minute' price drops were a mirror of the 'book early' ones, you'd get the shape of prices most folk think of when looking at other organisations.

if you want to get in early and book, there's a small discount...well not actually, prices just start to rise beyond a certain point in time...OTOH if you wait will there are unsold pitches a few days before arrival, shouldn't the price fall then to attract folk into booking?

if this were the way things worked, as David is suggesting (and most would have assumed also) then it might be the incentive needed to fill vacancies near to arrival.

looking to reduce prices wholesale, months before due dates certainly seems to be something far more fundamental to me. 

...not within strolling distance of Broadway...

it's 'value' not 'cheepnis' (Frank Zappa) that I was referring to.

ML😉

if you want to get in early and book, there's a small discount...well not actually, prices just start to rise beyond a certain point in time...

Rather than just a small one in my experience of actually booking sites a year or six months in advance and then comparing prices on arrival BB. I think others (one was it Steve?) have posted the the same. I've noticed it's been about 10% with a high of 14% once, not that big but it mounts up, but not a small discount and not in the way you suggest I would say? Worth doing if one can.

OTOH if you wait will there are unsold pitches a few days before arrival, shouldn't the price fall then to attract folk into booking?

Depends on circumstances surely, if there are a good number of empty pitches maybe but if only one or two or low and the break even point has been met or there's a lot of interest in that site then perhaps raise the price, or if there's two lows either side say Friday and Sunday the price goes up for the Saturday, I've seen this twice - hence my rarely in an earlier email although as posted the vast majority of Saturdays do not rise in price unlike as you suggested).

Slightly off topic but I've been tracking Ryanair for the past month to spot patterns for a day trip to Dublin in November, on Tuesdays there's a flight out at 7am and a return one at 10pm. Now Dublin is a fair city but I don't want it to rain so I would book as close as possible. I've noticed that a few weeks in advance the basic price (which would work for us) has been very cheap (early November is £14.99 both ways though the week before it's half term it's £40-50).

Now sometimes the price the few days or day before before goes up and sometimes it stays the same, I did a dummy booking and found when the price goes up, sometimes triple the price which is still good for me, there's very few seats left when you try and select your seat, perhaps less than ten and once we wouldn't have been able to get seats together, but when the prices are still low there's plenty of seats.The club could be doing the same? 

unsold pitches a few days before arrival, shouldn't the price fall then to attract folk into booking?

So no, not always

The problem I find now is where is the baseline price by which to compare? I appreciate that those that don't book all their sites a year in advance will go onto the booking page when they are ready to book and accept the price they see. We have just come back from a week at Seacroft in Cromer and we paid £38 a night for a standard awning hardstanding pitch (booked 15th August 2023) . We were also at Cromer exactly a year earlier, but on that occasion we booked a service pitch which cost £37 a night so if I subtract the serviced element £32 a night an increase of just under 16%. If I book now for the same week next year for the same type of pitch I had this year it will cost me £34 which doesn't seem bad value and over the two years is only a very modest increase. So am I to assume that £34 is the baseline price and if I book next year a month or two before arrival the price is likely to be around £40 a night? I do have to add that Seacroft was full for most of the time we were there and they were even using some of the grass pitches which normally close on 1st October so I can see there would not be much justification for a discount unlike sites which seemingly are half empty. It seems that the deposit system has delayed that mass booking we used to get when pitches first become available and everything the Club has done since seems to be based around getting people to go back to booking a long way in advance by lower deposits and lower prices.

David

OH makes our bookings, so I asked her what she thinks.

She says she cannot be bothered with all this chopping and changing of prices and would rather there were reasonable fixed  prices as in the past.  That way you can easily decide if the site offers you value for money.

Special offers on certain sites in certain seasons seem to indicate that the price has been set too high to start with.    

And the special offers do seem to have too many restrictions to them.  The other Club have removed quite a lot of their restrictions.

Price reductions across the board, or on individual sites, if costs like electricity fall could be easily applied without anyone needing to cancel and re-book.  Less hassle all round.

These days, we only book a bit ahead for our 5/6 week summer trip, and only because it is busier then than at most other times.  Even then it will be only a couple of months ahead.  

At our stage in life, we never assume we will be 100% able to travel, so naturally prefer a low deposit, so the reduction to 10% was good.    Even better if it was made permanent.