Waking up in early January 2021 was an anxious time for all those involved in the hospitality business. The ‘cancelled Christmas’ had just passed where we again experienced another set of lockdowns and rules to prevent social contact amongst friends and families. Half the population had a huge Christmas dinner – having to eat all the food they had bought for their guests and the other half not having as much to eat – whilst they unexpectedly remained in their homes. How did this affect StayZo – we had many bookings cancelled by people looking to spend time in a StayZo property whilst visiting friends and family around the country.
Although it wasn’t all bad news for January, we took over 8 apartments in central Southampton in a deal that we had been working on since the previous August. For the rest of the month, and during February, it was a case of making all our clients aware of the new location, setting up the new properties into our systems and ensuring the guests that were currently in place or and the guests already booked had a stress free visit – and we successfully achieved all this.
March – Not only did Spring arrive, but so did the 11 StayZo caravans. These were purchased to accommodate my clients employees working on the nearby HS2 railway. Not only did we have to fully integrate these caravans into our software but having never set foot in a caravan prior to these 11 new arrivals, I had some serious learning to do. Once all the linen was purchased and the photos were done, we were ready to open up….
April – unfortunately the HS2 timetable was delayed a little bit – with various problems hitting the multi billion-pound project so we had to revert to our plan B for the caravans – open them to key workers – and so we did. Having guests stay in one of our properties is routine, but having 2 bookings for key workers working locally, and them never having never stayed in a caravan before was a slightly nervous time – but we managed to get them settled, explain how everything works and where to find everything. We all got through the booking and that was a relied in itself, but the icing on the cake was a lovely review.
May saw the continued work on refining and setting up the caravans and the Southampton units. Many other operators saw what we re doing and asked if they could advertise their properties on our website – and this also kept us busy.
We were beginning to hear about the end travel restrictions in England and the reopening of the economy – and allowing families to stay in Serviced Accommodation again and how we could benefit from this
June did see the end of restrictions and bookings did pick up. It seemed to happen in a very odd way – getting busier from our southern sites before the booking effect moved north, through our Coventry and Peterborough sites before Bradford. Many of our new clients have been contractors, booking accommodation for their staff. As habit, they previously just picked up a telephone and booked the nearest, cheapest hotel with a pub or café nearby. Covid saw to it that these hotels closed and if they did stay open, there was nowhere for their contractors to eat because the pubs and cafes had closed. This is when many companies came across companies like StayZo. Great city centre locations, large clean houses and flats, great parking meant that their contractors could stay in their own bubble, cooking their own food when they wanted it without the same tired menus found across the country – and with all the great customer service StayZo provides. A number of our new clients that they has never really considered Serviced Accommodation before and are now unlikely to go back to hotels – and we saw this as a great win for us.
July and August say the American term ‘staycation’ become normalised. This term means holidaying in your own country – international flights were still few and far between and people didn’t really want to spend hours in an aeroplane with other people, breathing the same air when there is an international respiratory pandemic going on. This massive explosion in bookings took both Cristina and myself buy surprise – the 7 day a week juggle of organising housekeeping staff to be in the right place at the right time, ensuring guests checked in and out on time and dealing with any unexpected problems.
The big news in late August, the StayZo team grew and we now have Gen working for us. After some time spent at looking at what was in place and how things were being done we decided that changes were needed. All of at StayZo have been working behind the scenes to find the software that can support us and be able to give our future guests a better IT experience before, during and after their visit to us. The new software is also designed to provide better communications to our housekeeping team. We aim to ‘go live’ with this later on in December.
What we will see in 2022 is anybody’s guess. Will the latest version of Covid send us all into lock down again or will the scientists come up trumps and produce a vaccine, will we have to close our doors again to leisure guests, are we all going to see more international guests cancel their bookings? For StayZo – we are currently working on new locations – hopefully they will go live in 2022. We also aim to have our new software up and running. New sites are actively being looked at for HS2 contractors and this is a major growth area for the company for many yeays ahead.
We hope you all have a very Happy and Healthy Christmas and New Year from the StayZo team
Tom, Cristina and Gen
