In an effort to continue improving our service and experience, we began providing toiletries to our guests. We are still tinkering with the process, trying to get the the most optimal cost/value basis, and we are now transitioning to a 3 piece “Mountain Escape” set that will be provided in each bedroom for our guests!
Overall, this cost breaks down roughly as follows…
Additionally, the usage rate is approximately 50% (not every item gets used for every stay!) so depending on the size of your home, the variable cost is as follows…
So really, what we are deciding is if providing these items brings us more value than the costs above. We ultimately decided “yes!”, for a few reasons:
By doing this, it allows us to attract a bit of a classier clientele, which provides a few net benefits:
But overall, there’s a bigger question at play. How much should be provided? What’s the optimal amount? It’s a hard question to answer, and it’s a bit of a sliding scale…
So in order to most accurately answer this question, we need to understand the variable cost to understand if we believe we’re making back that amount of money (or more!) per stay.
Costs (assuming a 4 bed, 2 bath home):
The above items add up to an additional $53 in costs per stay. So the question then becomes “are we able to charge more than $53/stay to offset these costs?” and while this is hard to directly prove (without doing an A/B test) but we can look at other homes in the area, what they charge, and I can say with a high degree of certainty that this is overwhelmingly worth it.
With an average stay of 3 nights, this means we would only have to charge an additional ~$18/night, and realistically, I would say we’re charging over an additional $100/night (as opposed to NOT providing any of the amenities that we do). In other words, $53/stay is likely earning you $300/stay!
There are also “softer” benefits that come with providing a better experience, such as…
So while you may see these costs come across to you in the end-of-month ledger, keep in mind this increase in nightly rate also comes across to you! So while there are some costs upfront, there’s a disproportional rate of return being passed on to you. And remember – More Money. Less Work. 🙂