Casa de Fe Lagoa (Portugal)

The Challenge

The owner of Casa de Fe had been running this vacation rental for the last two years. This 3 bedroom villa is located in Lagoa Portugal, which is a popular town in Southern Portugal. It is a weekend destination for the Portuguese citizens and is also popular as a summer destination for Europeans and the British. The peak months are June, July and August.

Despite running the property for two years, the owner was finding it difficult to get more bookings for the villa and had approached CCS Hospitality Marketing for assistance with OTA Management.

Our Approach

Casa da Fe was listed on Airbnb and Booking.com besides a few local and niche platforms. We reviewed the content and photographs and suggested changes which were approved. We also reviewed the reservations over the last two years to see the pattern. We found that the pricing was high and could be preventing guests from booking. We prepared a new pricing strategy for season and off season rates and implemented the same.

The Result

Despite working with Casa da Fe for just 3 months, we were able to generate 79 room nights from January-March compared to 87 room nights during the April-December period. A majority of the bookings (80%) were generated through Booking.com, filling up the peak months of June-August. We realized that the property was overpriced and rationalized the pricing to increase bookings. If we had continued working with the property, we would have achieved the targets set by the owner.

The owner decided not to continue with our services after just 3 months due to personal reasons but appreciated our efforts at growing the business so quickly.