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That's exactly what I did for April 2009 on my West End Apartment in the heart of Edinburgh. When I looked at my availability calendar in late February and realised April was a desert with NO bookings – I realised the credit crunch had hit. It was obvious what I must do to win over the potential customers that were out there looking for a bargain. That meant I had to discount and be competitive. Fortunately the Rental Reserve online booking software (which powers www.letinedinburgh.co.uk) allowed me to do exactly that. The software is highly flexible and can be used to aggressively market your property where other systems fail. Let me give you an example. After discounting all prices by 10% the weekends slowly booked up. Great, however, this left me with mid week gaps that were going to be very hard to fill. I discounted them by an additional 10% and sure enough 2 of them sold. The clever bit was the software allowed the 20% discount only to apply to bookings of over 3 days meaning I wasn't going to suffer too much, once I took my meet and greet and cleaning costs into consideration. I have now set myself a target to see if I can get 100% occupancy in April by offering a massive 40% discount on my final 2 midweek periods. Again it's only if the customer books 3 days or over so I won't loose out. The word is slowly spreading that the software can do such clever tricks. In these difficult times every little helps and fortunately for me – its those that can discount cleverly that will beat the competition.
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