The winter season is almost upon us and if your property is in the mountains and your guests are skiers or families who want to spend some time in the snow – you are no doubt getting ready – on many different levels: Maybe you are upgrading the furniture or decor or you are sharpening up the description of your property.

Recently I spoke to the father of a family with 2 young children who had just booked their winter break in the Alps. Josh told me that he was really struggling with getting advance information on all the different skirun options, distances, facilities and ski schools for the kids.

How do you get that sort of information to your guests in advance? Do you have a pdf or some document that you copy and paste into your emails?

Well – one of the easiest ways of helping your guests get organised before the arrival is by sending them access to your own online guidebook which holds all the details and options for their stay.

Try it out with our 6 month Free Trial now!

If your property is in a town or quite easily accessible and you have a keylock installed, late arrivals are not a big deal. If on the other hand, your property is quite difficult to reach or a bit remote and you rely on local managers to do the meet & greet – then late arrivals will definitely be a challenge. This is a case with one of my properties and recently I have found that several guests made a surprise announcement that their flights will arrive at 23:00 or after midnight and how could they access the property. In our case visitors would not easily find our property, let alone in the dark. Therefore our local manager always meets guests, takes them to the property and settles them in – a warm welcome and service guests are grateful for and appreciate.

As it takes up to 2 hours after airport arrival to get to the meeting point it can be a real stretch for our local manager to attend to guests late at night and I have now introduced late arrival fees and have started communicating these fees right at the beginning of a confirmed booking.

I wonder if there is a late night arrival trend as prices tend to get cheaper the later or more inconvenient flight times become. How do you manage late arrivals and if you have late arrival fees, how are they structured?