2016 has been a really successful year for both ourselves and our clients. We've released 14 updates made up of over 910 'commits' that have in turn introduced great new features. It's been exciting watching both our own business and the businesses we work with grow over the course of the year.
SCRUMPY has grown substantially by over 700% this year, this has driven us to continue developing great features to help make property owner's lives easier and their businesses more successful.
Updates
We've deployed 14 updates this year that have enhanced existing features and added brand new ones. We've been listening to customer feedback all year and observing user behaviour on site to help deliver more bookings to our property owners. Big updates in 2016 included:
- Trip Advisor
- Reduced PCI Compliancy
- Shortbreaks.com
- Stripe Integration
- Booking Offers
- Chargeable Extras
- Apple Pay
- Apple Wallet
- High Quality Imagery
- Booking Protect Integration -
This year we also added a help system where we've written dozens of great articles on how to make the most of social media, manage bookings and best make use of SCRUMPY to advertise holiday properties online.
Year in Review
A huge amount of data comes through the system each day, it helps us to make better decisions about future features and allows us to watch the success of the businesses we work with. We've pulled out some interesting facts from 2016 using anonymous data.
Booking Pricing
The average price of a holiday rental booking in 2016 according to our data was £1702, the peak average price was in August at nearly £2240. Last years most expensive month was June at £1700. Last years most expensive month has become this years average, perhaps a sign of property owners reacting to the continued interest in UK based holidays.
Booking Volume
Once again Bookings peaked in January with customers booking their Summer breaks. A small increase in May and a gradual ramp up until November/December when customers realise they need to save their pennies for Christmas presents.
We've started gathering even more data on which parts of the website deliver bookings, how far off people make bookings and more to help give us the data we need to begin to make suggestions about the price of properties.
Property Diversity
There are dozens of different types of property on SCRUMPY, its part of what makes putting together websites for our customers a really fun job. The 'House' still reigns supreme this year but is very closely followed by 'Cottages' and 'Barns'. This year we've been joined by Glamping Complexes, static caravans, watermills and castles!
A Sneak Peek at 2017
Ongoing feature development is driven by the needs of our clients and research into what we can do to improve existing functionality. We're hoping to both continue to improve existing features and tackle the following next year:
- Payment Refunds + Automated Security Deposit Refunds
- Microsites
- Improved Channel Management
- Brand new Admin interface
We welcome any ideas that minimise paperwork, increase efficiency, encourage people to book or generally make property owners lives easier and businesses more successful.
Recommend a friend for money off
Dont forget that we’ll give you 10% of the business generated by any clients you refer to us off your scrumpy bill. We are seeing a good uptake already with several clients reducing their monthly bill. Our referral program even offers the possibility that we could end up paying you each month! If you know of anyone with a holiday property whether they’re just starting out or whether they are an established agency we’d love to talk to them, you can either forward their details on to us or use the 'Refer a Friend' section of your admin.
Happy Christmas!
All the elves here at SCRUMPY would like to wish you a Happy Christmas and every success for 2017! We are out of the office now until 3rd January 2017 at 8:30AM.
Lookout elves will be monitoring emails over the Christmas period, our uptime and automated error detection systems are in place to notify us of any issues to help us maintain our 99.9% uptime.
We look forward to seeing you in 2017, we're expecting a really busy January and hope all our property owners share in the success!