When the market feels uncertain, it’s very easy to assume your business is failing.

The quieter inbox.

The later bookings.

The random gaps in the diary that suddenly appear where they never used to.

And meanwhile, social media is full of hosts apparently having their “best year ever” while you’re wondering whether everyone else is somehow in a totally different economy!

So today, I’m talking about what’s actually happening in the UK short stay market right now and why many hospitality business owners, like you, are feeling unsettled.

Because the truth is, the market hasn’t collapsed. But guest behaviour has changed dramatically.

I’m also sharing in this episode why I think some of the pressure hosts are feeling comes from comparing today’s market to the unusually exceptional post-pandemic travel boom and why that may be creating unrealistic expectations around typical occupancy and bookings.

This episode is about perspective, adaptability and learning how to market your holiday cottage or glampsite confidently during uncertain times instead of making emotional decisions based on one quiet week.

Because different doesn’t mean doomed. But it does require a smarter strategy.

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Key Takeaways:

• The UK short stay market in 2026 is broadly flat overall, but booking behaviours have changed significantly
• Guests are booking later, staying shorter and becoming more spontaneous with travel decisions
• Shorter stays are growing rapidly, meaning flexibility and gap-night strategies matter more than ever - I share my tips with you.
• OTAs and Airbnb are gaining market share in late bookings while direct bookings become harder to secure last minute
• Many hosts may still be benchmarking success against the unusually high demand seen during the post-pandemic travel boom
• Consistent visibility, email marketing and repeat guest strategies are increasingly important in a more competitive market
• Successful hospitality businesses in uncertain times are often the most adaptable, not necessarily the biggest or fanciest

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Looking for more support?

If you're looking for a supportive community and the latest marketing advice for our turbulent times - I have something for you. Take a look at my marketing club membership here.

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Do you have a marketing roadmap for your business?

No more winging it and feeling like you are in constant marketing chaos! Create your easy-to-follow marketing roadmap for the year ahead. My Direct Bookings Bootcamp is now available ON DEMAND! Let’s make this the best year yet for direct bookings! Head to my website for more info.

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What would you do with an extra £20k+ in your holiday business?

I've saved £100k in commission in 5 years by taking 100% direct bookings and now I show Airbnb hosts, holiday cottage and glampsite owners how to do the same.

It is easier than you think to move to 70%+ direct bookings.

If you currently rely on Airbnb or another online agent (OTA), take Sarah's FREE quiz here - it's time to give them the boot!

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You're listening to Get Fully Booked with Sarah Orchard. Are you ready to master your marketing so you can ditch your reliance on the online agents and grow your direct bookings?

I'll be sharing with you exactly what it takes to grow your direct bookings and the simple marketing steps to get more profit in your pocket. Hello, hello, hello, we're back. Season six of the Get Fully Booked podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Orchard.

I'm totally thrilled to be back in your ears with more practical marketing tips to help you boost your bookings and get more profit in your pocket. Today I want to talk about something that I know is weighing very heavily on a lot of short term rental owners right now.

We are living in turbulent times because, let's be honest, the market feels weird, doesn't it? Bookings are very slow. I think we can all identify with that and I think we all thought we'd moved on from turbulent times post Covid.

But the last few years have been tough. I don't think there's been one year that feels like it's been normal, whatever normal is.

You're staring at your calendar, you know, wondering what on earth is going on.

Bookings feel later, guests are more price sensitive, people are chopping and changing their plans all the time, and meanwhile social media is full of people shouting about being fully booked while you're over there wondering if everyone else has got given some secret sauce that you don't know about.

Look at the booking trends you need to pay attention to and a slightly uncomfortable but important conversation around whether our expectations as hosts have just become a bit unrealistic in the current climate. Because I want this episode to be about, you know, it's not about panic, it's about perspective.

And hopefully by the end of the episode you'll feel a lot calmer, clearer and more strategic about how you market your business moving forward. So before we dive in, I wanted to share a really interesting stat from that key data report on the UK market.

And this one really made me stop in my tracks and think about what's going on out there. Did you know that one to two night stays now make up only 13% of reservations, but they contribute 22% of revenue. That's huge.

Meanwhile, the traditional six to eight night stay, the booking pattern that many short term rental businesses have been built around is actually shrinking. And I think this tells us something really important. You know, the old rules of hospitality marketing are changing.

Guests are traveling differently, they're booking differently, they're spending differently. And businesses that adapt faster are going to win. So I thought I'd start off by looking at the state of the market.

I don't think it's bad, but it is very different. So first things first, the market is not collapsing. That key data report shows that the market is not collapsing.

And I think it's important to say because sometimes when we're in our own little business bubble, it can feel incredibly personal when bookings slow down, it's like, why are people not noticing my business? You know, what have I done wrong? Why is this not working anymore?

You know, some regions seem to be performing really well. Northern Ireland, London, Edinburgh, Snowdonia. The data is showing that other areas are a bit soft on booking demand.

The Lake District, Northumberland, Kent, the Highlands. So you could be in one of those areas that is just looking a little bit softer.

So if you're in one of those softer regions, it doesn't mean that your business is failing. It means that competition is tighter, consumer confidence is definitely wobblier, and guests have more choice.

And the other thing we're seeing is rates increasing. So average daily rates are up around £6 nationally year on year. So hosts are generally charging more. But here's the catch.

Occupancy isn't really growing alongside it because we're seeing those gap year booking calendars. So in many cases, businesses are making similar money but with fewer nights booked.

So if you're only measuring your performance based on your occupancy and not looking at the revenue, it can create a very emotionally strange environment that makes us feel very wobbly because you might have fewer enquiries, more gaps in the booking calendar, later bookings, but revenue can still look relatively okay. So Have a look at your revenue, because psychologically this does mess with us.

You know, as human beings, we, you know, we love certainty and we love seeing that booking calendar. Filling months ahead makes us able to sleep at night. And that's simply not the market we're operating in anymore.

I think one of the biggest mistakes hosts make during uncertain times is assuming that silence means sort of disaster is looming. Sometimes silence just means that guests are waiting longer to commit and that does change how we need to market.

So my second point I wanted to talk about is the booking trends, because booking trends are changing fast and our marketing needs to catch up. So let's talk about guest behavior, because honestly, I think this is where the biggest shift is actually happening.

One of the standout stats from that report is that 24% of reservations are now booked within seven days of arrival, nearly a quarter of bookings. So it's no wonder that we're sitting and looking at gappy booking calendars because people are waiting right till the last seven days to book.

I couldn't organize my life in seven days to go away, but, you know, each to their own. And sometimes it's, you know, needs must. But that's nearly a quarter of our booking. Bookings are now happening in the UK last minute.

And Airbnb in particular is gaining huge market share in that late booking window. When people are in a hurry, they tend to go to the brands that they remember.

And if you're not communicating with them, you know, brands like Airbnb, very aggressive, prominent marketing, that's where people turn the Airbnbs, the Booking.coms of this world.

Now this matters because many hospitality businesses still do all of their marketing, as if guests book six months in advance or three months in advance. But normally it's like they think that everyone in January plans their holidays and they've booked for the summer.

They launch one summer availability post maybe in late January, February, and then sit back and think, okay, I've done, I've done my summer marketing. But modern hospitality marketing needs to be much more agile.

We need ongoing visibility, we need regular email marketing, consistent social media, maybe retargeting with things like meta ads, flexible offers and gap filling strategies because guests are behaving more spontaneously and honestly. This makes sense when you look at the wider world. It Feels slightly bonkers out there right now most days, or is that just me?

People feel financially cautious. You know, we've been just been hit by our mortgage going up and it's going to cost us another £500amonth.

You know, that has an impact on people making decisions. Look at the cost of fuel, look at the cost of oil. If you've oil heating like I have it as well. So it's a real joyous time for us at the moment.

The geopolitical climate feels really uncertain. The constant news cycle is exhausting and people are hesitant to commit too far ahead so they delay decisions.

And the businesses that stay visible during that hesitation period are the ones most likely to win the booking. And the other really interesting trend is the shorter stays. So 2/3 of bookings are now for five nights or less. That's a massive shift.

I mean we actually at the Hideout, our bookings are always generally two or three nights. But there's a massive section of the short term rental market that relies on five or seven night sort of bookings.

And I actually think that many hosts are still emotionally attached to the perfect booking.

But increasingly profitable businesses are being built around flexibility and that means embracing the shorter midweek stays, opening up two night gaps, creating seasonal experiences to tempt people, giving them a compelling reason to want to come and visit your area and stay specifically with you. Financially incentivizing booking further out if you want more certainty targeting the nearby drive market guests.

With the current cost of fuel issue, you know, people are now looking at longer drives to more remote places like the Highlands, Northumberland, Cornwall, which actually interestingly are some of the areas that are sort of suffering, maybe their traditional marketplace in terms of people who are coming from the south east, for example, are actually thinking, I don't want to drive that distance because that's going to cost me 20 double what it almost double what it used to. And you need to create offers designed for that spontaneous traveler.

The businesses thriving right now are not necessarily the fanciest or with the like the most amenities or even the ones that are necessarily spending the most on the marketing, they're the most adaptable. And my last point I wanted to talk about is our expectations and are our expectations a little bit unrealistic in the current climate?

So this could be a slightly Uncomfortable conversation because I think it does need saying. Some hosts out there, you might be one of them, are benchmarking your expectations against an unusually exceptional period in travel history.

The post pandemic travel boom created completely distorted expectations for many who started during that time.

People could barely leave the house for two years and then suddenly everyone wanted to escape their home, head straight for a hot tub, shepherd's hut or a woodland cabin. Immediate. Or lock themselves away in, you know, beautiful countryside that they haven't been able to visit for many months.

So many businesses experienced unprecedented occupancy, were able to put, put in place premium pricing, had waiting lists as long as your arm. We had, at one point we had 18 month bookings in advance for the treehouse.

It was an insanely high demand time, but it was artificial and that period was never normal.

Guests have more choice, the costs are higher, consumer confidence is mixed and the marketing matters more than ever. And I think this is catching people out.

Those people that haven't had to do any marketing because guests just came to them have sat back slightly on their laurels and that's come back to bite you on your bum because it is tougher out there. But this doesn't mean that you should have lower expectations for your business in terms of its financial performance.

But I think we do need to have realistic expectations because sometimes I speak to hosts and obviously clients that I work with and members in my marketing club and they're 80% occupied, they're charging good market rates, they're not, you know, heavily discounting, they're profitable, they're building a strong brand.

And comparison is dangerous in this industry because nobody posts, nobody says, I've had a slightly average Monday, I had no bookings today and actually two guests cancelled, no one goes out and says that. So we all sit there in this little bubble and, you know, sometimes what we're seeing on social media makes us think that we failed.

Hospitality and short term rental marketing online has become very Highlight reel heavy.

And I think there is a real power in just sort of stepping back and asking, you know, what does a healthy, sustainable, profitable business actually look like for me, not for the loudest person you know or business online, not for the person, the business with the biggest TikTok account in your particular niche, but for you. Because turbulent times, requirements, emotionally resilient business owners, not reactive ones. So I've got some practical takeaways for you.

So if you were to leave today with just a few things that you can think about from this episode, it would be this. Firstly, number one, stop relying on early bookings as reassurance. The market is booking later.

That doesn't actually mean that demand has disappeared. It will come, but it will come later. So we just need to keep our nerve.

Don't go into rash discounting, thinking that that' what you've got to do to stimulate demand.

When people are in this situation, it doesn't really matter potentially how heavily you discount, you probably still won't influence them necessarily always to take action. So actually all that does is harm your business. Number two, stay visible consistently.

The businesses that guests remember are the ones that keep sending them marketing messages. They keep getting seen. Number three, build flexibility into your strategy. Short stays, gap nights, spontaneous offers, seasonal campaigns.

You know that matters more than ever and you should be monitoring your, you know, your, how your bookings are looking and thinking about what you can do to actually be agile and flexible in attracting the guests that are looking. Which means if you just do that one post a year, the chances of someone seeing that is probably quite slim. Number four, focus on repeat guests.

Direct booking share is falling in late bookings, but your past guests are one of your most valuable assets and we often forget about them. So reach out to those regularly. Number five, don't make emotional decisions based on one quiet week.

Use the data, track the trends, talk to other hosts, look at patterns, not panic moments.

So hopefully this episode has helped you zoom out a little from the, you know, maybe looking at your, the calendar this week or the week that you've just had and realize that it does, you know, feel different right now. And that's because things are very different. But different doesn't mean that we're all doomed.

In fact, hospitality and short term rental businesses that adapt well during uncertain periods often come out stronger, smarter and more resilient than the ones that relied on the easy demand years. And honestly, this is where real brands are built. Not during the boom years, during the wobblier ones.

But it can feel really lonely navigating these turbulent times.

So if you feel like knowing what other hosts are experiencing would really benefit your confidence right now, do come and check out my Marketing Club membership, the Fully Booked Business Club. It's a community of over 100ambitious hosts just like you. The link is in the show notes. Thank you for listening.

If you enjoyed this episode, you know what to do. I'd love it if you could leave me a review because you know how much us hosts love those five star reviews.

Now next week I'm back with another solo episode that flows on really nicely from this one. It's as if I planned it. What marketing metrics should you be tracking? You'll want to tune in for that one. Bye for now. See you next week.

Thank you for listening to Get Fully Booked with Sarah Orchard.

If you want to see if you are ready to ditch the likes of Airbnb and grow your direct bookings, put your business to the test with my free Direct Booking Roadmap quiz. Head to my website get fully booked.com quiz and let's get you more direct bookings and more profit in your pocket.