We tracked 438 South West indie hotels into bank holiday weekend. Most of them haven't moved a penny.

We've just had the early May bank holiday, with the next one (Spring bank) due in a couple of weeks. So with the summer proper not far off, I wanted to look ahead to the big one and see how the South West's independent hotels are pricing into August bank holiday weekend.

People are booking their summer holidays now. International travel is still feeling a bit chaotic, almost COVID-era in some ways, and there's been a real shift back towards domestic. The question I wanted to answer was whether that's actually being reflected in indie hotel prices, or whether the smaller players are getting left behind by the chains, who have proper revenue tools and dedicated pricing teams.

So we ran a little study. 438 independent hotels across Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset, the classical British summer holiday corridor. We spent some time travelling around there as a team last summer, so this isn't an abstract dataset to us. We picked two Saturdays and compared them: 22 August (a normal weekend) and 29 August (bank holiday Saturday). For every indie we also pulled the nearest Premier Inn and Travelodge as a benchmark.

One bit of housekeeping before the numbers. The booking sites show you whichever room is cheapest on a given date, and what's cheapest shifts as inventory sells out. A £170 Twin on the 22nd might be a £345 Sea-View Double on the 29th, just because the cheap room sold. That's not a real price hike, that's an inventory artefact. So we only count a hotel as moving its rate when the same room type was on offer on both dates. 222 of the 438 cleared that bar. The other 216 either changed which room they were showing (a small signal of dynamic pricing in itself) or weren't comparable for one reason or another. Everything that follows is from the 222.

I thought the chains would be moving harder than the indies. I didn't think it would be by this much.

What the chains did

• Travelodge raised rates by an average of 26% week-on-week, and 59% of their sites pushed prices up by more than 20%.
• Premier Inn raised by 13% on average, with 35% of sites up more than 20%.
• Of the 222 indies we could compare on equal terms, almost 80% didn't change their price at all. Within plus or minus 5%. No real movement.

176 indie hotels charging the same price for the same room on a normal August Saturday and on the busiest weekend of the British summer.

Why?

I don't have one neat answer. Honestly. But there are a few things you see if you spend any time talking to owners and looking at their behaviour.

Owners and managers don't really have the time to be three months out. They're worried about today and the next few weeks. The booking that just came in, the staff rota, all the rest of it. Strategic pricing for a Saturday in August is always a tomorrow problem.

A lot of operators also don't have the confidence. The big chains' revenue teams are constantly weighing the price-versus-occupancy tradeoff, but that's a much harder call to make when you're the owner and every booking matters. Raise the price 20%, and what if you lose the booking altogether?

The thing is, when you look at this across enough hotels, operators are often making more money at slightly lower occupancy and a meaningfully higher price. Fewer rooms turned, less hassle, more in the pocket. Money you can put back into the property. Once you crunch the numbers, the trade looks very different from how it feels.

Hayle

A few specific examples stood out. The clearest one was Hayle, in Cornwall.

The Premier Inn in Hayle goes from £116 on Saturday the 22nd to £163 on Saturday the 29th. A 41% jump.

The Cornubia Inn (about a fifteen-minute walk down the road, similar starting price) was at £115 on the 22nd. On the 29th, still £115. Completely unchanged.

Loggans Lodge (literally a hundred metres from that same Premier Inn) is also unchanged, sitting at £125.

So on bank holiday Saturday, two independent hotels in Hayle are pricing forty, fifty quid a night cheaper than the generic Premier Inn box on the bypass. Premier Inn benefits from having direct distribution and a lot of demand-signal data from its own consumers (they've spent a fortune building it), and they're using every bit of it. The pub down the road, sitting on the same booking platform, isn't.

Some have figured it out

It's not all bad. A few indies actually moved their rates harder than the chains.

• The Wellington Hotel in Boscastle (Cornwall) went from £173 to £217. Same Cosy Double both dates, up 25%.
• The Halfway House Pub and Kitchen in Polbathic (also Cornwall) went from £115 to £151. Same Double Room, up 31%.

Worth flagging that even the most aggressive indie movers in our dataset are basically matching Travelodge, not beating it. Nobody's running away from the chains, they're just keeping pace with them. So the dozen or so indies who pushed prices up isn't really the headline of this study. The couple of hundred who didn't move at all is.

Otterly

We're bringing this out early because we think it matters. We're humans who've done revenue management before, for the big chains and the big travel companies in this space, and now we do it for independent hotels at rates they can actually afford. No commitment.

If you run an independent hotel in the South West and you'd like to know where your pricing sits in the data, get in touch.