CHLA Lodging News May/June 2020

www.calodging.com May/June 2020 7 continues   Seize the Day LIKE MANY OF YOU, THE phone calls started to ring off the hook a month ago with cancellations and we realized within a day or two that every call over the following weeks would be the same. It’s still amazing to us how quickly things changed, and while we opened in 2008 and weathered the recession, this has become a completely different animal. My husband Tony and I own a boutique bed and breakfast near San Luis Obispo set on seven acres with four individual lodging houses, or Casitas—as it is a Spanish styled estate. Seven years ago, I was able to ‘retire’ from corporate life (my sales job at Dun & Bradstreet), because of the incremental business we built hosting weddings. So, double whammy—as the calls started to come in, we knew we needed to take action to bring in cash flow quickly. I was asked to write this article as we successfully launched a quick campaign to former guests in late March and, within 48 hours, successfully brought in $8K to help pay some of our bills. We also helped a couple of other vendors in our area at the same time. I think this is something repeatable that many of your lodging places could also implement. DEVELOPING A PLAN We knew we couldn’t sell rooms now, but we brainstormed on what we could offer now for a special experience in the future. We came up with five good ideas, but decided to start with one that carried a higher dollar value initially, knowing we could offer more ideas later. During the third week of March, we launched an email appeal, offering a win-win package to former guests who also wanted to help us out as a small business. Our package included lodging, cheese fondue that we make for our guests, a bottle of wine from our vineyard not sold to the public, and two massages during a future stay. We then reached out to other ‘friendors’ (vendors that are also friends) knowing they were also GENERATING CASH FLOW NOW FOR FUTURE GUEST STAYS By Pat Goetz, Co-owner, Casitas of Arroyo Grande

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