What are the best boutique hotels in Paris?

How do boutique hotels ensure they have high room occupancy rates?

• Bigger hotels can block sell their inventory to Orbitz, Priceline, Expedia and other online brokers. For a boutique hotels with say 4 to 20 rooms, this doesn't seem feasible. Also, publicly slashing prices won't go down well with your regular customers or may bring in the wrong type of customer which might harm your reputation. What are boutique hotels doing to make sure their rooms don't remain empty? Anonymously slashing prices through platforms for flash sales? Mystery Hotel deals? HotelTonight?

• Answer:

  TL:DR  - I would rather be half full at a good margin, than full at a lower margin. My Hotel has 10 rooms, and our maximum capacity is 23 beds. Year on year I am running at about 70% occupancy. In good weather from April through to mid-September it's closer to 90%, if we get bad weather and a lot of cancellations in July or August we drop back down to 70% again. In the winter we can be anything from 5% to 100% full depending on what special events are happening in Bournemouth. Bournemouth is a holiday resort town with a resident population of about 170,000, there are over 200 hotels, ranging from small ones like mine to big chain operated hotels with over 200 rooms. The pricing of hotel rooms is highly volatile and very competitive outside of high season (July and August). A £5 ($8) rise per person per night in September can cut bookings and occupancy by 50% (We experimented with this one year, and proved it!). So price cutting is a possibility, but it is ruled out, as the questioner suggested, by the high probability of getting the wrong sorts of customers. During our September experiment, we had one good lady come to stay with us for four nights. There was nothing untoward reported by the cleaners for the first three. Once she checked out, she walked out of the front door and sat down on the pavement (sidewalk), took a litre bottle of 40% polish vodka from her bag and proceeded to drink most of it whilst calling taxis to come and take her to the railway station. At this point, I decided to inspect her room for myself, as the cleaner was busy elsewhere. Shortly afterwards I placed an order for two new mattresses, put the bedding in the trash, and changed into a boiler-suit to clean up a lot of vomit and other messes. The good lady was still sitting on the pavement once I had finished, as the taxis were (very sensibly IMO) refusing to take her. Then I called the local policeman on his mobile and explained. He shortly arrived with a paramedic, who checked her over. The police officer called in his sergeant, who arrived by car, and they loaded her into the back, informing me that they would take her to the police station and sober her up, releasing her in the morning. That particular four night stay ended up costing us quite a bit of money. This is why price reduction is not an option. Flash sales and similar schemes operated by the OTAs are too similar to just cutting prices. We even considered Groupon, but their terms meant that we would be making a loss on every customer that we took from them, as well as the risk that price cutting has. We do occasionally get customers walk in off the street, and if we like the look of them, we may well drop the price a bit to secure their business, but this is definitely the exception rather than the rule. This is not a high pressure business, I have already retired once, and expect to do so again in a few years, so the occasional week when business is slack is, to be honest, quite a relief, and much appreciated. However I am really the exception to a lot of rules: I would rather be half full and covering my fixed costs (plus a little bit of profit), than be working hard both to fill the hotel, and to operate it at a higher level of occupancy and a lower margin.