How Picton Harbour Inn flipped the script on hotel management to increase occupancy and revenue

The Picton Harbour Inn is a 3-star Prince Edward hotel in the heart of Ontario’s newest wine and culinary destination. The waterfront hotel features 29 rooms and 3 suites, plus a restaurant consistently voted as best breakfast in Picton.

Scott Walcott is a co-owner of Walcott Hospitality, which includes Picton Harbour Inn, West Lake Willows, and Bay of Quinte Charters. It’s a family affair with Scott, his brother David, and his wife Sophie all involved in the ownership and day-to-day operations of the inn.

At the time that Scott and the new ownership team took over in 2015, the hotel operated completely on pen and paper. Scott laughs as he recalls the gigantic 3-ring binder that held all their reservations. “It’s a smaller property, but when we’re at full occupancy, we’re almost 1000 room nights a month. We needed a cloud-based solution.”

The staff was nervous to switch to software but found Cloudbeds’ platform interface to be very easy-to-use and straightforward. “Cloudbeds is not intimidating. It’s so user-friendly and anyone on our staff can jump in and use it,” says Scott.

With Cloudbeds’ reporting functionality, Scott and his staff are able to identify booking patterns, dive deeper into the data, and take action. With reporting at their fingertips, Scott and his staff can better understand guest behavior and optimize pricing to maximize occupancy.

This past year Scott and his staff at Picton Harbour Inn started to use Cloudbeds’ Pricing Intelligence Engine (PIE). PIE made it easy to gather market data, make better pricing decisions, and automate tasks to maximize yield. The results were felt immediately. Scott estimates that they made an additional 60K CAD in just six months.

We massively impacted our bottom line by reviewing occupancy reports in the offseason. For instance, we found that changing the pricing for a certain room type resulted in tens of thousands of incremental dollars.