Like many businesses, we monitor our costs to price our accommodation accurately ensuring that all aspects of the business cover costs and deliver an operating profit. After the installation of smart meters and individual property metering, we are better equipped than ever before at costing out our provision.
What The Forums Say
We follow a number of hospitality forums and like any sector, there is a great deal of misinformation available some venues say that the use of the hot tub is free. In contrast, others offer their hot tub saying that it is included in the price. Firstly for clarity, if you are a business and want to have a business to run next year then all of your costs need to be recovered through your sales.
Legislation
Hot tubs which are stand-alone and do not have a plant room with automatic dosing must be emptied cleaned and refilled for each set of guests, they need to be cleaned each day and water tested for ph levels TDS and chemical balance. We use Bromine (Salt) as it is better on the skin and provides sanitisation at high and low temperatures.
Costing
We recognise that our guests do not always want a hot tub typically 32% of our stays are not with a hot tub. Also, some guests opt to only have a hot tub for a couple of days. We now offer our hot tubs at £200 for a 2-night use + £30 for each additional day, the reality of filling and heating a hot tub now costs £77 in electricity alone, once you add on your chemical costs, filters, replacement parts, water at 1200ltrs per fill and time our full cost for a 2-night use (3 days of heating) is £171.04. This calculation does not include initial purchase and future replacement.
If you are thinking of adding a hot tub to your guest accommodation, please note, guests will leave the lid off the hot tub, they will have too many people in it causing water to overflow and the pump to stop working.
Fortunately, we are able to hot fill from our biomass boiler which gives us a shorter time for heating up to 38.5 degrees and is a lesser cost than electricity, we also have solar on the farm which reduces some of our grid-supplied power, without this our costs would be significantly more.
Many manufacturers claimed that running costs would be just a couple of pounds a day, but this is simply not the case.
Conclusion
Consider all costs
Consider all costs
- Initial purchase divide this over 3 years by which time you should aim to have recovered this cost in full
- The biggest cost now is in electricity use monitored over a 24hr period from a cold fill we used 53KW
- Water cost typically 1200ltrs x unit cost for 1 cubic metre
- Cost out your fill and cleaning time, typically this will be 2.5 hrs taking into account that other jobs can be fitted in around the fill.
- Be sure to take into account all chemicals and PPE costs these have doubled over the last 3 years
- shop around for filters and chemicals your hot tub supplier will often be more expensive and significant savings can be made here.
- Look for savings on the environment, we use water for irrigating our fields and orchard consider this in the planning of your project 1000 litres of water is a big volume to dispose of on a regular basis.
- Allow for breakage damage and replacement covers etc.
- If you do not live on-site you will need to employ someone to maintain the hot tub this cost should not be underestimated.
Thank you for reading please feel free to contribute in the comments section of this blog, it helps us to add to the post keeping up to speed with what others are doing within the sector.
For more information on Staying with us here at Oaks Barn Farm please click through this link: Accommodation Options
