What is 'the snowball effect'

What is the snowball effect?

There are a couple of factors in holiday cottage letting that can be hard to explain with regards to setting prices and calendar availability. I’ll try and give you a quick explanation here: 

The more bookings that are added to the booking calendar; the more this exponentially increases your chances of booking the dates on either side of this new booking. I refer to this as the ‘snowball effect’. 

The more bookings you receive, the easier it is to sell the remaining dates in that period; browsing guests have a ‘fear of missing out’ when viewing your online calendar.  This prompts them to book more quickly, as an impulse purchase. It’s important to not look at weeks as isolated sales, it’s about the overall annual rental income achieved for the whole period/segment. If guests see a lot of availability in the cottage calendar, they are much more likely to wait before making a commitment to book your property.

Here is a visual of what I'm trying to describe. The hardest bookings are the first few, then the easiest bookings are filling the gaps when most of the dates are already sold. Bookings are created in exponential growth, view the blue line below. 

If you price too high, you can sit with a lot of weeks empty. The more you sell, the more likely you are to sell more.