The season is moving. Your guide probably isn't.
October used to be the end of the year. It isn't any more — but most guides still describe a place in August.
You know the feeling. It's the second week of October, the phone has gone quiet, and you start thinking of the flat as closed for the winter.
Meanwhile October is growing faster than August.
Not in absolute numbers — July is still July. But the growth is happening at the edges of the season, and it has been for a couple of years. The season is spreading out. The question is whether your place still reads like a summer place.
What the numbers actually show
The European Travel Commission publishes a quarterly report on European tourism. In the one covering the end of 2025, three lines are worth an evening of your attention:
- Air traffic grew more in the shoulder months than in high summer: revenue passenger kilometres rose 6.7% year-on-year in October and 7.1% in November, against 4.4% in July and 6.0% in August.
- There are more flats than last year. Short-term rental supply in Europe went from 4.92 million units in December 2024 to about 5.13 million a year later — roughly 4.4% more.
- And the report expects the trend towards shoulder-season travel and off-the-beaten-track places to become more pronounced, not less.
Put those together and you get the actual situation. More people are travelling when it's quieter. There are also more places for them to stay. Nobody wins that with a lower price alone.
Whoever comes in November is not whoever came in August
This is the part that gets missed. We talk about the low season as the same product with fewer people in it. It isn't. It's a different stay.
In August your guest wants the beach, the balcony and ice. In November they arrive at five in the afternoon and it's already dark. They want to know how the heating works, whether the museum is open on Monday, and where to eat when half the places have closed for the season.
None of that is in most guides, because most guides were written in June.
Three things to write before the clocks change
Not a renovation. An hour at the kitchen table, once, and it works for every guest until spring.
- How the heating works, with a photo. The actual thermostat, in a photo, with the two buttons that matter. Which hours it runs, whether it needs time to warm the place, what to do if a radiator stays cold. A guest who is cold at midnight and can't ask anyone writes about it the next morning.
- What's open, and on which days. In winter, opening hours are the local knowledge that guests can't get anywhere else. The restaurant that closes on Tuesdays, the museum that shuts on Mondays, the bakery that only opens in the morning, the bus that runs half as often. Five lines. They save ten messages.
- A plan for the rainy afternoon. Three things to do when the weather is bad, with walking times. Not twenty: three. This is the single most useful page you can add for the winter, and the one nobody writes.
And then there's the small matter of competition
Five million flats, and more of them every year. In a quiet month the guest choosing between yours and three others isn't comparing bathrooms — from the photos they all look the same.
What they can compare is whether the listing sounds like it knows what November is like there. A place that says “the terrace is lovely in summer” is a place that has nothing to say in winter. A place that tells you which market day still happens, and that the sunset over the river at half past four is the reason to come now, is a different offer at the same price.
You already know all of this. It's simply never been written down anywhere the guest can read it.
What to do this week
Take the photo of the thermostat. Write the five lines about what's open. Pick three things for a rainy afternoon. That's the whole low-season upgrade, and it takes less time than answering the messages you'll get if you don't do it.
And if all that ends up in a message thread, it's gone by Tuesday. That's the reason tulligo exists: one guide your guests open from their phone, in their own language, that you update once and everyone sees. Three days free, no card required.