The summer season is decided in January

Anyone who runs a seasonal business knows the January evening. It is quiet, there is finally an hour free, and everything that went wrong last August comes back at once. The booking form that emailed nobody for a week. The prices on the website that were last year's. The Germans who asked the same four questions every single day.

This is the right moment to have that thought. It is also the last comfortable moment. By March the first early bookings arrive, by Easter the phone is ringing, and from then on nothing gets changed that is not on fire.

In Greece this is sharper than in most places, because the season is short and the whole year's income lands inside it. A mistake in July is not one bad day. It is one bad day out of the ninety that pay for the other two hundred and seventy.

What people usually leave for later

These are the things that are cheap to fix in January and expensive to fix in July:

• Last year's prices and dates are still online. A guest who books at the old price expects the old price. You either honour it or start the holiday with an argument.
• Nobody has tested the booking form since it was set up. Forms stop sending email quietly — a changed password, a full inbox, a hosting move — and the first sign is a customer who says "I booked, didn't you get it?"
• The same questions are answered one by one. Parking, pets, what time the boat leaves, whether children can take part. Every answer that is not on the site is a message someone has to write by hand, usually at night.
• The phone number only works in office hours. Your customers plan their holidays after work, from another country, in another time zone.

That last one is worth a number. On the Mykonos Diving Center website we rebuilt, 45% of bookings now arrive outside office hours. Those are not extra customers the site invented. They are people who would otherwise have had to wait until morning, and some of them would have booked somewhere else by then.

A January list

If I had one evening with a seasonal business, this is what we would go through:

1. Make a booking yourself, from your phone, on mobile data. Not from the office computer. Time it. Note every moment you hesitated.
2. Check where the confirmation went. Did the customer get one? Did you? Would you have noticed if you didn't?
3. Write down the ten questions you answered most last season. Put the answers on the site, in every language you take bookings in.
4. Update prices, dates and photos in one sitting. Old photos are less of a problem than old prices, but a pool photographed before the renovation still leads to a disappointed guest.
5. Decide what happens when you are full. A form that accepts a request for dates you cannot serve creates a message you have to write and a customer you have to let down.

None of this needs new software. Most of it needs an hour and a phone.

When the list is not enough

Sometimes going through it shows a bigger problem: bookings that arrive in three places and have to be typed into a fourth, or a calendar that two people update and nobody trusts. That is a real project, and January is exactly when to start it — there is time to build it, test it, and let staff get used to it before anyone is under pressure.

If that is where you are, tell us what last season looked like. Bring the messy version. It is more useful than the tidy one.