The season is running and you're deep in campaigns to bring in new guests. You're thinking about budgets and acquisition costs. But the easiest win is closer than you think.
Do you actually know when your customers rebook? And is that the right moment, or could you encourage them to come back at a more interesting time?
This article looks at how to assess repeat behaviour, and whether your loyalty marketing is actually well set up. Your customer decides earlier than you expect, and if you're available at the right moment with the right offer, you don't need to convince them.
How to know when your customer normally comes back
In part 1 I explained why repeat rate per acquisition year is the metric that matters. To know whether your loyalty marketing works, you need a second number: your purchase cycle. That's the median time between two consecutive purchases from a returning customer.
Use the median, not the average. Outliers distort an average. The median gives you the number where half of your returning customers rebook sooner and half rebook later.
How to calculate it: take all customers who have made at least two purchases, calculate for each customer the number of days between purchase 1 and purchase 2, and take the median of that series. That is your purchase cycle.
A simple example: five returning customers with gaps of 95, 240, 310, 370 and 420 days between their first and second purchase. The median is 310 days. That means half of your returning customers come back within ten months, half take longer. That is your baseline.
The cycle differs by business. For a seasonal accommodation business it typically sits around the annual cycle. For a webshop it can be weeks, for a B2B service provider sometimes more than a year. The calculation is the same, the number is yours.
One thing you might be overlooking: the difference between when the customer decides and when they arrive. Someone who books in October for a stay in June next year is won in October. If you only start communicating in April because that's when the season begins, you're already too late. The decision has already been made, somewhere in winter, in front of a screen.
Look at your own rebooking window and it also tells you something about your loyalty marketing. A window that's longer than expected, or longer than last year, is rarely coincidental. It's a signal that customers are delaying their decision, or that you're not there at the moment they're ready to make it.
What's the best moment to get a customer to rebook?
There's no single moment that beats all others. Right after the stay is an opportunity. Two months later is too. What matters is that you don't let any of those moments go to waste.
Picture this: a family comes home from their stay and wants to go back next year. But they can't book yet. A large part of them will already start looking for an alternative. Those who wait hear the kids talk about it a month later, or get a memory notification from Google Photos or social media two months on. At those moments they check again whether they can book. Still not available? So they book something else. They genuinely wanted to come back, but you've lost them. Meanwhile you're wondering whether the experience wasn't quite as good as the review suggested, or whether pricing was the issue. You're thinking about ways to win them back, when the only thing you needed to do was make sure they could book again.
Regular family weekends, annual traditions, returning groups: those decisions happen earlier than you think. And if you're not there, someone else picks them up.
A healthy rebooking curve declines gradually. Many rebookings right after the stay, then a tapering tail as time passes. What you typically see at seasonal businesses is something different: a flat zone early in the curve followed by a peak later in the year. That flat period is what I call the dead zone — proof that something needs to change in how you activate and re-engage customers.
That it can be different is measurable. At the moment a guest leaves, their satisfaction is at its peak. The experience sits fresh in their memory, the competition is quiet, and the booking rush that comes later in the year hasn't started yet. The customer doesn't need to be convinced of the value of another stay either, because they've just lived it.
At a business I work with, a loyalty promotion exists that encourages guests to book their next stay shortly after departure. Guests who used that promotion rebooked with a median of less than a month after checkout. Guests without it took ten times as long. The nightly rate was virtually identical in both groups, so there was no revenue loss. The decision was pulled forward, nothing more. Every booking secured earlier also contributes sooner to customer lifetime value, something your ROAS target may or may not reflect.
A straight discount works, but the risk is that you create an expectation you have to repeat every time. A better approach: give loyal guests priority access to bookings for the next season. They get to book before the general public, which means they get the best availability. That benefit costs nothing in pricing terms and feels like a reward without having to manufacture scarcity.
Post-stay communication in the departure window and the weeks that follow pulls rebookings forward that would otherwise arrive months later and removes them from the competitive environment before they ever land in it.
Who is overdue and what to do about it
Once you know your purchase cycle, you can calculate for every returning customer whether they're overdue. Someone whose last visit was longer ago than the median purchase cycle, and who hasn't rebooked since, is overdue.
At businesses with an annual cycle, that's a large share of the customer base. A discouraging number, but not all equally worth pursuing.
Shortly past the purchase cycle. The memory of the visit is still relatively fresh. A targeted email with a concrete offer has the best chance of working here. The shorter someone is overdue, the higher the conversion likelihood.
One to two purchase cycles past. A direct offer works less well. A seasonal reminder at the moment the next buying opportunity arrives connects better with what they're already starting to feel.
More than two purchase cycles past. The statistical likelihood of return is small. The effort invested returns less than focusing on the warmer segments.
Whether your loyalty marketing works shows up in the data
Points, discounts for loyal customers, VIP status: those instruments have value, but they miss something fundamental. Your customer decides to come back on their own timeline, shaped by their experience, the season, and external triggers you don't control.
What you do control is whether you're there at the moment that decision falls, whether your pricing is visible and your offer is ready.
Whether that works doesn't show up in open rates or clicks. You see it in the repeat rate of the cohorts you contacted versus those you didn't. You see it in the shift of the rebooking curve: are customers booking earlier than last year? That's the signal.
The purchase cycle is the compass. Without that number you're communicating at the wrong moment, and then it barely matters what you say.
If you want to calculate your purchase cycle but aren't sure where to start, or if you suspect your loyalty marketing is hitting the wrong moment, I'm happy to take a look.
The patterns and mechanisms in this article are based on what I encounter in practice with businesses that have returning customers.
Joey Vangaeveren founded Intzicht and works as an embedded marketing and data analytics partner for businesses with returning customers, from e-commerce to seasonal operators. His work spans strategy, custom analytics dashboards, and applied AI. He writes about what he sees in practice.
Curious what this could mean for your business? Get in touch.