Choosing a comparison period when Songkran moves the week

Every March, a hotel or a retail counter asks for a chart that sets this Songkran against last Songkran. The first file we receive is almost always a Monday-to-Sunday export. It looks tidy. It is often the wrong shape.

Songkran does not sit on the same weekdays each year. A Sunday stack of public holidays in one year can fall mid-week in the next. If the shop was closed, or the front desk was on a skeleton roster, those dates are not a fair pair for a fully staffed weekend. A rolling seven-day window hides that.

Open days, not calendar twins

The studio asks for the actual closure list before agreeing a comparison. We line up days the business was open for guests or shoppers, then say so in a sentence at the top of the sheet. If last year had five open days in the window and this year had four, the chart shows daily pace as well as the total, so a shorter window cannot masquerade as a weaker campaign.

Hotels and street-level counters need different open-day rules. A riverside hotel may be full because Bangkok emptied into it, while a Min Buri counter may be quiet because its regulars left town. Using the hotel’s busy week as the comparison for the counter, or the reverse, makes a capable season look lost. The comparison note names which business’s calendar is in force.

What we write down before ink

The note is short. It lists the dates, the closures, and the reason a calendar twin was refused. Drawing does not start until the client accepts it. That pause feels slow in the week before a budget meeting. It is cheaper than reprinting a bound set after someone in the room points at a holiday we failed to mark.

If you are preparing figures for a reading, send the public-holiday list you actually observed, not only the government calendar. A voluntary closure, a half day, or a front desk that stopped answering after 16:00 belongs in the same note.

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