I have spent a fair amount of time in coastal places in the months when nobody goes, partly because it is cheap and partly because I prefer them.
It is not for everybody and the trade-offs are specific enough to be worth describing properly rather than romanticising.
What actually closes
More than you expect and less than you fear, and it varies enormously by place.
Seasonal businesses close completely — beach bars, water sports operators, the restaurants that exist only for the summer trade, and a proportion of hotels.
What stays open is whatever serves the resident population. In a town with a real year-round community, that is a lot: shops, a handful of restaurants, cafes, transport.
In a place that is purely a resort with few permanent residents, almost nothing stays open, and those places are genuinely bleak out of season.
The distinction to check before booking is whether anybody lives there in January. A town with schools, a hospital and a market functions all year. A development of holiday apartments does not.
The weather question
The honest version. Off season means weather, and swimming is frequently not on offer.
What you get instead is walking weather, which for coastline is arguably better. Long empty beaches in cool clear air are among the best things I know, and they do not exist in August.
Storms are more likely and are worth planning around rather than avoiding. Watching weather come in over water from somewhere warm is a genuine pleasure.
The failure mode is a week of grey drizzle with nothing open, which happens, and which is why I would not book more than four or five nights in one coastal place out of season.
The price difference is enormous
Larger than in almost any other kind of destination.
Coastal accommodation in peak season is priced against demand that vastly exceeds supply for eight weeks. The same rooms out of season are frequently a third of the price or less.
Restaurants that queue in summer take walk-ins. Places that require booking months ahead have tables.
And the staff are different people to deal with, because they are not working a fourteen hour day at the end of a long season.
What the town is actually like
The thing I find most interesting and which is invisible in summer.
Coastal towns have a real life underneath the seasonal one — fishing, farming, boatyards, a market, people who have been there for generations.
In season that is entirely obscured. Out of season it is the only thing happening, and the cafe that serves visitors in July is full of the same six men every morning in February.
Being the only stranger in a place is a specific experience. Mostly people are curious and welcoming, occasionally you are simply ignored, and either is more interesting than being one of a thousand.
Practical things that catch people
Transport frequency drops, sometimes dramatically. A bus that runs every twenty minutes in summer may run four times a day, and the last one may be early.
Opening hours shorten and are unreliable. A restaurant listed as open may not be, and there may be no alternative within walking distance.
Accommodation heating is the one that has caught me. Buildings designed for hot weather are frequently poorly heated and can be genuinely cold. Ask directly rather than assuming.
And check whether the place you have booked will actually be operating. Listings stay online after businesses close for the season.
The best months
The shoulders are the compromise most people should be making.
The few weeks either side of the season have most things open, considerably fewer people, and weather that is still usable. Prices are between the two extremes.
Late in the shoulder is generally better than early, because the sea retains heat and is warmer in autumn than in spring at the same air temperature. Swimming is possible weeks after most people have stopped.
Deep off season is a different proposition and should be chosen deliberately rather than as a cheaper version of the same holiday.
Where I have found it works best
Places with a working harbour, because the working part continues all year and it is the most interesting thing there.
Places with something inland — hills, a town, walking country — so there is somewhere to go when the weather closes in.
And places large enough to have several restaurants, because one closing leaves you with options rather than with nothing.
The failure has always been the same: somewhere beautiful, small, and entirely dependent on summer, arrived at in November, where the answer to every question was that it opens in April.
Talking to people
The unexpected part, and the reason I keep going back to these places at these times.
Out of season, the person running the cafe has time to talk, and frequently wants to. So does the man mending nets, and the woman in the shop.
In August none of these conversations are available, because everybody is working flat out and you are the four hundredth person that day.
What comes out of them is the actual information about a place — where to eat, what happened here, what it was like before, who owns what.
It is the single largest difference between the two seasons and it does not appear in any comparison of prices or weather.