Rev Up Volume 14 - Winter Recap and Early 2024 Trends - March 2024

Welcome back to Rev Up with your Brett/Robinson Revenue Management team!  We wanted to quickly provide a recap on our Snowbird Season, an update on our Spring booking pace, and some early takeaways from what we’re seeing for Summer 2024.

Our Snowbird season finished out very strongly across the beach!  We finished with very strong occupancies, and our units outperformed similar gulf-front condos in Gulf Shores and Orange Beach by an average of about 34% across the snowbird season in revenue!

Spring season is moving slowly relative to the past couple of years for March and April, and behaving a lot more like 2018 and 2019 than the past 3 years.  While there are some strong weeks at the end of March and early in April, the remaining March and April dates are just not moving as well as the past couple years have, unless we have very low rates.  We are not alone in seeing these slowing trends, and are working hard to take as much occupancy and market share from the smaller traveler base as possible.  If the weather improves and we get some nice, mild, sunny weekends, we’ll see things fill in nicely, but if we see rainy forecasts and weather, we don’t anticipate very strong last-minute movement. 

Here’s a quick illustration of what the occupancy comparisons to 2023 look like for Spring for Brett/Robinson, Gulf Shores and Orange Beach as a whole, and 3 key Northwest FL markets that we compete with for Spring Break travelers:

There are lot of lines on that chart, so I am hoping I can help explain it without being too confusing.  Our Brett/Robinson occupancy variance is blue, the GS/OB market is red, and the NWFL markets are orange, green, and white.  You can quickly see that we’re still fairing substantially better than our market in occupancy for the Spring despite these struggles, and that’s because we have been aggressively targeting Spring since late 2023. 

Summer pace for May, June and July continues to look very encouraging.  We have been working hard to get more bookings and revenue on the books earlier this year based on traditional pacing challenges that we see in election years, compounded with what we saw for overall pacing and demand in 2023.  We still feel great about our initial pacing and believe we have the best strategies in place to maximize your rental revenue for 2024!

If you’re interested in seeing a bit more detailed discussion on Spring and Summer pacing, please check out our recent webinar that we hosted to discuss what we’re seeing and how we are comparing to the market so far in 2024. You can also access that link or the presentation itself in the owner’s portal at www.browners.com/track in the “Coastal News” section over to the right.

If you do have questions, concerns, or anything you’d like to see discussed in a future RevUp article, please let us know by shooting us an email at revenuemanagement@brettrobinson.com.