Rev Up! - Volume 15 - Summer 2024 - June 2024
Welcome back to Rev Up with your Brett/Robinson Revenue Management team! We wanted to quickly provide an update of how our Summer looks so far, and what we’re expecting here moving deeper into the Summer, and what our early indications are for what this Fall may look like.
If you’ve been following our Sandscripts and attending our Market Update calls this year, you’ll recall that Spring was a bit of a struggle this year both internally and across our local markets. We have been fairly confident all along that our demand for Summer would be more normal, and the indicators currently are showing those expectations appear correct.
The line chart below shows the average revenue per available room night (RevPAR) for Brett/Robinson in blue, and competing rental units on other rental programs in Gulf Shores/Orange Beach in red. We pull these results directly from a third-party data provider that anonymizes the data and allows us to compare our performance with the market’s.
Patience has been a key factor in our ability to drive our impressive performance across the early Summer months. As we transitioned from Spring to Summer, we noted many of our competitors panicking and making enormous rate cuts for their properties for June and July. Brett/Robinson looked at our performance across the strongest Spring Break weeks and opted to stick with more nuanced adjustments based on data rather than our gut for Summer 2024. Despite the slowdown across non-peak Spring weeks, we analyzed the strength and late booking window across our key Spring Break weeks and determined that we should not be panicking to match rates for our prime Summer dates too early. The results shown on the graph show that Brett/Robinson owners made 20% more revenue per night for May than owners on other rental programs, and are currently up over 20% for June, and are growing that number every day. This means that our owners are currently pacing over $2,300 ahead of owners who picked other rental companies for May and June!
We do want to point out one other significant trend we’ve seen across all of 2024: our lead time is shortening. For the month of May, we saw roughly 25% of bookings for our properties happen within 7 days of arrival, and for June, we’ve seen roughly 16% of bookings occur within 7 days of arrival. Across the two months, that’s roughly 1/3 more of our bookings that are happening within 7 days than in 2023! Our ability to capitalize on this extreme last-minute demand has been one of the key reasons for our success to this point in the early portion of the Summer and will be key to finishing well for the remainder of the Summer.
We are pleased to announce a July Owner Update will take place Thursday, July 11 at 4PM central time. We will give a more in-depth overview of the latest trends in the market, Summer performance, and take an early look at what’s going on for our Fall season. You can RSVP by sending a message to us at rsvp@brettrobinson.com.