Rev Up - Volume 12 - Black Friday Recap - December 2023

Welcome back to Rev Up with your friendly Brett/Robinson Revenue Management team!  As we wrap up an intense 2023, we wanted to take a moment to thank you for continuing to trust us to maximize your rental revenue for your property, and to provide a quick update on what we saw with our Black Friday and Cyber Monday flash sales.

If you’re looking for one word to describe the flash sale, we’d use “Outstanding”.  We will certainly go into more details, and we’ll show you some specific examples, but overall, our flash sales came in over 35% better than our previous best Black Friday/Cyber Monday flash sale in overall bookings and revenue both!

Below you can see a comparison of revenue booked for 2024 by arrival date vs. bookings made for 2023 (during 2022 flash sale) and 2022 (made during 2021 flash sale).  The thing that should jump out is that March, May and June both performed incredibly well vs. the past two years, April paced similarly, and July performed slightly better than either of the past two years.  Some of the very positive initial trends are early March, May, and June.  

Early 2024 trends are leaning toward demand very similar to 2023, which means that our focus is on getting earlier bookings for 2024 than we did for 2023.  You may find that your early bookings for 2024 are not necessarily the same rate as 2023, but our goal for 2024 is to grow the final ADR for your unit vs. 2023 where possible, and getting additional bookings earlier will help toward accomplishing this goal.  Below you’ll see another chart comparing the number of bookings and average rate for this year vs. the past two years:

Blue is this year’s ADR/average nightly rate (columns) and bookings (line).  The increases in the number of bookings and revenue are very closely tied to our understanding that the rates for 2023 were much higher at this time last year than what we ended up accomplishing by the time we finished the year.  Filling up the calendar for 2024 more right now will lead to better overall nightly rates, and potentially better occupancy as well. 

We are encouraged by what we’ve learned over the sale, and believe that this will help us continue with the right strategy to maximize revenue heading into 2024.  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.