Let’s face it – this off season is hard to swallow. It’s not unusual to have occupancy levels drop, but when the overall occupancy of PCB hits 6%, it’s hard to get condos booked even at extremely low rates. In 2022, overall occupancy for Nov-Dec was 47.1%. This year, for the same time period, the average was 11.3%. That’s a huge drop! After Ironman, we started dropping our rates, continually dropping to our lowest minimums. When that didn’t work, we dropped to unprecedented low rates and still saw only a few nibbles. We also lost 4 snowbirds for this winter with cancellations due to health. This is the first year in 13 years that we have not had a waiting list for winter snowbirds going into November. We are continuing to slash those longer term rates to entice interest, but at some point we must consider whether the low rates will attract guests that will not respect or care for your property.
Cancellation Policy
VRBO listing sites are telling us that they are now favoring property listings with a more lenient cancellation policy. They want us to allow full refund cancellations up to 14 days prior to arrival (we are currently at 30 days). But allowing this would mean that you could end up with a last minute vacancy on your calendar, with little chance to fill it if someone cancels. If you would like for us to offer this with your property, to see if it improves bookings, just let us know. You can’t offer different policies for different stay dates, but we could offer the more lenient policy for a promotional period?
Plan Ahead
Since we know that November and December are traditionally low occupancy and low-rate months, many owners use that time to update their condos or visit themselves. November is a beautiful month to visit the area (I usually spend the month there myself). We do most of our deep cleaning and inventory updates during November too. I also recommend that you budget some of your summer income, when income is strong, to cover expenses for these months.
Looking Ahead to 2024
But here is come good news – the bookings for 2024 are already coming in. The market forecast is that 2021-2022 rentals were high coming out of COVID, but the 2024 rates are expected to return to more “typical” rates. We’re seeing bookings coming in now slightly at or higher than the rates for 2023, so we hope to see 2024 at or higher than our 2023 REVPAR.
Next month we will post your year-end REVPAR reports in the Statements section of your Owner’s Portal. Our hope is that everyone will still see a higher REVPAR in 2023 than in 2022. Ultimately, that is our goal.
As always if you have specific questions about your property, or have promotional ideas you’d like to try out, feel free to call us to discuss them – we’re open to all new ideas and opportunities to generate revenue for you!
Leave a Reply