Rev Up Volume 13 - National Trends from 2023 - January 2024

Welcome back to Rev Up with your Brett/Robinson Revenue Management team!  Recently our team was able to attend the 2023 Data and Revenue Management conference in Nashville, Tennessee.  We met with other talented revenue management teams across the world to learn and share insights, we were asked to participate on an expert panel, and we were able to meet with some of our key technology partners to discuss how we can optimize your revenue even better for you moving forward!

Key snippets from industry data leader KeyData:

• American travel to Europe grew 35% in 2023 vs. 2022
• American Cruise travel increased 50% in 2023 vs. 2022
• There was a 21% decrease in stays between $500-$999/night in 2023 vs. 2022
• There was only a 9% decrease in stays over $1,000/night in 2023 vs. 2022

What can we learn from this?  Top producing units saw less decline than “average” producing units in 2023 across the country.  We have seen this trend throughout 2023 in the research we have seen across several articles and industry websites as well.  The highest spending vacationers were less likely to skip (or set hard spending limits on) their vacation in 2023 than the “average” traveler.  While some of the highest end travelers decided to head overseas to Europe, with Cruise prices dropping this year, we saw some shift from the “average” traveler from vacation rentals to cruises. 

One key thing we stress internally with Brett/Robinson is that it’s important that our Revenue Management and Marketing teams be on the same page as we build our strategy.  In talking to the folks around the country, we learned that we’re well ahead of the curve in how aligned our team is here at Brett/Robinson.  Look for an entire post on this subject in the future on Rev Up, but for now, please understand that we place a great deal of value on ensuring our pricing and marketing strategies are aligned so that we can achieve the # 1 goal of revenue management: selling the right property to the right person, at the right time, for the right price, on the right channel (website, call center, OTA) to maximize revenue for our owners. 

Finally, we’d like to share for 2024 is what the industry projects for vacation rentals vs. the past few years.  The consensus is that overall, the industry expects 1-3% occupancy decline in 2024, at 1-3% nightly rate increase.  The overall projections expect revenue to be somewhere between flat and 3% better than 2023.  We expect somewhere between 3% and 5% growth for the “average” property in 2024 at Brett/Robinson.  We believe that a sound early booking strategy that is currently putting more on the books than in the past will allow for a strong initial revenue base that we can grow upon.  As you can see in the chart below, we’re off to a great start so far in our revenue/unit pacing vs. the past two years:

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.