Every January, the best revenue managers in the vacation rental industry gather at the Data and Revenue Management conference to share what they learned the hard way the prior year. The 2023 DARM conference in Nashville was no exception — and the data that came out of it painted a picture of an industry in transition that most operators hadn't fully processed yet.

We were there, including on an expert panel. Here's what the numbers said, what we took from them, and how we positioned our portfolio heading into 2024.

What 2023 National Data Actually Showed

KeyData, one of the industry's leading data providers, presented a set of numbers at DARM that told a story more nuanced than the headline "vacation rental demand is softening" narrative that was circulating at the time.

A few of the most telling data points:

  • American travel to Europe grew 35% in 2023 versus 2022
  • American cruise travel increased 50% in 2023 versus 2022
  • Stays between $500–$999 per night declined 21% in 2023 versus 2022
  • Stays over $1,000 per night declined only 9% in 2023 versus 2022

Read those four numbers together and a clear picture emerges: 2023 wasn't a story of Americans traveling less. It was a story of Americans traveling differently — and specifically, of mid-tier vacation rental demand migrating toward alternative products.

The post-pandemic pent-up demand for international travel finally found its outlet as Europe opened fully. Cruise prices dropped significantly after years of pandemic disruption, pulling price-sensitive travelers away from vacation rentals toward an alternative that suddenly looked more affordable. The travelers who left the vacation rental market in meaningful numbers in 2023 were largely in the mid-tier spending band — the $500–$999 per night segment.

The high-end traveler, by contrast, barely moved. A 9% decline in stays over $1,000 per night in a year when the mid-market contracted 21% tells you that premium inventory held its value much better than average inventory. The highest-spending vacationers were simply less likely to redirect their vacation budget than the average traveler.

What This Means for How You Price and Position

The implications of this data aren't just interesting — they're directly actionable for how you think about your portfolio.

Quality matters more in a normalizing market than in a demand surge. When post-pandemic enthusiasm was driving bookings across the board, average properties could ride the wave alongside exceptional ones. When demand normalizes and travelers become more selective, the gap between top-performing units and average units widens. The 2023 data confirmed this nationally — top producers saw meaningfully less decline than the broader market.

If your property sits in the mid-tier and you're competing primarily on price, you're fighting in the most contested, most price-sensitive segment — the exact segment that contracted most sharply in 2023 and will continue to face pressure as alternative travel options compete for the same traveler.

The answer isn't always to lower rates. Sometimes the answer is to invest in the property, improve the listing, and move up the tier. A $50 per night rate increase paired with genuine quality improvements can shift you out of the most competitive band and into a segment that held its value through a difficult year.

Channel and marketing alignment isn't optional. One of the clearest takeaways from conversations at DARM was how unusual it is for revenue and marketing teams to operate in true alignment. In most organizations, pricing sets rates and marketing promotes them — but they're not building strategy together from the same data set.

The goal of revenue management, properly understood, is deceptively simple: sell the right property to the right person, at the right time, for the right price, on the right channel. Every word in that sentence matters. Rate is only one variable. The channel — whether that's a direct booking website, a call center, or an OTA — affects not just the commission you pay but the type of guest you attract and their booking behavior. Marketing messaging affects which travelers self-select into your funnel. Pricing without considering those factors is solving half the problem.

The portfolios that outperformed their markets in 2023 were, almost without exception, operating with genuine alignment between their revenue and marketing functions. That's a competitive advantage that shows up in the data even if it's invisible in day-to-day operations.

The 2024 Projection — and Why We Were More Optimistic Than the Industry

Heading into 2024, the industry consensus projection was measured: 1–3% occupancy decline, 1–3% nightly rate increase, with overall revenue expected to land somewhere between flat and 3% above 2023.

That's the average. Average projections are built for average portfolios managed with average strategies.

We entered 2024 projecting 3–5% revenue growth — meaningfully above the industry consensus — and we had specific reasons for that confidence.

The primary driver was booking strategy. We had made a deliberate decision to build a stronger early booking base in 2024 than we had in prior years. Two factors argued for that approach: the normalization of booking windows we had observed through 2023, and the historical tendency for pacing to compress in election years as travelers defer leisure decisions during periods of political uncertainty.

By getting more revenue on the books earlier — through targeted early booking incentives, proactive outreach, and coordinated marketing campaigns timed to booking window patterns — we built a revenue floor heading into peak season that created more strategic flexibility later in the year. A strong base of early bookings means you're managing from a position of strength in the last-minute window, not desperation.

The early pacing data as we entered 2024 was already tracking ahead of the same point in both 2022 and 2023. That wasn't an accident — it was the output of a strategy built from the DARM data, refined through our own portfolio analytics, and executed with the kind of marketing-revenue alignment that most operators don't have.

The Broader Lesson

The vacation rental industry spent 2021 and 2022 in a demand environment that made almost everyone look smart. Post-pandemic enthusiasm, suppressed travel demand releasing all at once, and a short-term rental supply that couldn't keep pace with bookings — those conditions masked a lot of strategic weakness.

2023 was the first real test of what disciplined revenue management actually looks like when conditions normalize. The data from that year is a clear record of who had a genuine strategy and who had been riding the wave.

Going into 2024, the managers who had read the 2023 data clearly — who understood the mid-tier compression, the high-end resilience, the international travel rebound, and the booking window shifts — were positioned to outperform a market that was still calibrating to the new normal.

That's what the data is for. Not to describe what already happened, but to inform what you do next.

Bryant Loy is Director of Revenue at Brett Robinson Vacation Rentals and co-founder of Vrroom Revenue Consulting. He presented at the DARM Conference and has spent nearly a decade building revenue management infrastructure and analytics systems for one of the Gulf Coast's largest vacation rental portfolios. For a consultation, contact the Vrroom team at vrroom@brettrobinson.com.