Decreasing Your Minimum Length of Stay to Generate More Bookings

By Melissa Yang, CTO and VP of Engineering

PhoCusWright recently completed a market research report on the vacation rental industry. They found out that RBO (rental by owner) in general required a longer minimum length of stay than professionally managed properties, which hurt their business.  To figure out user search patterns, I dug into EscapiaNET data.  EscapiaNET is used by both our own vacation rental consumer site, Clearstay.com, as well as over 30 network partner sites to provide functionality for searching and booking vacation rentals.

The data below shows the number of queries per length of stay consumers searched online.  The result is based on hundreds of thousands of online queries this year.  More than 90% of users searched a stay of less than a week.  Interestingly, 6 night stays are very popular.  If a property manager requires a week as the minimum length of stay, they may miss out on a large number of potential bookings.

Of course, reducing the minimum length of stay involves some extra overhead such as housekeeping.  How to adjust the minimum length of stay to increase bookings while balancing with increased overhead is an interesting issue for vacation rental managers to consider.

Comments

[seaside vacations]

Shorter stays seem to be a strong trend throughout the tourism industry. Shorter stays do create challenges for vacation rentals, but we need to be flexible enough to accommodate the demands guests are making…especially during slow economic periods. Short stays on the Outer Banks have increased dramatically over the last year. It is clear that our guests have enjoyed the flexibility of shorter stays

[Dylan Peterson (Sales Operations, Escapia)]

Despite the recession I believe people will still realize that they need to continue going on vacations. However, with smaller family budgets and rising airline costs I would expect a trend to drive more than fly as well as take shorter vacations. So I would think that cutting back on the 7 day minimum could really help occupancy levels.

[villa rental in spain]

Me and my family do both. When the destination is local, we tend to do rental, maybe b/c we trust/know the people of the country. If its in a country that is new to us, I think a hotel is safer.