Prepare Your Short-Term Rental For Regional Events
Why Should You Prepare Your Rental?
National and local events are always good excuses to travel, and there’s a reason why certain dates are some of the most-coveted for travelers–they want to be where the action is. For example, KeyData reports that during Super Bowl weekend in 2022, both occupancy and nightly rates jumped when it came to booking this key weekend.
Even if your property isn’t located close to where the action is for a gigantic event like the Super Bowl, these national and local events can have a huge impact on your short-term rental business, and we’re here to help you get prepared for them. We’ve come up with 5 steps to get you educated on large and small events along with ways to improve your processes, year over year, to get more bookings during these revenue-intensive periods.
#1: Research Holidays, National Events, and Nearby Seasonal Events
Is your short-term rental located in a hub of activity for a specific event, such as the Sundance Film Festival in Park City or Mardi Gras in New Orleans? Are there any smaller regional events that always draw in a crowd, like Ullr Fest in Breckenridge?
Consider all of these factors while you’re planning out your strategy for tackling national and local events. The regional vacation rental market will always see spikes of activity during certain times of the year, largely affected by seasonality as well as these key events, so it’s good to educate yourself on what’s to come so you can prepare your business strategy. Rentals can spike even in unrelated locations during very large national events like the Super Bowl, so it’s a good idea to research larger events as well that might affect the market, even if they are not located anywhere near you.
#2: Update Your Listing Description to Showcase Nearness to Events
While some guests may plan in advance and book their accommodations accordingly for events they’re looking forward to, others might be searching for things to do while they’re at their destination. Updating your listing description to advertise your nearness to both large and small events can give travelers a good idea of what attractions and celebrations will be happening during their stay, and might give them the extra push they need to book your listing.
#3: Personalize Your Home with Event-Inspired Interior Design Touches
When visitors decide to book a vacation rental, often they’re hoping to experience a little bit of what it’s like to live in that area. To provide a bit more local color to guests, think about personalizing your short-term rental with touches related to popular events that they might be traveling for. Is there a popular football team in your town, or a nearby music festival that people might be traveling for?
Add tasteful but personal interior design touches to your rental that relate to these local events, like a poster for the event on the wall or decorative pillows supporting the local football team, and ensure they show up in your listing photos. This is a small way to prepare yourself and better appeal to those guests who might be traveling to your locale to attend an event they’ve been dreaming of for a long time.
#4: Keep Watch Over Your Event Pricing and Booking Windows
One of the most important ways that you can prepare for the effect of national and local events is to keep an eye on what your average booking windows are and adjust your rates accordingly. If you’re seeing a lot of interest and searches in the weeks leading up to events and holidays, you’ll be able to tease out the trends of what people travel for in your area and adjust your prices more accurately to keep up with the demand as well as your competition.
#5: Analyze Your Event Trends
After you have about a year of rental data and statistics under your belt, it might be a good time to check in and analyze booking trends during local and national events. There will always be predictable spikes of activity in certain markets, like an increase in bookings during the Christmas and skiing season in places that get a lot of snow, like those that manage rental properties in Breckenridge. But with your expertise and knowledge of local and national events, you can forecast and better predict the type of revenue you should expect during those weekends or weeks in the future.
Preparing for Local and National Events with LocalVR
It can be a tedious process to research events that affect your market and revenue, but the rewards of personalizing and catering to the experiences that guests are looking for are well worth the trouble. Plus, teasing out trends and being able to forecast your busy days will make it that much easier to know what to expect for the future of your real estate investment.
However, if you don’t want to deal with all of the work of researching and analyzing the data yourself, hand it over to LocalVR. Our high-tech proprietary pricing algorithm takes into consideration a variety of market factors, including local and national events, to set your short-term rental at the best possible price to get the bookings you’re looking for. To learn more about our cutting-edge property management services supported by advanced and intelligent technology, take a look at local vacation rental management.