Now that fall is arriving, how are bookings looking in your market?

[JD Martin]

I'm curious to see, anecdotally, how everyone is doing now that the summer is over. I know there was plenty of discussion about a slow-down earlier in the year in many markets (including mine). 

I am in Four Corners. Things are still definitely slow. September & October are low booking months there, so that's to be expected, but surprisingly I do not have Christmas/New Year's booked yet. I do have some winter bookings in place, Thanksgiving week is covered, but overall it is still pretty slow definitely compared to last year. 

I ran some experiments on both AirBnb & VRBO on pricing - AirBnB lets you do promotions, whereas you just have to adjust price on VRBO, and I picked several typical very slow weeks to run promotions such that it put my pricing to where I was about cheaper than everyone else, and there still was very light activity. I did pick up one 10-day stay in October that typically would have been vacant, but otherwise even the cheap pricing didn't move the needle much. 

My personal feeling is that everyone is just busted at this point - high gas, high groceries, student loans coming due, high interest on their credit cards - and so they're afraid to spend money right now. My market (Orlando) pretty much revolves around theme parks and other pricey attractions so as they go, so will I.

How about you? What market are you in, how much is your place, and how are bookings coming along?

[John Underwood]

Our Lake House is mostly weekends only for the rest of the year.  The Clemson football home games booked early at $500 per night.

Our 6 bedroom Pigeon Forge Cabin that sleeps up to 23 people is probably 80% full for the rest of the year.  I still hope that fills in a little more. Super popular time of the year for that area. We got 8k just for the week of Thanksgiving.