As Fall has officially started this week, it is a great time to reflect on the past summer, and to look at some of the visitor data from the last few months. Business owners know how their businesses performed over the busy June, July and August months; whether their visitation and revenues were up or down from the summer of 2018. However, how about the hotels in the region? How did hotels do in comparison to your individual businesses? What is the flow of visitation for them?

This summer, CCT started collecting aggregated hotel data for the region to answer the questions above and many more. Knowing this extra information allows CCT and its stakeholders to know the visitation trends in the region for overnight visitors. This data can also provide your businesses with ideas on how to increase visitation/revenue throughout the year.

Some examples could include:

• Create packages with the hotels to diversify both your own markets and their selection of products/’things to do’ for visiting guests; leading to increase your brand awareness with their guests.
• Schedule familiarization tours with the hotel staff in the low season to have them promote your businesses to their hotel guests throughout the year.
• Understand how the hotel’s peak/shoulder/off seasons compare to yours, and when to expect an influx of tourists to the region – Especially when your businesses are launching new products, and observing their potential impact on hotel visitation.
• Identify gaps to increase overnight visitation with various products/experiences (E.g., festivals, sport tournaments, events, etc.)

Although, not every hotel/motel in the region supplies their data in these reports, approximately 60% of the properties participate, which covers 83% of the total rooms in the region.

The hotel/motel stats below cover data from January 2017 – August 2019; including Occupancy percentages, Revenue, and Average Daily Rate (ADR).

As seen in these charts and tables above, a combination of a high occupancy and average daily rate in August 2019 produced record breaking revenues for overnight visitation in the region. CCT also hopes that your businesses saw an increase in visitation and revenue as well. Please feel free to share any success stories to further stakeholder engagement and opportunities for everyone to be more successful.

For additional hotel/motel stats, information about the Visitor Research Program/Environics, or other research, please contact Tom at TGuerquin@CentralCounties.ca.