A critical data point for predicting future travel demand

I don’t need to tell you about the challenges the travel industry has faced in the last few years – they’re self-evident and have ranged from wholly new and unpredictable to modified versions of conditions we’ve seen before. Searching for clues about the road ahead can be tough, whether you’re trying to avoid downturns, anticipate the upticks or even maintain the status quo. 

And while in some cases there’s no precedent to follow, there is one dataset that has remained a reliable indicator of future travel demand: school breaks.

We know for a fact that over 60% of households with children plan their major trips around when school is out and that number goes up when the household is exclusively children aged kindergarten through high school.  That’s why understanding when breaks happen is so important to planning your next year. This Christmas is a great example.  Because December 25 is falling on a Monday, a large percentage of schools aren’t actually starting their breaks this year until the Friday beforehand.  In fact, there are 45% fewer students on break the week of the 16 than there were last year, and they’re going back to school later in January.  

The impact on December bookings is twofold. First, hotels aren’t able to capture the same kind of occupancy this year as last, leaving a significant deficit for the pre-holiday week. Second, they’ve lost a lot of the rate power that the high demand would normally bring to an important revenue-generating period.  Fewer nights for fewer dollars is something that a marketer or revenue manager needs to be able to anticipate well in advance. 

But it also turns out that the shifts shift, too. Big events like hurricanes can have a significant impact on breaks for an entire region, while smaller events like a localized blizzard may add a week of make-up days at the end of the year in a critical market. It’s not just a matter of looking at school calendars during the summer, but continuously monitoring changes throughout the school year.

This information is imperative on the individual operator level, but it also applies to the aggregate. Local tourism boards and governments need school calendar data to ensure demand-generation efforts, like hosting major events, aren’t scheduled during dates when there’s already existing demand from school breaks in their key markets. 

Whether you’re a marketer looking to plan ahead for year-over-year changes, a chief financial officer wanting to anticipate shifts in when revenue will be recognized, a town manager needing to staff the bus lines or even a small operation wanting to hire college students when they’re off for a few weeks, shining some light on one of the mysteries around “what’s next” is a welcomed bit of certainty after the last few years of change.

Tools like Inntopia’s School Calendar Explorer are solving the data side of this problem, but it’s up to the operators, marketers, planners and leaders to use that data to make informed decisions around marketing, pricing, planning and customer satisfaction. With so little clarity in our markets and the economy even a few months out, insights like these can make or break a business’s performance.