Q: Where’s the sweet spot for length-of-stay where guests have the highest NPS?

There are many reasons to try to get a guest to stay at your resort an extra day. First among those is revenue: another day in one of your rooms means another day dining, drinking, or skiing at your resort. But is there a sweet spot where the LOS is long enough to get the full experience but short enough that guests don’t start longing for their own beds and begin having a progressively worse time? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
We took data from over 10,000 guest surveys for this analysis. The analysis was a fairly simple grid with Net Promoter Score down one side and the length of stay down the other.

Going above 7 on the length-of-stay side resulted in sparse data, so we had to face the fact that those insights probably wouldn’t paint an accurate picture and lump those together instead. Here’s how the numbers turned out:

The trend isn’t hard to spot. From a low point of below 8.4 for a 1 night stay to nearly 9.0 at 7+ days, the longer a guest stays at your resort, the better time they’ll have.

What This Means
As we said in the beginning, we were looking for a sweet spot. Instead, we found a consistent, upward climb. There was one, small dip when a guest stayed 4 nights which is interesting when you consider a past “Stash” where we identified the LOS of an in-state guest versus an out-of-stater. The 30 second version is that, on average, in-staters stayed 2 nights and out-of-staters stayed 4 nights.

Seeing this dip in a guest satisfaction appears at 4 nights might justify an extra effort to stretch those locals to 3 nights and those destination guests to 5. Not only will they fill more beds and generate more revenue, it appears they’ll have a better time as well.

There may also be something to be said about the chicken and the egg here. Did skiers stay longer because they were having an awesome time or did they have an awesome time because they stayed longer? We’ll let you chew on that one until next week…

But Wait, There’s More!
This isn’t just a one-time post, we release a new insight like this every week. We call it “The Stash”, and if you want it waiting in your inbox each Tuesday morning, stick your name and email below.