Trends The Stash: Are booking lead times really “shrinking fast” for all hotels?

A recent article in Travel Weekly revealed that hotel booking lead times in both North America and Europe are “shrinking fast.” Meanwhile, mountain destinations have been placing an increased emphasis on advanced booking. So, has their extra effort helped them avoid this trend or is the dominance of last-minute bookings inevitable? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at booking lead times over the last 6 years for 30 mountain destinations. We then found the average lead time for each calendar year and plotted them on the chart below.

The simple answer is, no, lead times have not dropped for ski resorts and mountain destinations. On the contrary, they’ve grown almost 25% from 44 days in 2010 to just under 55 days so far in 2015.

What This Means
Keep in mind that the last few ski seasons have seen below-average snowfall across much of the country. In a weather-dependent industry like skiing, this may have decreased last-minute bookings driven by snow storms and kept the average higher than it would have been. Interestingly, the last season with above-average snowfall nationwide was 2010/2011, which is also the lowest point on our graph.

In other words, it may take another strong snow year to know if these efforts to drive advance booking have been successful and, in reference to the point we started with, how closely mountain destinations mirror trends in the rest of the hotel industry.

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