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Through April 2023, 59% of actualized reservations across the U.S. have had a lead time of less than 7 days prior to arrival, with just 29% booking more than 15 days in advance. Shorter booking windows indicate travelers are still making short-term decisions about their time away from home.
The flexibility of work from home and hybrid schedules have encouraged this trend since the start of the pandemic recovery era, and it seems like it’s here to stay.
Shorter booking windows mean booking pace is a less reliable metric for business decisions than ever before. It’s increasingly difficult to rely only on reservation booking pace as a baseline for expected performance when forecasting for revenue or operational performance.
Additionally, 30%-35% of on-the-books reservations are canceled, and 45% of those cancellations occur less than two days prior to arrival. An additional 19% of cancellations occur within 3 to 7 days of arrival.
Forecast accuracy and achievement of forecast projections will continue to be increasingly difficult metrics to work with if hotels and commercial strategy teams are relying only on pace or on-the-books data.
Kalibri Labs’ proprietary predictive algorithm projects performance at the individual hotel level, for all competitors, and hotels in the subject hotel’s submarket and market. This data quickly allows a user to identify gaps in projected performance and proactively put strategies in place to avoid falling short of the competition or expected performance for that period of time.
