Cozy fireside chat, anyone? Our latest Lodgify webinar offered just that.
On December 10th, Lodgify hosted a special webinar-meets-fireside chat with two successful hosts and property managers, Daniela Derin from Skol Apartments Marbella and Kerri Gibson from Chalets Hygge. Together, we reflected on the biggest trends from 2024, shared tips for making the most of them in the year ahead, and revealed insider tricks to help you thrive in 2025.
For those of you who missed it, grab some coffee or hot chocolate and snuggle in to watch the recording or read the recap below!
Webinar recording
Webinar recap
The webinar began with an introduction to our speakers:
- Daniela Derin is the co-founder of Skol Apartments Marbella in Spain’s Costa del Sol, where she manages 90 properties.
- Kerri Gibson is the co-founder of Chalets Hygge, a vacation rental business made up of six rental chalets in Quebec.
As the webinar host and Lodgify Content Marketing Specialist Miquelle Radich explained, our third speaker, Kit Leggett, was unable to attend due to a flight delay. Kit Leggett is the founder of Nova Scotia-based property management business KBL Advantage and glamping business Sunken Escapes, managing a total of 31 properties.
Miquelle then went on to introduce Lodgify and its offerings, after which she dove into the first section of the webinar: 2024 trends.
2024 trends
This section of the webinar focused on sharing some key trends from 2024, with the hope of giving attendees an idea of what to expect in the new year. These trends come from analyzing Lodgify’s internal data for 2023-2024 bookings in the U.S., Canada, and Europe (see our full methodology here).
Booking window
When analyzing the average booking window, or the number of days prior to check-in in which a traveler books, we saw a:
- 1.3% decrease in average booking window, which dropped from 47.3 days in 2023 to 46.7 days in 2024
- 6.3% increase in last-minute bookings (bookings made 0-7 days before arrival), which made up 34% of total bookings in 2024
Essentially, people are booking slightly closer to check-in, and about a third of bookings are being made at the last minute. Given these findings, we had to ask our guests, how do you encourage earlier bookings, while also taking advantage of last-minute stays?
For Kerri, encouraging earlier bookings has been a question of loosening her minimum stay requirements. While she used to require six- to seven-night stays as a minimum during high season, she’s found that’s no longer possible and has seen earlier bookings after reducing her minimum to just four nights.
Kerri has found that capturing last-minute stays is the harder of these two challenges, as it means keeping a close and constant eye on her calendar two weeks out. She uses PriceLabs for dynamic pricing and monitors occupancy to decide what her likelihood of booking is and how low she wants to go.
As Daniela puts it, “A good revenue management strategy involves mixing early bookings and last-minute stays. You have to be prepared for both.” Since repeat bookings make up 65% of Daniela’s reservations, she often has repeat guests booking a year in advance, and will let them book early without a deposit to encourage those reservations.
See also: Lodgify Winter 2024 Report: When’s the Best Time to Book Your Winter Vacation?
Length of stay
As for how long guests are staying for, we noticed a:
- 2.9% decrease in average length of stay, which dropped from 3.73 days in 2023 to 3.62 days in 2024
- 1.1% increase in bookings of just 1-3 days, which made up 71.4% of total reservations in 2024
Stays are getting shorter, and the vast majority of reservations are just a few days long. So, how can you encourage longer stays?
Daniela simplifies this problem by requiring a minimum stay length of five days. Out of season, she says it’s simply not worthwhile to accept shorter stays, once you factor in the cost and time of turnover.
Kerri tries to manage her stays seasonally. For the high season, she reaches out to her repeat guests directly to let them know when her calendar opens and give them the first shot at booking. Since these guests tend to book further out, for longer stays, and at higher rates, this is a great way to both encourage longer stays and maximize occupancy and revenue.
In the lower season, Kerri requires a two-night minimum, and then offers both discounts and curated programs with local businesses to encourage longer stays. She also targets both workationers (who tend to book for longer) and families who don’t have school-age children in her marketing campaigns.
Average daily rates
Unfortunately, our analysis uncovered a 2.7% decrease in average daily rates (ADR) year over year. ADR was $254 in 2023 and $247 in 2024.
This makes rate optimization more important than ever, so you can guess our question for Daniela and Kerri: How do you optimize your rates?
As we mentioned above, Kerri uses PriceLabs for dynamic pricing, which is a tool that analyzes factors such as seasonality, market trends, and events to automatically optimize your nightly rates. Dynamic pricing has been a game-changer for Kerri: Not only does it mean she’s not having to do this kind of analysis herself, but both her ADR and occupancy have gone up since she started using it. In fact, Chalets Hygge’s 2024 annual revenue to date is up 18% over their previous best revenue year of 2021.
Daniela offers a different approach: “Over the years, I’ve seen that you can only play with prices so much,” she explains. Being in a niche destination market with five different seasons, she prefers to handle rate optimization herself to avoid raising or lowering prices too much. While she increases prices yearly about 5%, for other rate adjustments she simply uses Lodgify’s calendar view to monitor gaps and tweak prices accordingly.
Interested in dynamic pricing? Learn more about how it works and then check out Lodgify Dynamic Pricing.
Number of bookings
The last trend we analyzed had to do with the number of bookings our customers received in 2024. Specifically, we saw an 8% increase in the number of bookings per house listing, giving businesses a very welcome boost in occupancy.
Of course, we had to ask what our speakers do to maximize occupancy, and for Daniela, it all comes down to social media marketing.
“We’ve found that if people are constantly in touch with the destination and the accommodation, they feel much more inclined to rebook us,” she explained. “Our success with direct bookings and repeat guests comes down to social media marketing done the right way.”
And what’s the right way? Daniela is careful to use a personable tone of voice that makes her followers feel as if they were having a real conversation with her. And as for platforms, she opts for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, using the latter as an alternative to email marketing.
Kerri couldn’t agree more, emphasizing the importance of using social media marketing to take your occupancy into your own hands:
No longer can we just sit and wait for the OTAs to drive business to us.”
“If you’re doing that, it’s going to be few and far between that people are going to see sustained success,” she went on. “And if you are now, that doesn’t mean you will be next month when they change the algorithm.”
In your social and email marketing strategy, Kerri recommends targeting potential guests, existing guests, and past guests as well as sending communications during pre-booking, pre-arrival, and post-stay. Simply by sharing details about what there is to do in the area, she’s gotten about 20% of upcoming guests to request additional days!
To see additional trends, be sure to check our blog in mid-January for our end-of-year report!
Insider insights and Q&A
In the next section of the webinar, we had some questions for Daniela and Kerri to help shed light on other property management trends, best practices, and tips for our audience. And, as always, we ended the webinar by taking questions from attendees.
Check out the webinar recording to hear all the questions as well as Daniela and Kerri’s insightful responses!
Learn more
Throughout the webinar, there were numerous questions about how to do search engine optimization to market your business and how to drive repeat bookings. To learn more about these topics, check out these past webinars:
- Vacation Rental SEO: How to Increase Online Visibility & Direct Bookings
- How to Build Guest Loyalty and Secure Repeat Bookings
Connect with our speakers
You can learn more about and connect with our speakers on the following platforms.
Daniela Derin:
Kerri Gibson:
Kit Leggett:
- KBL Advantage website
- Sunken Escapes website
- Sunken Escapes’ Instagram, TikTok and Facebook
- Kit’s Instagram
Methodology
We analyzed over 2.6 million bookings in the U.S., Canada, and Europe in Lodgify’s internal data from 2023 and 2024, including direct bookings as well as bookings from Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Expedia, Google Vacation Rentals, and other OTAs.
