Resorts Adapt to the End of the Off-Season

25.08.2023 - 14:15 / skift.com / Carley Thornell

The adage “If you build it, they will come” has multiple meanings for Cory Carlson, regional marketing director at Four Seasons Resort and Residences Jackson Hole. 

Last year’s renovation of guestrooms and suites brought an influx of interest on social media — and reservations. And in the past couple of years, Carlson and his team noticed that more potential guests were clicking the online booking calendar, trying to reserve dates when the resort was traditionally closed.

“Jackson Hole is becoming more robust, and we kept seeing November becoming very apparent as a time people wanted to be here,” Carlson said.

That, combined with data about the number of passengers on daily flights into the market, were the deciding factors for Carlson and his team.

Data from analytics firm Cirium‘s Diio service that Skift checked suggested there’s a lot of variance by day and season. On a Monday in early February ski season, Jackson Hole had 1,687 departing seats across airlines American, Delta, United, and Alaska. But during shoulder season last year, it was only about 800.

“We said, we need to give this a try,” Carlson said. “It’s a huge success story for us.”

The Four Seasons resort doubled its occupancy percentage for the entire month of November, as compared to the single-digit percentage when it was only open for Thanksgiving in previous years.

The whole travel industry is grappling with subtle changes to seasonal travel demand. As Skift has noted, blended travel has come of age as people mix business and leisure trips, and U.S. airlines saw last year off-peak travel bookings coming in higher for both pre-summer weeks and midweek days.

Four Seasons Jackson Hole joins a burgeoning number of formerly seasonal properties open year-round, offering guests rates that are hundreds of dollars less per night than in high season – and offering hotels operational wins.

Keeping Pelham House Resort in Dennis Port, Massachusetts, open year-round has many benefits, said managing partner John McCarthy. But unequivocally the primary one is to combat massive seasonal labor challenges in Cape Cod. 

“The biggest reason we stand by staying open year-round is for our staffing. Once the high season starts, we’re not starting from zero and having to build up momentum again because we’ve lost people and have to train new ones,” McCarthy said. “That’s if we can find them.”

In the next town over, EOS Hospitality reopened Wequassett Resort & Golf Club this month as a year-round property. Wequassett’s 27 oceanside acres formerly offered hundreds of workers seasonal employment just April through November, with an impressive year-over-year employee return rate of 60 percent, said general manager Alton Chun. 

But Chun still envisions fewer