Hotel Occupancy v Vacation Rental Occupancy

Just recently I had a comment on a blog post of mine that demanded I be a little more honest with my readers. Here was the comment :

Hotel Manager
askmeDave@gmail.com

Hello,

What is the current occupancy for vacation homes? The reason occ is up is because the aggregate occ numbers for homes are almost nil to begin with. Be a little more honest with your readers…

Well the only thing I can do to reply to that is quote some facts and figures to back up my case isn’t it?

So the aggregate occupancy numbers for homes is almost nil to begin with is it? That’s obviously a statement from someone who feels threatened by the vacation rental industry in the Orlando area and by someone who clearly doesn’t know the numbers involved.

Studies commissioned by Central Florida Vacation Rental Managers Association, Kissimmee CVB, Polk County CVB show that the economic impact of the vacation rental business in just two counties, Osceola and Polk county show that the combined economic impact is approximately $3.3 BILLION. That would be clue number one that occupancy in vacation rentals is and has never been “nil to begin with”.

If we then go a stage further and take a look at the actual sales tax collected by Joe Tedder, the Polk County Tax Collector in 2009, then we’ll see a number of 62.6% being collected due to the vacation rental business as opposed to 33.7% by the hotel/motel industry.  That’s clue number two.

Clue number three is to compare those percentages with last years numbers and we’ll actually see that hotels actually increased their number marginally from 33.4% to 33.7% whereas vacation rentals went from 61.4% to 62.6%.

I’d say that my original post from 27th October was pretty much on the money and in no way misled my readers. What do you think?

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