Three ways hotels lose money in the low season, and what those months are actually worth

In ten years of hotel projects I have come to see it differently. The money in those months is mostly lost through three decisions the hotel makes itself, all of which look sensible at the moment they are taken.

And underneath all three sits a misunderstanding about what a quiet month is worth in the first place.

The rooms are empty, so the rate comes down. It works. Bookings appear, the month looks less alarming, and the decision is confirmed as correct.

Then it gets paid for.

The first payment is obvious and everyone accepts it: the same room sold for less, in the months where the margin was already thinnest.

The second is not obvious at all, and it is larger. Analysis of how discounting actually behaves in travel keeps arriving at the same conclusion: promotions mostly change when people buy rather than how much they buy. Volume over a year barely moves.

What moves is timing. The discount fills this month partly by pulling forward bookings that would have arrived later at full price, and partly by attracting people who have simply learned to wait.

Then there is the effect on what a guest thinks your hotel costs.

Research published in the Journal of Travel Research found that advertising low prices lowers what customers are willing to pay afterwards, because the discounted figure becomes the reference point. Once somebody has seen your November rate, your March rate does not read as a normal price. It reads as an increase.

None of this is marginal. One revenue management analysis puts over-discounting in the shoulder season as the single largest source of recoverable revenue in a hotel, ahead of commission costs.

And there is a specific version of this that I see in independent properties. The discount goes out through every channel, including the platforms, which means you have cut the rate and are still paying commission on the reduced figure. You have made the booking cheaper for the guest and no cheaper for yourself.

Worth checking: compare what a low season guest spends in total, including everything beyond the room, against a high season guest. The answer usually surprises people, and I will come back to it.

This is the one that costs the following year rather than this one, which is why it survives.

The logic is hard to argue with. There is no revenue coming in, so the spending has to stop somewhere, and advertising is the easiest line to pause. Nobody notices immediately.

To explain why it backfires, I have to describe how paid advertising actually works for a hotel, because it does three different jobs and only one of them shows up cleanly in a report.

The first is the guest searching for you by name. They already know you exist, from a recommendation, a list, an article. This advertising is cheap, converts well, and looks excellent in any report.

The second is the guest searching by characteristic. A spa hotel. Somewhere quiet with good food. A place that takes dogs. They have never heard of you. They will look at your website and leave, and come back in a week or a month, if at all.

The third is the guest who has decided nothing. Where to go for a few days in November. Somewhere in the mountains in winter. At this stage they are choosing an idea, not a property.

The second and third almost never produce a booking in the same session. What they do is get you into the shortlist a guest holds in their head before they start comparing specific options, and whoever is not in that list does not exist when the decision gets made.

Here is what I have watched happen more than once. Those campaigns are switched off. The first month, nothing changes, which confirms the decision. Around month three, searches for the hotel by name start to soften, because fewer new people are learning it exists. Six months later the platform share is visibly up, and nobody connects the two events.

Worth checking: if campaigns were paused, look at what happened to searches for your hotel name in the two or three months afterwards.

The simplest of the three, and the most common.

The calendar for next month looks thin. Somebody suggests a promotion. It takes a couple of weeks to agree what the offer is, write it, get it onto the site and into the ad accounts. By the time it is live, the month has started, and the people who were going to travel then made their plans several weeks ago.

The low season is booked closer to the dates than the high season, but not on the day. In practice you need the offer live six to eight weeks before the dates, plus the time it takes to build the pages and write the thing in the first place. Start the conversation in October and you are working on February, not on November.

This is why low season work has a peculiar quality: it has to be done when there is no visible problem. In the middle of a good summer, nobody is worried about November, and that is exactly when November has to be built.

Worth checking: how many weeks before your quiet months does the offer go live, counting backwards from the first date, not from when someone started thinking about it.

Now the part that changes how the first three should be read.

I said the low season is usually treated as a demand problem. It is also usually treated as a discount problem, on the assumption that the people who travel in those months are the ones looking for a bargain.

The data says something close to the opposite. An EY Tourism Advisory study covering five southern European markets found that the months with the lowest visitor numbers carry the highest spending per visitor, with the final quarter of the year skewing towards higher-spending segments.

That makes sense once you think about who actually travels in November. Not people looking for cheap. People for whom empty is the point. Someone recovering after a hard stretch of work. A couple who want to be somewhere without a crowd. Someone who wants a week of silence to think. A group taking most of the property.

These are not bargain hunters. A discount is not what they are waiting for, and cutting your rate to reach them means giving away a premium that is already sitting in your own numbers.

A project where this became very clear

I worked with a remote mountain retreat with strong summer demand and almost nothing in the cold months. Winter was written off. It was not discussed as a problem to solve, it was accepted as geography.

Winter there was spectacular. Genuinely. And there are people who specifically want to be somewhere beautiful and empty, and who will travel a long way for it.
What did not exist was anything they could buy.

There was no defined offer. There was no page describing a winter stay. There was no answer anywhere to the obvious question of what a person actually does there for a week in the cold, which is the first thing anyone would want to know.

And for group organisers, who were the most promising audience of all, there was nothing to plan with: no practical detail, no way to work out whether it would suit their group, no route to a serious enquiry.

We built winter as a separate product. Its own positioning, its own page, the main objections worked through in the content, and the practical material that a group organiser needs before they will even start a conversation.

Winter became a line of business rather than a season to discount through, and the group demand turned out to be real.

The distinction I want to draw from this is the one that mattered most on that project. The retreat had not been failing to sell winter. It had never been selling winter. Those are different problems. The first can sometimes be fixed with a campaign. The second cannot, because there is nothing for the campaign to point at.

Groups deserve a separate mention here. A group fills a lot of nights in a month where every night counts, and groups actively want the property to be quiet.

Corporate retreats and organised trips avoid the high season on purpose, because they cannot function in the middle of it. For a hotel with empty months, this is the most under-approached demand there is.

The three losses are decisions that look reasonable when they are made. Drop the price when it is empty. Cut the spending when there is no revenue. Deal with it once the problem is visible.

Each one is made in service of months that are worth more than the hotel thinks they are, and each one is cheaper to avoid than to repeat.

The work that replaces them is not complicated. It is finding the reasons people would come to you in those specific months, building them into something a guest can actually buy, and being in front of those guests before they decide.

It has to start well before the quiet months arrive, which is the only genuinely hard part.