August 26th, 2011
Kissimmee hotel bookings
Have you noticed that the stock market is swinging up and down like a yo-yo? There is definitely a lot of uneasiness in the market place right now. We have high unemployment, fear of a double dip recession, fears from the Middle East, and the financial mess of the European nations. While! I getting scared just typing this right now.
I thought it would be a great idea to see how the swinging in the stock market has effected people’s ideas about going on vacation. The fortunate thing is that we can look at really two major cities in the United States (Orlando and Las Vegas) to gauge if people are still willing to travel, or if they have decided to cut back. Looking at the Orlando market, it is about the same as it was last year, and last year was huge improvement over 2009.
I think as long as we do not go into a deep recession, the rest of 2011 and first part of 2012 will look pretty good or at least on par with end of the 2010 and beginning of 2011. However, I do expect that 2012 will be a better year than 2011. I feel that the stock market will calm down a little bit, and hopefully some of these companies that are sitting on a pile of cash will start to spend it again and hire people.
I recently read an article that Orlando hotel packages are up about 7% over 2010 numbers; however, since most hotels have cut their rates so dramatically to entice guests to stay with the that their profits were not much higher. Now, we all know this cannot go on much longer, heck some area hotels are barely keeping their doors open. We do expect rates to go up in 2012 but nothing drastic maybe 5% to 6%.

