Room Rates In Season Are Falling Like Key West Housing Prices and Rents

So here we are, tourist season a little more than 3 weeks old, and on my nightly runs into town, I always check the hotels on A1A, the Casa Marina area, the new motels and hotels and condotels on Simonton, and all the guest houses on Upper Duval.

So far during this season vacancies are everywhere.

Room rates have dropped dramatically. Deals abound all over the island. And I'm talking deals for which you do not need AARP cards, airline points, etc., to get a place for less than $200 per night.

Just last year, for instance, the Santa Maria condos were running $390 on weeknights and $440 and higher on weekends.

The Courtyard of the Santa Maria Luxury Condos

Today you can go online and find these same rooms vacillating anywhere from $290 (the lowest I've seen) to $340 . . . and these are weekend rates during Season.

But why take my word for it?

I found several room rate shopping bot (kayak.com, onetime.com, etc.) which compare prices from the likes of travelocity, orbitz, hotels.com, etc. It takes the room rates quoted by all these sites and show you the three best quotes from all the sites you choose to compare.

So, to show you how this works, I went to the front page for www.onetime.com

I then clicked on the tab labeled "Hotels"

When the Hotels page opened, I then checkmarked every single deal provider (including the one for kayak.com . . . which is a shopper bot similar to onetime.com).

After I checkmarked every deal provider, I then plugged in the following parameters for the test:

2 people, 1 room, staying form Jan.29 through Jan.31 of 2009. That would be Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, the nights when rates are normally highest during the week.

Now before I show you the results, keep in mind that deal providers all work against one another to show the best rates available. On any given night, if a hotel, motel or guest house has many vacancies, the deals they will offer will show lower, and lower and lower pricing on these deal provider websites such as hotels.com, priceline.com, etc. (Priceline offers set rates and an area where you can also "offer" the hotels a cheaper bid than what they are showing . . . it's simply fabulous and I'll cover this more in a minute.)

One more thing to point out: since I've begun monitoring these deal providers, I have witnessed room rates fluctuate during a 7 day period. For instance, as I saw the Santa Maria parking lot fill up with cars this week, I watched the rates on these deal providers creep slowly upward. Rooms which were as low as $240, were suddenly up to $290, $300, and so on.

That said, the further you book in advance, the better your deals might be as this Recession worsens . . . especially when travelers are worried about layoffs (see Pink Slip Friday from A1A News this past Friday) rising, foreclosures at an all time, the Housing ATM shut down, millions of homeowners upside down on their loans, and debt to home equity at an all time high.

Consumers are tapped out. Vacations are discretionary income purchases, with money going to the necessities of life instead of frivolities like vacations, satellite radio, full blown cable packages, etc. (Car and boat companies are selling far fewer cars as repossesions of both are at an all time high.)

Hence, Las Vegas, Key West, California (now losing more residents than people moving into the state) and other vacation hubs are seeing one business after another close for good.

Thus, as fewer vacationers with money come to Key West, hotels, motels and some guest houses are vying against one another by lowering bids for their rooms on these online deal brokerage websites.

Okay, it's time for us to look over the results of this Sunday's (Jan. 18, 2009) data of best deals for the dates Jan. 29 - Jan. 30, 2009 . . . Thursday through Saturday nights during Season, one room for two people.

I think Northerners will be surprised by these results:

Lowest priced motels per night: El Rancho at $99, Days Inn at $100,

Travelodge Suites and Holiday Inn $127

Budget, Radisson, Comfort Inn and the Palms: $130 to $140

Southernmost Hotel: $144

That's nine places under the $150 per weekend night IN SEASON . . .

The highest price place: Parrot Key next to the Walgreens on North Roosevelt at $449 a night.

Noticeably absent in the price wars are the majority of guest houses in Key West. You'll only see "contact hotel directly" printed under each of their names.

Let's check to see where those Santa Maria luxury condotel rooms are today (remember, I said they've come down from $390 to $440 and higher last year). Hmmm, just a few days ago, I found several rooms for rent at $290. Today, something called reservetravel.com will get you the rooms at $314 per night, whereas Orbitz and cheaptickets are quoting $349 per night.

Which goes to show you, shop around, the deals abound.

Caveat emptor,

Rock Trueblood



p.s. If you are from out of town, shop this kayak.com or any other deal bot for hotels websites. Once you got the low rates for a place, don't commit yet.

Go online to priceline.com, pick out the star level rating of where you want to stay (in this example I clicked 3 stars and offered $110 a night. You'd be surprised at how many times a hotel with $250 rooms is sweating vacant rooms and they'll do anything to fill them up . . . just as airlines do . . . by selling the rooms at half-price or more.

That said, the cold front is breaking, the sun is shining, and the town is looking to show you a good time. Come on down.