Vacancy
If you grew up in the 60s like I did and you got the opportunity to take road trips, also like I did, then one of the icons of your travels was seeing the signs at the various motels that you passed that blinked NO (or not) before the word VACANCY. If business was good at the motel, the NO was lighted and you presumably knew not to bother to stop and ask if they had a room available. When you think about it, there was a lot of energy and cultural iconography expended simply to save a few itinerant salesmen from having the inconvenience of having to stop and ask if there was room at the inn. My motelier friend, Mike, tells me it actually had more to do with the motel manager wanting a well deserved good night’s sleep when he was full up, rather to be roused from his bed as each traveler stopped looking for a room. In some ways, I feel like the ubiquitous signage that virtually every motel in America had hanging out front, was there to remind the motelier that his main goal in life was to sell out his inventory each and every night if possible. Perhaps there was also a little bit of advertising in the mix as well as the more times people might pass and see the NO sign flashing, the more they would assume it was a popular hotel and they would have to keep in mind to get there early enough to get into the client base the next time they passed through town.
It would be somewhat distasteful to scream to the world that you are vacant and in need of business. It is unbecoming to be needy. But if you are being friendly to people who are not able to sample your wares by telling them not to bother to stop and waste their time, then you are being a solid citizen. There is no bragging going on if all you are doing is making life easier for the weary traveler. So, you see, there is a lot going on with something as communicative as a vacancy sign with a NO option out in front.
In some ways it solves a host of issues, even in the early part of the day when no one is looking for a room. It shows that you have the expectation of selling out and having to turn the NO sign on at some point. It’s no wonder that so many NO signs on motels sputter and blink. God only knows how often they are used and for that matter, where they get turned on. Do they go on automatically when the last key leaves the last key cubby or does the front desk clerk have to remember to flip a switch when he or she has sold the last available room? And is there ever a motel that doesn’t have just one extra room available that they didn’t intend to sell because the towel rack needs fixing or some such thing? Are motels ever really at full utilization?
Mike tells me that the more genteel motels have a “Sorry” sign instead of the NO Vacancy sign. He also tells me that the NO Vacancy sign is the the DoDo Bird of the Motel industry and only the Mom and Pop motels still have them, He should know, he was the Chief Operating Officer of Motel 6 before he retired and we all know that if anyone is going to leave the night light on it will be Motel 6.
Mike is the guy who just lined up seven SE Asian hotels for us to stay in during our recent trip, and I must say, they were all great, right down to pillow-top mattresses and big-screen TVs. And he did that at an average cost of $236 per night for a King-sized luxury room. I will say that we got a bit lucky in traveling to Asia right after the end of the Chinese Lunar New Year (and Mike just thought he was going after the Super Bowl), which is something I would recommend to others as a good time to go. The occupancy in each and every hotel was probably below 50% so we literally had these great hotels and their facilities almost all to ourselves.
I’ve just booked hotels for a week at the end of April for Kim and I and my daughter and granddaughters for a Spring Break trip through the wonders of the South from Nashville to Tupelo to Chattanooga. That week of travel will get us an average cost of $293 per night, which is 24% more expensive than 5-Star Asian hotels (and nothing in Tupelo and Chattanooga can really claim to be 5-Star at anything!). This got me interested to compare the costs of other hotels against what they cost in SE Asia. It so happens that I have booked our trip to Nova Scotia for September recently and so I have gone into the file to figure out that average cost. The eight nights in the hinterlands of the Maritime Provinces will average $201 per night, and that includes a few spots that can only be characterized as cottages rather than rooms and I’m guessing that half of them won’t have TV’s at all, much less big-screen TVs. In fact, I’m going to take a bet right now that half of these 8 hotels are really motels and will have NO Vacancy signs on display since they sound a lot like Mom and Pop operations.
For this recent trip to SE Asia, since we had three couples going and we managed all the arrangements ourselves (thanks mostly to Mike’s good work), we managed to get our per person cost of everything except the international flights to/from the region down to an amazing $3,866 per person for a 17-day trip. Think about that. That was $227 per day per person for lodging, travel (between stops), food, tours and even tips. Our estimate in doing the same or less (tips and some meals would not have been included) for a 14-day trip would have been about $10,000 per person or $714 per day per person, or 215% of our DIY program. Thanks to Mike, we saved almost $17,000 per couple. That’s meaningful.
We are looking at a Patagonia cruise through Cape Horn for next year on a top-of-the-line carrier like Viking (which we have cruised with three times before and love). Pricing out a mid-level Veranda Room (2 lower grade and 3 higher grade) would give us a price of $7,999 per person, which would cover lodging, meals, many of the same sort of tours and all interim travel around the horn. If we add 15% to cover things like tips and other things, that would take us to a per day per person for the 18 days of $511, which all seems like a fair compromise between the high-ticket travel tour and the DIY program.
I follow an online cruise discounter website and see that the cruise industry is very proactive about discounting their excess inventory as needed to fill up their cruises. You can always tell the high-demand versus low-demand routes and cruise lines. The good news and bad news is that Viking rarely gets discounted or if it does it’s in the 5-10% range where other lines with bigger ships (Viking has approximately 900-passenger ships versus the big 2,000 – 6,000 passenger mega-liners of other brands). So, I think it is safe to say that Viking would have a continuously lighted NO in front of their Vacancy sign if such a thing existed on a cruise ship. We’ll now see if Mike can improve on $511 per person per day as we debate the pros and cons of seeing the Drake Passage through Cape Horn.