North Tahoe joins effort to track lodging occupancy

With North Lake Tahoe Resort Association joining the Mountain Travel Research Project activity forecast program, Lake Tahoe as a whole now will be able to track and forecast hotel occupancy figures.

That will allow it to compare its figures with other mountain destinations such as Aspen, Snowbird, Deer Valley, Jackson Hole and Whistler that also are participating.

The Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority, which focuses on the south side of the Lake Tahoe region, is already into the program and last month was its first testing month.

The MTRiP initiative is designed to track the destination mountain traveler, according to Ralf Garrison, administrative director of the Denver-based program.

"The real focus of MTRiP is to look at the overnight guest and who comes for multiple nights, and an ability to look at the advance reservations so that we can see what's coming down the road and give that information to the destination," he says.

The NLTRA operates a central reservation system that books rooms in all of Lake Tahoe.

But that's only one part of the distribution channel, says Andy Chapman, tourism director for the association.

"What MTRiP is going to allow us to do is to get information from all three channels, which is the central reservation, property direct and the wholesale tour operators," Chapman says.

Lodging properties outside the central reservation system are beginning to feed data into the study.

In exchange, they get information on how their properties are doing against everybody else in the region.

Chapman says the information allows lodging operators to make intelligent decisions on placement of marketing resources.

"It really, for the first time, allows us to have a decent forecasting tool to, say six months down the line of how we are pacing versus last year and the year before," Chapman says."And if we see 'OK, there's a little bit of a slippage here in June,' it gives us the opportunity to react to that and put some marketing programs and promotions in place to help the soft times we're seeing."

At the end of each month, the program sends out a report to all the participating partners with a set of questions based on reservations.

The program takes into account not only the numbers in the month prior to the report but forecasts for the next few months.

It then combines everybody's information into a snapshot of how North Lake Tahoe or South Lake Tahoe is doing.

By combining the two pieces, operators can see how Lake Tahoe is doing as compared to other resorts.

"It also helps to know how you're pacing for January at the end of October or at the end of November," Chapman adds.

It's premature based on South Lake Tahoe's October figures, says Garrison, to get a clear picture of Lake Tahoe.

But he thinks the cooperation of properties in north and south Lake Tahoe will further widen their focus to national and international markets.

"When they combine their forces, they are going to be much more successful against their major competition in Utah and Colorado, the major skiing markets,"Garrison says.