Bargain shoppers: Resorts and attractions grapple with last-minute bookings.

• Author: Webb, Gaylen
• Position: Busrness Trends

Aluxury boutique hotel in New York used Twitter to broadcast daily discounts of 25 to 30 percent for unsold rooms, and savvy customers learned to wait--some in the hotel's lobby--for the last-minute specials before booking their stays. Other patrons booked their stays in advance at higher rates and then demanded the lower, last-minute rate when they arrived at the front desk. After six months of discount mayhem, the hotel discontinued the Twitter broadcasts.

In the past, resorts and attractions could count on bookings being solidified up to a year in advance. But during the lean years of the recession, customers began waiting for last-minute deals before booking a trip. Has that become the new normal? In 2012, hospitality industry blogger Max Starkov wrote, "Many major hotel brands report 80 percent or more of their mobile bookings are for the same or the following day. In this hyper-connected social and mobile world, the booking window has shrunk tremendously over the past few years and travel consumers have embraced the mobile Web as a legitimate booking channel."

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Early on in her career at Red Mountain Resort in Ivins (formerly the National Institute of Fitness), General Manager Tracey Welsh says it was almost unheard of for a client to book a stay and arrive at the resort on the same day. Now it is almost commonplace, even for Red Mountain, which was named the No. 1 destination spa in the world for 2012 by Travel + Leisure magazine.

"I don't have the level of confidence that I had in the past to forecast 60 or 90 days before a need period; however, I have much more hope now for the 30-day window, that things can correct themselves because of that last-minute booking trend," she says.

Shorter booking windows make forecasting much more difficult, says Welsh, especially from a staffing perspective. "We have a very high staff-to-guest ratio, but with the shorter booking window, if a guest wants a spa treatment immediately we may have to call in a spa therapist to serve that guest." she says. "The trend certainly demands more versatility and adaptability from our staff than ever before and makes forecasting challenging. We have learned to adapt to the last-minute clientele."

Timothy Rutland, director of sales and marketing at Stein Eriksen Lodge Deer Valley, a Forbes five-star resort, says the trend toward shorter booking windows emerged during 2009-2010, at the height of the Great Recession, as cautious consumers waited...