Airlines are setting travel records this summer, are you making the most of this boom?

Summer is almost here and if you haven’t already started promoting your hotel, consider this your alarm clock. Last week, we shared with you a data-driven summer promotion strategy that’s worked for some of the biggest hotels across the world. This week, Airlines for America, the trade group representing major U.S. carriers, announced that they expect to set a new record for number of travelers this summer. All told, they expect 257.4 million passengers to travel on airlines across the U.S. between June and August—that’s about 93,000 more travelers per day than last year. Last year, we should note, set records as well, with airlines seeing 75.8 million passengers in July alone.

This year’s surge in travelers, up 3.4% from last year, comes in spite of some troubling news for the airline industry this year. The grounding of the 737 MAX planes due to several troubling incidents led airlines such as Southwest Airlines to cancel hundreds of flights. However, the news doesn’t seem to have had any effect on travelers’ desire to go on holiday. Not surprisingly given the increased volume of travelers and decrease in the number of flights, airlines are even raising fares. Most domestic U.S. flights are $5 more than last year. Now, given the upsurge in travel, U.S. Airlines are scrambling to add seats to accommodate this increase in traffic.

How can you, as a hotelier, get in on the summer travel action? It starts by sending out promotions to attract travelers. Most hotels send between one and five promotions per year, our research suggests that hoteliers can send out many more promotions without seeing diminishing returns. In fact, we found that generally the more promotions you send, the more bookings you see. Of course, you can do even better if you build your promotions around holidays and long weekends and you can use our email marketing calendar to help you do just that.

We hope you take advantage of this boost in travel to secure more bookings for your property this summer.