SLO County hotels, vacation rentals see boom in demand after COVID crisis
After struggling during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, North Coast hotels, motels and vacation rental businesses have rebounded and are looking forward to a business boom this summer and fall, according to their owners and managers.
That means if you want to book a room or vacation rental in a prime San Luis Obispo County tourism area this summer or fall, you’d be wise to do it now.
Many dates are already sold out, and some lodgings are booking reservations into 2022.
Local lodging businesses were fiscally clobbered in the first three or so months of the pandemic, representatives told The Tribune.
But things have gradually picked up since then, with some periods of heavy demand.
In fact, business owners in many industries, including lodging, have gone from a lack of customers to a lack of employees.
Lockdown affects SLO County hotels, motels
Initially, hotels and motels in San Luis Obispo County were directed to restrict the number of rooms they could rent, limiting rentals to so-called “essential workers,” such as the nurses and medical assistants who relocated to the Central Coast to help care for COVID-19 patients or vaccinate people against the deadly virus.
Fidel Figueroa, who co-manages San Simeon Beach Bar & Grill and San Simeon Lodge, said that as soon as the statewide and local stay-at-home orders were put in place, “We were lucky to rent eight rooms out of our 60 (rooms total) each night, especially during the week.”
“When the pandemic first hit, people were wary,” said Michele Lilley, who has owned Highway 1 Vacation Rentals in Cayucos for 22 years.
“Everybody canceled,” she recalled. “In those first three, four, five months, I thought I was going to lose my business.”
Moonstone Hotel Properties owner Dirk Winter, whose company owns Cambria Pines Lodge and two other Cambria hotels, said that “there was a tremendous falloff in business” in March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
It was the same for Cambria Vacation Rentals, according to associate Jone Ubbenga. “In March and April 2020, all we had was cancellations,” she said.
Lodging business owners remodel North Coast properties
Some local lodging business owners used the downtime to remodel or refurbish their properties.
The new owners of Cambria’s White Water inn, who bought the hotel in 2019, began renovating that property in January 2020 and bought the neighboring 9Iron motel in June. They wound up completely redoing both properties.
Since reopening in September, the upscaled lodgings have captured the attention of Vogue and Travel + Leisure magazine’s It List 2021, and more recently, the inn became one of only five California hotels to earn a spot on Condé Nast Traveler’s Hot List.
Business looks up for lodging industry
The situation for the lodging industry began to lift about a year ago, right before Memorial Day.
As San Luis Obispo County entered new tiers of coronavirus restrictions under California’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy plan, most retail shops and dine-in restaurants started to reopen.
In a sister move, a San Luis Obispo County regulation limited hotel occupancy to 50% of capacity, with the preference that rooms be rented only to front-line healthcare workers, employees of essential services and county residents taking care of family members.
Most lodging representatives said they adhered to those guidelines.
Then, anticipating a wave of out-of-the-area visitors, San Luis Obispo County’s business and governmental leaders placed advertisements that asked those people to stay away.
Attracted in part by a bout of warm weather, crowds arrived in droves, packing vista points, parks and trails countywide. Beach areas were packed.
Throngs of people strolled along downtown streets and jammed into restaurants that were serving in-house. The tourists, often shoulder to shoulder, lined up to get into choice locations and queued for take-out food at food trucks and cafes.
When they could, the visitors rented rooms at area lodgings.
“Once we got to June, people started calling,” Lilley said. “Again I was getting some repeat customers, some traveling nurses.”
Even when restrictions loosened, she said, “I tried to go easy on renting,” because some neighbors of vacation rental properties were concerned about being so close to out-of-towners.
“By the start of last summer, we had come back to about 50% of our normal business,” Winter said. “By the time fall started, we were seeing record-breaking occupancy, because families were no longer tied to home, with kids no longer in school.”
Local businesses are looking for workers
Since then, business has steadily, even dramatically, increased for the North Coast lodgings, local entrepreneurs said.
That’s left some places short of employees, following a nationwide trend.
During the pandemic, when many of his employees were laid off or had their hours drastically reduced, some of them “moved back to Mexico, where they don’t have to pay rent,” Figueroa said. “We don’t know if they’re coming back.”
That leaves the motel and the restaurant short of maids, dishwashers, cooks, clerks and more.
Boom days ahead for vacation rentals?
According to Winter, Moonstone Hotels’ 2020 booking were “off by 50% from 2019 for the first six months and about 10% down in the last six months.”
“January and February this year were down about 10% below 2019,” he added. “March (2021) is about the same as 2019.”
The pace of current bookings, he said, suggest that “the rest of the year is looking very good.”
“Now, we’re very busy,” Ubbenga said. “People are telling us, ‘We are so anxious to get out of here!’ One woman told me they really hadn’t gone anyplace for a year, and had had everything delivered.”
Lilley said that “2020 ended up being my busiest year in over 22 years, and 2021 looks like it’s going to exceed 2020.”
“Ours was one of the lucky industries,” Lilley said. “We’re going to be just fine on the (Central) Coast.”
As Erica Crawford, president of the Morro Bay Chamber of Commerce said, “We’ve seen so many people coming through … taking the trip that’s been on their bucket list for so long.”
“We’re blessed by being a very beautiful destination,” Crawford said. “There’s almost a natural migration pattern from the valley, to escape the heat or dip toes in the ocean.”
Ubbenga said a lot of her clients told her “everybody came here to get away from where they were, that this was the place where they wanted to be. They told me, ‘If I’m going to have to stay at home anyhow, I’d rather look at the ocean.’ ”
