Any other season apart from low, high, off and shoulder season?

score:5

Accepted answer

Contrary to Calchas' statement, seasonality still plays a big role in hotel pricing and other services in tourist destinations. While Calchas is correct for business hotels in big cities, tourist destinations like Hawaii, Bermuda, Thailand, Bali, etc still use seasons when bracketing prices.

The basic categories used most frequently are: off or low, shoulder, high, peak. But the number of seasons used depends on the location.

Some areas have only two seasons, high and low, as an example Bermuda where they have numerous cruiseships visiting in spring, summer and fall, then a huge drop in tourists in winter when the cruises stop.

Hawaii is two seasons plus, winter and summer are high season, spring and fall are shoulder season, as numbers drop but as a whole the islands are still pretty busy. Some properties in Hawaii add a third pricing season, Peak, during the Christmas / New Years time when everything maxes out on capacity.

Here in Thailand many places use all four seasons, low during the rainy season, shoulder in late fall early spring, high during winter with peak seasons at Christmas New Years and again during Thai New Year (Songkran).

Unfortunately there is no universal definition for seasons, so each country, destination and sometimes hotel can use a slightly different set of dates and qualifiers to define the seasonal brackets. And some places use their own naming conventions instead of high, low, etc, as an example many places in SE Asia call the low season the "green season" (since it is rainy season).

So yes, seasonality comes into play when planning your travels, but you need to research what the seasons are for each destination.

And for the nitpickers, my use of calendar season (spring, fall,etc) are based on the northern hemisphere, North America patterns.

Upvote:2

There are also holiday seasons and event seasons. Those are defined by region and hotel property. I know of several hotels in Montreal for example which have low, high and Grand Prix pricing. There are different prices as dates get closer to major event. Last week, for example, I booked 7 days of hotel in Rio starting and ending before Carnaval and there is a 3X (!!) difference in price between the first night and the two nights which are main Carnaval days, so in this case the increase is more gradual.

Holidays such as the week between xmas and new year or semana santa, the week in which easter falls, often get a higher pricing tier even if they fall in the generally low season. Again, taking Montreal as an example, winter is low season but prices often go up from xmas to new year.

Upvote:4

Besides the general seasons, as discribed in the other answers, there can be school holiday seasons.
These are more clear when looking at a relative small area where many people stay within the area for their holidays and show very clearly where holiday parks show calendars with coloured coding for different price rates.

If there is a short holiday in low season, the prices of holiday parks often peak for just the period of that holiday.

Not as clear but working the same way is when there is a school holiday in the country many of the tourists are from, like where a lot of English holiday makers stay in Spain and there is a mid term holiday in England.

The more diverse the tourists are in an area, the less clear the peaks and the more likely a shoulder or high season develops, unless the holiday is a widely celebrated one like Easter and the school holidays fall in the same week in many countries.

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