2019 - A GOOD YEAR IN SPITE OF MOTHER NATURE

IMPORTANT READ FOR VACATION CABIN OWNERS AND OUR GUESTS

We at Idyllwild Vacation Cabins would like to say thank you to all cabin owners and all those that stayed in our vacation properties.  It was a challenging 2019 for many.  Many of the people that live in Idyllwild area found 2019 very unpredictable following the devastation of Mother Nature unleashing catastrophic rains on the mountain on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2019.

On that day, Mother Nature had literally washed out and closed Highways 243 and 74.  Initially, we thought the road crews would get to work and get the roads reopened quickly, but we were all stunned to find out that the monsoon rains and caused severe damage at nearly 100 locations and would be closed for an undetermined time !!  This meant that visitors to Idyllwild would have two of the three major arteries shut down indefinitely until a plan could be put in place to rebuild them.  It got worse when we found out that funds were a problem after officials found out how much early would have to be moved.  So much so in fact, that crews began working 24 hours a day — month after month.

We don’t think some really had a grasp of how bad it really was here — but it was worrisome to many who depend on vacationers to Idyllwild - including our vacation home owners.  What it really meant was that vacationers had to add several more hours to their commute time to come to the Idyllwild area.

As it ultimately turned out, these two major arteries were shut down for nine months !!  It wasn’t until Thanksgiving weekend that the roads were officially reopened, and boy was that a time for celebration.  We were told by so many customers checking in that the journey up was really long and they likely would not return until those roads were reopened.  The early impact on some vacation home owners in the community was pretty apparent and we knew that we needed to do more to keep visitors coming into the community.  What we did see was that the loss of visitors hit other vacation rental firms pretty hard.  You could hear it on the street and in local cafes.

Knowing this was going to be a longer term problem, we hunkered down and got creative.  We focused on our websites, promoted more specials, put more efforts into our Facebook page and began more advertising on both Facebook and Google.  The great news is that this hard work really paid off handsomely.  We tripled the number of Facebook followers in 2019.  We focused on getting more vacationer from the San Diego region to come up - and come up more often because the road for them was unaffected by the road outages.

Recently we examined our efforts and they were surprising.  The number of visitors to our main website during 2019 was up 72% over 2018, and the number of pages visited was up 54%.  In spite of 2 of the 3 main roads being completely washed out for a full nine months, business was up 35% and the number of booked nights had increased by 20.9% over the previous year.  This wasn’t easy, but we did it.   With a lot of hard work, 2019 was a good year for Idyllwild Vacation Cabins, Inc.

We’d like to say thank you to all those cabin owners who had faith in us to do our best.  I’d also like to say thank you to the my staff that really put in a lot of effort, to make sure that our visits were treated well and arrived to clean cabins.  The reviews couldn’t have made us more proud.  So again, thank you all for making 2019 a good year.

Martha