With Valentine’s Day falling on the weekend before Presidents Day, hoteliers are taking advantage of demand from guests looking to get away for a few days in a safe, romantic environment.

Hotels have long been the destination for couples to celebrate Valentine’s Day. With the COVID-19 pandemic keeping people mostly at home for the past year, a holiday that encourages romantic partners to spend time together alone makes hotels — with their enhanced cleaning and safety protocols — an attractive destination.

For Valentine’s Day, Aimbridge Hospitality’s full-service and resort properties focused on creating special experiences and food and beverage offerings in ways guests can still be socially distanced, said Rob Smith, executive vice president of operations for full service & resorts at Plano, Texas-based Aimbridge.

The Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites in Los Angeles has an engagement package that includes a dinner for two in a 30,000-square-foot ballroom as well as the presidential suite and a limo with a 50-mile radius, he said. In hopes to secure future business, the package also offers 15% off a wedding or a baby shower following the engagement.

Some properties have taken tables out of their restaurants and put them into guestrooms to create a world-class dining experience for guests within the safety of their own rooms, Smith said.

“We’re focusing on that on Valentine’s to show that it’s not just wheeling in a cart for room service but having that full dining experience,” he said.

Guests at Aimbridge’s resorts can choose just about anywhere on-property they would like to dine and the resort will serve guests dinner there, said Mike Wylie, senior vice president of e-commerce at Aimbridge.

“We’re having people choose things like golf greens, sometimes the traditional balcony, an area on the beach, the gardens on-property,” he said. “So it’s another way to allow guests who are social distancing; we’ll set them up and they can dine anywhere on the grounds.”

Germantown, Tennessee-based McNeill Hotel Company didn’t initially offer many holiday packages as they can clog up the sales shelf, but its hotels have offered some of those provided by the brands, said Jennifer Driscoll, vice president of revenue management at McNeill. In recent weeks, the company has added some of their own, such as chocolates and flowers or putting petals on the bed, as guests are looking for a night away.

“They typically don't sell a whole heck of a lot, but I do think that they can bring in additional revenues and occupancy just purely from a convenience standpoint, because someone else is handling all those details for (the guests),” she said.

Bookings for Valentine’s Day didn’t pick up pace until after the weekend of the presidential inauguration, said Cassie Bond, vice president of revenue strategy at Greenbelt, Maryland-based Chesapeake Hospitality.

Chesapeake’s hotels are booking a lot of stays from Friday to Monday because, in addition to being Valentine’s Day on that Sunday, the following day is Presidents Day, so it’s a long weekend for many guests, she said.

“They are extending it, so we're getting a lot of Friday-to-Monday reservations, which is great because we couldn't ask for anything better,” she said.

While pace is down year over year, the short-term booking window has exploded, particularly for weekend stays, Driscoll said. With Valentine’s Day falling on the weekend of Presidents Day, she expects bookings the week before to be “gangbusters.”

Martin Luther King Jr. Day, was a “phenomenal weekend” for the company’s entire portfolio, she said. Much of it was short-term bookings for the three-day weekend.

“I feel like it's going to be even better,” she said. “I've just seen that the numbers this far out for this weekend are stronger than a typical weekend.”

Booking windows for Aimbridge’s hotels are shorter than ever before, including even same-day bookings, Smith said. That’s why whatever offers are being put out in the market are being left open until the day of, he said.

“We’ve seen some unique demand quite a bit where people are asking for day-use rooms for a spontaneous getaway,” he added.

Aimbridge has been consistent in not lowering rates, Wylie said. At hotels in areas with greater demand, such as Florida, the company's hotels can be more aggressive with pricing, he said. In other markets, the company looks at demand levels and sets hotel prices to be competitive, not just lower.

Through the pandemic, McNeill properties have been aggressive on holding rate on weekends, Driscoll said. That is thanks, in part, to being able to retain the sales and revenue teams.

“We’ve been fortunate with knowing that it’s a short-term booking window,” she said. “It’s really important for our hotels that we’re actually priced right, priced competitive.”

The special offers and packages McNeill’s hotels offer are a value-add for guests, she said. Guests have a perception of a discount or getting something extra for the rate, so while the hotel isn’t actually discounting the stay, there’s an ability to flex within the difference between the cost and the retail price of amenities that add value to a stay.

Chesapeake’s hotels have taken a similar approach, offering different amenities and packages, allowing the hotels to bump the rate and then hold, Bond said. That’s generally been the company’s approach through the pandemic because the amount of demand hasn’t changed much, so there’s no sense in lowering rate.

The package inclusions aren’t high-cost items for the hotels, and these special offers allow guests to get a little more out of their stay, she said.

“We’re not lowering our published rates that are out there,” she said. “We’re incentivizing them to come early and stay later and then giving them a little more in the package inclusions, because that doesn’t cost the hotel a lot, and if they’re seeing more included that way, they’re more apt to come to us.”

Given the overall lower occupancy, the hotels have more suites available for the holiday weekend as well, Bond said.

“We're able to use that and then I can bump the rate a little more because I'm getting a better room type,” she said.