Bonnaroo got cancelled. Here is the playbook for the 48 hours after.
Bonnaroo was cancelled on June 13, partway through the festival, after heavy rain made the Manchester site unsafe (Bonnaroo Music Festival). Tens of thousands of people who had planned to be somewhere through Sunday suddenly were not.
Middle Tennessee gets weather like this every year — a spring storm system, a hard summer rain, an ice event in January, and occasionally a December tornado outbreak that takes power from 100,000 customers. The specific festival is not the point. The point is that a weather event hits two different things at once, and they need to be handled in a specific order.
First: the buildings, not the calendar
The instinct after a demand shock is to open the pricing tool. That is the second job.
The first job is knowing whether your homes are okay. After any significant weather event, we run the same check on every property we manage:
Water. Basements and crawl spaces, under sinks, around water heaters, the base of every exterior door. Water damage is exponential — a wet spot found on day one is a towel, and found on day ten is a subfloor.
Roof and gutters. Overflowing gutters put water where it does not belong. Visible damage, obviously, but mostly we are looking for the boring stuff: clogs, downspouts pointed at the foundation.
Trees and limbs. What came down, what is leaning, what is now over a parked car or a power line.
Power and mechanicals. Did the home lose power, and did everything come back? HVAC, water heater, wifi, and, critically, smart locks — battery-backed locks can behave oddly after an outage, and a guest locked out at 9 p.m. is a five-star stay turned into a three-star one.
The street. Standing water, blocked access, downed lines. Even an untouched home is unusable if a guest cannot reach it.
Homes with guests in them get checked first, and those guests get a message before they have to ask. "We have checked the home, everything is fine, here is my number if anything changes" is a message that converts a stressful weekend into a good review.
Most of what this check turns up is the same set of items the quarterly walkthrough already tracks — lock batteries, detectors, drainage, the water heater — which is why it goes quickly on a home somebody has actually been inside recently. Anything that needs a repair gets scheduled immediately, and it is billed to the owner at what the vendor charged. Maintenance passes through at cost here — no markup, which is how the whole arrangement is built — and that matters most in exactly this situation, when several homes need work in the same week and nobody should be quietly profiting from a storm.
Second: the calendar
Once the buildings are accounted for, you deal with the demand side.
Expect cancellations, and reprice the freed nights fast. When a large event ends early, some guests go home. Those nights come back onto your calendar with very little notice, and their value decays by the hour. Within a day, those dates need a new rate — usually well below what they were, because you are now selling last-minute inventory into a market where a lot of other homes just got the same nights back.
Drop minimum stays on the freed nights immediately. A three-night minimum on a Saturday that just opened up is an empty room. This is the single highest-value move and it takes two minutes. It is the emergency version of the same lever we use deliberately on event windows months ahead of time, just run in reverse and in a hurry.
Look for the offsetting demand. Weather events create displacement as well as cancellation. People whose plans collapsed sometimes reroute rather than go home, and there is real one- and two-night demand in the twenty-four hours after a disruption if your listing is visible and your minimums are open.
Be generous with the guests who are already stuck. Somebody mid-stay whose whole reason for the trip just evaporated is having a bad week. Flexibility there — an early departure handled gracefully, a late checkout — costs a night and buys a review and sometimes a repeat guest.
The order matters
Owners who reprice first and inspect later find the water damage on Thursday. Owners who inspect first and reprice on Monday sell nothing.
Both jobs are small. Doing them in the right order, within about forty-eight hours, is most of what "professional management" actually means on a week like this. There is nothing clever in it. It is a checklist and somebody who runs the checklist when it is inconvenient.
What to do before the next one
Weather is a certainty here, so treat it as a scheduled item rather than an emergency.
Know where your water shutoff is, and make sure whoever services the home knows too.
Clean the gutters twice a year, spring and fall. This is the lowest-cost maintenance line item in the business and it prevents the most expensive one.
Keep spare smart-lock batteries in the house, and know the mechanical override.
Have a plumber and an HVAC contractor who will actually answer during a bad week. Establish that relationship before the bad week.
Decide in advance how flexible you will be with a guest whose trip is ruined, so you are not making that call while annoyed.
If you would rather have somebody else running that checklist on your home — and doing it before you have thought to ask — talk to Boost Rentals. Storm checks, quarterly inspections, and same-week repairs are part of management here, billed at what they actually cost.
— Chris Hetzner, Boost Rentals