16.8 million visitors, 1.2 million of them in short-term rentals
Last week the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp put out its 2023 numbers: a record 16.8 million visitors, $10.56 billion in visitor spending — about $29 million a day — and roughly 1.2 million of those visitors staying in short-term rentals.
That 1.2 million is the number I would frame and hang on the wall if I were arguing with a council member. Short-term rentals are not a fringe accommodation category in this city. They house a serious fraction of the people who make the economy work.
And they are all arriving at once starting Thursday, because CMA Fest is this week.
What a $29-million-a-day tourism economy means for one house
It means demand is not your problem. Your problem is capture.
In a city with this much inbound traffic, an empty night in June is almost never a demand failure. It is a pricing failure, a photo failure, a review failure, or a responsiveness failure — three of which are the levers that still decide a booking once supply grows faster than demand. That is a harder thing to hear than "the market is soft," and it is more useful, because all four of those are things you control.
It also means the peaks are extremely peaky. Nashville does not have a smooth demand curve; it has a baseline plus enormous event spikes, and troughs to match — the weeks after New Year's Eve being the most predictable one. CMA Fest week, New Year's, big stadium shows, football weekends. A home that captures the spikes properly can make a disproportionate share of its year in about fifteen weeks.
The week that starts Thursday
CMA Fest brings tens of thousands of people downtown per day for four days. If you own here you already know your rate should be up. Most owners get that part right.
What most owners get wrong is everything downstream of the booking. A festival week is an operational week, not a pricing week, and here is what actually goes sideways:
Guests arrive later and in bigger groups. Check-in at 11pm is normal that week. If your check-in instructions require thinking, they will fail at 11pm.
Turnovers stack. Four-day festival, lots of three-night stays, and your cleaner has six other houses in the same neighborhood on the same day.
Noise complaints. More groups, more late nights, more chance of the call you do not want from a neighbor.
Things break. More people, more use, more failures, and every vendor in town is busy.
How we run guest communication that week
Guest messaging at Boost is covered around the clock, and during event weeks that is not a nice-to-have. The sequence runs: booking confirmation, a pre-arrival message a few days out with directions, parking specifics and door-code timing, an arrival-day message, a check-in confirmation, a mid-stay touch, and a checkout note with the review ask.
During CMA Fest we tighten two things. The parking message goes out earlier and with more detail, because downtown parking that week is genuinely difficult and a guest circling for forty minutes is a guest writing a mediocre review. And the noise-and-neighbors note goes in the pre-arrival, politely, with specifics — quiet hours, which wall is shared, where not to park.
Behind the automation there are people on our team reading and answering messages, and anything requiring a decision comes to me. I have taken plenty of festival-week calls at midnight. It comes with owning the business rather than working at one.
The rest of June
Do not let the festival week fool you into thinking every June week looks like that. Mid-June is a normal summer market: strong, not spectacular. Price it as itself.
And go look at your July 4 week now, not on July 1. Nashville's Independence Day is one of the biggest single-day events in the country and the booking window for it closes earlier than people expect.
The number I would push back on
One caution on reading tourism figures. Visitor spending is spending across hotels, restaurants, tickets, retail and transport. Very little of that $10.56 billion touches your bank account, and a record visitor number in a year when listing supply also grew can coexist with your specific home earning less than it did the year before.
Both things being true at once is the normal condition of this market now. Read the city numbers as a statement about the ceiling and your own trailing twelve months as a statement about your position under it.
The thing to remember about a record year
16.8 million visitors is the ceiling being raised, not a guarantee delivered to your address. The city's tourism office does the work of filling the airport. Everything after the plane lands is on the operator.
If your calendar does not look the way a $29-million-a-day city suggests it should, that gap is worth an hour of somebody's attention. Send me the address and I will pull your comps. Get started here.