Sep 1, 2025
I’m big believer in studying the past…often times past events help us understand how people will react to current events. Gas prices and inflation have steadily been climbing for quite some time; and over the past few weeks it has started to spike. So I was curious to see what high gas prices and inflation have done to Orlando tourism in the past.
As you can see from the chart above these are the highest gas prices in past 30 years. Two main dates I wanted to research June and July 2008 and April through July 2012.
June and July 2008- Gas prices national average was $4.105 in June and $4.12 in July. The spike in Oil prices in 2008 was due to surging demand, stagnant production, and tension in the Middle East.
April through July 2012- Gas prices national average ranged from $3.85 to $3.96 for these few months. The gas price spike was blamed on rising Middle East tensions and refinery outages.
I have posted a graft of the visitors to Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. This show that traffic to Disney was relatively flat in 2008 as compared to 2007. Also 2012, was up 2.3% in 2012 as compared to 2011.
So now we have to look at inflation, the first thing that jumps out to me is that inflation was also really high in July 2008. The inflation rate for June and July of 2008 was 5.6%.
The good news for us is that high inflation and high gas prices had little effect on Orlando’s tourism industry. Hotel rates and vacation home rates along with theme park attendance was relatively flat.
Closer Dive Into the Numbers: I went back and studied my own companies records in 2008. We did 12708 reservations in 2007 and we did 12722 in 2008…pretty common as to what we saw in the study above. However, we had a much better booking months in February, March and April in 2008 than we did in 2007. I also found we had fewer cancellations in the Summer of 2008 than we did in 2007 or 2009, but our bookings for the Summer were not quite as strong as they had been in 2007 or 2009.
My take away from this study are as follows:
Our goal is work to get as many bookings on the books as possible for the Summer. We also feel that Disney World’s reservation system helps us out quite a bit since guests know they have to order their tickets and make a reservation with Disney, something guests didn’t need to bother with in 2008.
Some of the ways we are promoting our vacation homes is to offer a $50 off their theme park tickets as a gas coupon.
← Back to All Blogs
