How many rooms were booked for each Tanglewood concert this summer
The July 4 James Taylor concert filled Tanglewood across the street to its capacity of 18,000 people, and we sold all 34 rooms. Nice! Now, if room prices were held constant, how many rooms would you expect us to sell for a Tanglewood concert with only half as many attendees, i.e., 9,000 people?
Maybe we would still sell 34 rooms; after all, we’re the closest hotel, and 34 rooms sleep about 68 people, and 9,000 is still far more than 68, so they ought to fill us to capacity before even looking elsewhere.
Maybe we would sell 17 rooms; half the Tanglewood attendees, half the rooms! For every 500 people who go to Tanglewood, 1 books a room here.
Maybe we would sell 0 rooms; it could be that we’re so lame that the first 10,000 guests will find lodging elsewhere, and only when all that fills up will people deign to stay here.
You could justify any answer; one full night tells you very little.1 And room prices do vary, pretty dramatically, case by case, based on the decisions of a “revenue manager” based in the Philippines.
The previous night’s James Taylor concert also hit Tanglewood’s 18,000 capacity, but we sold only 31 rooms, for 5% more on average. The previous weekend’s Brandi Carlile concert hit 18,000, but we only sold 30 rooms, for 34% less on average. What about halving the attendance? In August, 9,200 attended Yo-Yo Ma, and we sold 24 rooms, for 45% less on average. That is, for about 50% the attendance, we made about 40% the revenue.
We don’t know the attendance of every event at Tanglewood; we only know the top 10 overall and the top 10 classical concerts (adding up to 17 unique concerts) from figures published in The Berkshire Eagle a couple weeks ago. But we can fill in at least the names of selected other major events.2
The chart below shows every day of the Tanglewood summer season. Weekends are highlighted with darker date labels; Fri/Sat is really our weekend, not Sat/Sun. The gray bars are hotel revenue, and the blue dots are Tanglewood attendance, each on their own relative axis. When the blue dot extends farther, we underperformed; when the gray bar extends farther, we overperformed. Finally, the chart lists number of rooms booked and selected Tanglewood events, leaving off the lectures and (what I think of as) smaller recitals because I ran out of time to transcribe.
I asked Claire about her recollections of the vibe around the hotel around the major concerts of the summer.
She barely remembers John Fogerty. He was the first major concert of the summer, June 20, and it was immediately dramatically busier than we’d ever seen the hotel before. So she was mostly excited and overwhelmed. She remembers being in our apartment and hearing the concertgoers coming back happy and maybe a little drunk; it felt almost invasive to be so close to so many people’s late nights.
Roger Daltrey performed two days later, and she mostly remembers that everyone sooo looked the part of old rockers.
She has no memory of Kool and the Gang.
She knew Jon Batiste was famous but was still surprised by just how popular he was. He had a huge and very excited following. I recorded myself walking the 4 minutes from our porch to the Tanglewood gate and then recorded myself walking for 4 minutes along the massive standstill traffic jam and tried to make an Instagram Reel of the side-by-side comparison but the result was judged too confused and I never got back to it.
Some here — not me — actually caught a glimpse of Trey Anastasio. The crowd was not so stereotypically “Phish”-y, but maybe Apple Tree doesn’t have such a huge Phish vibe? Shortly before this concert, Claire got an email from Sharon, who had owned the hotel before the previous owners. Sharon had gotten an email from Airbnb telling her that someone had booked a room at the Apple Tree. That’s odd — Claire thought she had taken down our Airbnb listings! No: it turns out she had only taken down the previous owners’ (Khaghans’) Airbnb listings. But Sharon had an earlier Airbnb account which she had never figured out how to get rid of, so instead she just cranked the price up to $999/night so that nobody would ever book it. But, for this concert weekend, someone actually did book a room, which was a problem because it wasn’t tracking the inventory and that room had already been booked. Claire found a different worse room for her, which was cheaper than $999, but still pretty expensive because she had just told the revenue management team to raise the prices in the final days. So she felt bad for the woman who had booked farther in advance on a platform we didn’t even know about, and offered the guest a discount, and the woman refused the discount and came and had a great time and left an amazing review and booked again for a few weeks later.
Also that night was Claire’s birthday and I baked a cake for the first time in my life and tried to light the candles as Paper Anniversary started playing a lovely rendition of the birthday song and the kitchen ventilation kept blowing the candles out and I was running out of time and Rory was cracking up and I brought it into the Ostrich Room without a single candle lit and practically keeled over in embarrassment but eventually got one candle re-lit for Claire to blow out.
The next night Claire went to Brandi Carlile with Joe and Lidey and Danny. We were totally full that night, but at a much lower room rate than for James Taylor, which suggests our revenue management hadn’t anticipated how popular Brandi would be. The crowd was a lot more young hip women than most of the concerts. I watched the desk, and wrote in a previous post: “I gave an old arthritic couple a ride just down the driveway and I’ve never seen anyone so grateful. Two young women in matching shirts came in hoping the bar was open and left with my bag of potato chips. Everything seemed less stiff.” I loved that night.
Claire has no memory of the hotel crowd for Jason Mraz, but she remembers hearing the sound check for “I’m Yours” wafting up the hill. It was, like, “her song” in college with her best friend Kaye, and it felt sort of surreal to hear it at the age of 36 in rural Massachusetts overseeing her hotel far away from college and friends and certainly far from Kaye and her two kids in Brooklyn. And in that moment she sort of regretted not making Kaye go with her.
We went to the first night of James Taylor on July 3 with the Grubers. The company and picnic and general experience was lovely but the concert per se was underwhelming; we sat too far away, he seemed old to Claire, the hotel was too packed to get away and relax. (I wandered up closer to the stage and did get into it and was happy to hear “Sweet Baby James” recite the directions from our last home to this one, i.e. take the turnpike.) In general this was Claire’s least favorite week of the summer. People were paying such crazy rates because the market rate was crazy, which is fair in a sense but so disconnected from what you’d normally pay for that room. It’s surge pricing, basically. So there was more discontent and a more transactional attitude from the guests. Which, again, is fair: we give you market rate, you give us market rate crap. And the second night of James Taylor, July 4, was the worst night of the summer. Claire missed her family and their typical July 4 party, there was a leak in room 10, and we only had a spot to move them to because someone had hated room 106 so much they checked out early, so Claire was remaking the bed at like 10 p.m. to move a nice young couple into a worse room that was at least dry.
The very next day was BSO Opening Night, which was great! This is when the popular music gives way to the good old proper classical music program. Our friends Gene and Lloyd (my dad’s lifelong best friend) came and introduced us to BSO people and we sat in the Shed and it was, in Claire’s words, “magical”. Before the season started, Claire was like “Bring on the popular artists!”, but on this night realized she enjoyed the symphony thing a lot more than J.T. or Brandi. There were some nice hotel regulars around, more of the classical crowd, older and sweeter, many from New York. I had a worse night because I totally botched driving Gene and Lloyd, who couldn’t walk the hill so easily. But I made the mistake of driving down our driveway and turning left and parking in the lot which is slightly downtownward relative to the hotel. At the end of the concert, the traffic cops made that street one way toward town, so we had to wait in all the traffic going all the way into town and I had no signal and no GPS and didn’t know the three measly roads around here and it took us 45 minutes to get back. The lesson is: if you’re driving to the concert, park upstream of the dominant post-concert flow into town.
We don’t really remember the Broadway Today! night. I remember hearing them practicing something I couldn’t put my finger on.
We wished we’d gone to Stravinsky/Rimsky-Korsakov feat. the Boston Ballet! For the ballet part, especially. Maybe Abby went?
Yuja Wang was a big night. The broker who sold Claire the hotel is a big fan, which inspired Claire to get us tickets to see her in Boston Symphony Hall in the spring, when the transaction was underway but we were still living in Boston. She drew a huge crowd to the hotel. It was also the BSO’s Trustees Weekend, and we had some of them staying.
Claire went to the July 15th Stravinsky with our bartender Nic and some friends for his birthday, and Claire realized she loves Stravinsky (and loved the whole event).
When Claire went to the Pretenders with Alison, the hotel crowd was sort of like the low-key more-female version of the Daltrey crowd.
We wish we could’ve gone to Wagner because Claire’s grandmother is obsessed.
The Beck crowd was younger and hipper.
The John Williams film night was a little sad because he had to drop out due to illness. There were somewhat more kids that weekend. This is the event we’d gone to the prior summer, when we first came to Lenox, not suspecting it’d be our come, so Claire had been anticipating it coming up but it didn’t make as much of a splash as we’d thought.
She was away for Tanglewood on Parade but wishes she could’ve gone. I definitely want to try next year. It seems particularly tailored for locals because it’s on a Tuesday but it’s a big deal, with all the different Tanglewood groups involved in different ways, and maybe they have fireworks? We had a fairly big crowd for it.
Before it came we had not been thinking at all about Gustavo Dudamel conducting the National Children’s Symphony of Venezuela, and it was only moderately busy, but everyone who did come wanted to talk about it. It’s a wild story! Did you know that Venezuela has since 1975 had something called “El Sistema”, a federally funded music program educating like 700,000 kids across 400 music centers, culminating in this very talented symphony? Though some of the admiration might’ve verged on exoticized gawking.
Yo-Yo Ma was very popular; some people called wondering why rooms were so expensive on a Sunday and asking if they could get a lower rate because they weren’t going to see Yo-Yo Ma.
As the summer drew to a close, we were sad that we hadn’t gotten to see more low-key classical concerts, and on a whim popped into Chopin Piano Concerto No. 1 and Elgar Enigma Variations. We were too late for most of Chopin (which we do like), but ended up loving the Enigma Variations far more than we had expected.
The next morning we popped into the open rehearsals for Beethoven’s 9th. We hadn’t been to any previous open rehearsals and we loved the format and definitely recommend it. It’s less crowded and more casual and raw; they bop around the program out of order, repeating things as needed. We sat on the lawn, but if you buy seats in advance you can sit up close and hear the conductor’s notes. It made us sad we couldn’t go to the real thing. For the real thing the next day, we did a trial of something we’d been thinking about all summer: explicitly offering to shuttle people to and from the concert. (You may recall Rory really wanted us to buy a golf cart.) Only two people took us up on it. The drop-off was a little chaotic with all the traffic cops trying to wave us through or wave us off, I think just because I haven’t learned the proper drop-off spot; I missed one person’s call for pick-up and they ended up just wanting (and were happy with that). There are plenty of conflated variables, but overall we did not sense the huge pent-up demand and relief we suspected we might’ve had.
So buying a golf cart as a Tanglewood shuttle does not seem like a priority right now, which fits with a broader theme: we are already pretty good for Tanglewood nights; we do not need to be better for Tanglewood nights; we need to somehow fill rooms the rest of the year. Tanglewood is our greatest asset and also the most saturated; most of the opportunity lies elsewhere.
Judy Collins, Indigo Girls, and Rufus Wainwright were surprisingly popular. Some people had ridden up from Manhattan that day intending to make it a day trip, but their Uber Reserve back down to the city canceled on them and stranded them here, so they booked here at the last minute. Claire had sort of expected more stuff like that would happen, but it turned out to be rare.
Dispatch was, vibes-wise, perhaps Claire’s favorite hotel crowd all summer. Some of her high school friends came up for it, and some other guests sort of reminded her of her friends from high school, which added up to a nice and lively Ostrich Room scene for the end of the season.
Broad conclusions? “I wish people would stay more than one night.” Sometimes it works well when there are compatible shows back-to-back. But Claire made an interesting comparison to the Cape Cod market today. Cape Cod has the bridge bottleneck and crazy traffic, which makes getting on and off a pain, which makes people more likely to spend the week. Here it’s too easy to bop in and out. Islands, moats, and tampers!
Changelog
The whole exterior of the hotel is currently being painted, which is a subject for next time. The round room is being rearranged to prepare it for brunch service, which is another subject for next time. We’ve experimented with giving people a little slip where they put in their breakfast order. We’ve installed some uplighting for the hydrangeas in front of the front porch. Hagai got a much bigger mixer for the kitchen. They switched out all the locks in the main house (still good old-fashioned normal metal keys) so they have a better physical master key situation. I could do a whole newsletter on keys.
Reader mail
Re: Rory, Rob writes, “Some great observations from Rory. I do think she’s right about the Instagram posts though.” Adam writes, “Entertaining read. I don’t think Rory would have been friends with me in high school either.” Charlie writes, “Pretty sure I was not that self-assured in 10th grade.” Katharine writes, “I feel like this latest newsletter is a little bit just publicly roasting yourself.” David writes, “The interview goes off the rails when Rory says she’s someone who’s prone to chains.” Morgan writes, “Hahahaha — ‘Do you know what the SAT is?’ — This is amazing.”
Visitors
Thanks to the Dispatch crew — Owen, Kate, Chaps, Josh, Izzy, and Reba — who came in with an unusual level of foreknowledge of the babysitter they employed, including the fact that their children fell into the “wrong age group to babysit”; Blair ended up pulled into taking a turn staffing the front desk during a bar mitzvah, our first private event, during which kids made her stash their candy; Alison stocked us up with about 216 cans of Polar seltzer.
We are eagerly looking forward to visits by Garrett and Peter; Nina and Chris; JZ; Bip, Caro, and Julie; Alison’s friends; John and Michelle and their friends; Emily; Jess, Alex, Dan, and Julie; and maybe we can seal the deal on Bobby and Meg, Ian and Rachel, Aaron and Andi? Plus, loyal readers may know that our chief connection to Christian is that his mom and my mom are in the same book group, and that book group is coming out in a couple weeks!
I (Toph) will be away Oct. 25 – Nov. 3. I think we’re not sure what we’re doing for Thanksgiving or Christmas yet.
Like how placing first in a race puts no upper bound on how fast you are, and placing last puts no lower bound on it. Extremes (like the hotel being full) are especially uninformative; they give you one-sided information. I think I first learned this concept from playing Xbox and reading about TrueSkill as a clueless teen, and I remain clueless as to the proper statistical treatment; what is it, censoring or truncation or something?
Attributing guest bookings to Tanglewood events is easier for “popular” music than for classical music. The popular concerts are concentrated at the beginning and end of the season; in the middle, the heart of the classical programming, Tanglewood has several events per day. Big concerts in the Shed generally have a prelude concert in Ozawa Hall; there are Tanglewood Learning Institute lectures, and Tanglewood Music Center recitals, and open rehearsals, and so on. And, whereas James Taylor mostly plays James Taylor songs for James Taylor fans, a classical performance is not so much the work of a singular artist. The draw may be the composers and pieces to be performed (Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, Beethoven’s 5th, Elgar’s Enigma Variations), the conductor (BSO’s Andris Nelsons, the Pops’s Keith Lockhart, visitors like Karina Canellakis or Gustavo Dudamel), the group performing (Danish String Quartet or National Children's Symphony of Venezuela) or a particular soloist (Yo-Yo Ma, Yuja Wang, Emanuel Ax, Joshua Bell). Most guests do seem to come for a specific concert, but some of the classical fans just want to spend a couple days at Tanglewood for more diffuse reasons.
Please write a whole newsletter about keys! I am not joking.