What Is Shoulder Season? A Caribbean Operator's Take

It's tempting to treat shoulder season as the slow bit you get through before the real money comes back. I think that's backwards. I think shoulder season can make an operator's year, and cutting prices across the board is the wrong way to start.

So what is shoulder season? It's the stretch between peak season and low season, when demand is either coming down from the high or building back up toward it. Prices are often below peak rates and crowds are smaller, while the weather can still be good. For many Caribbean destinations, there are two rough windows, one on each side of the winter high season. Early November can fall in the autumn one.

What is shoulder season, and why is it called that?

The plain shoulder season meaning is the in-between: busier than low season, quieter than peak. It's the weeks when demand and rates can sit below peak levels.

As for why it's called shoulder season, nobody seems completely sure. Dictionaries date the term to 1960-65, and the earliest uses seem to come from airlines. One explanation is the shape of a busy-year chart. Draw demand across twelve months and the peak looks like a head, with a lower ledge on either side. Those ledges are the shoulders. I worked my way from deckhand to captain on tours around St. Maarten, so I know that chart from the boat side.

When shoulder season falls in the Caribbean

This varies by island, so treat these as rough windows, not rules:

• Spring shoulder. Commonly cited as about mid-April into early June, after Easter and spring break traffic fades.
• Fall shoulder. Roughly November to mid-December, before the Christmas rush. Some guides stretch it back into late October.

The official Atlantic hurricane season runs June 1 to November 30, with most storm activity between mid-August and mid-October. So the spring shoulder mostly precedes hurricane season but can overlap its start, while the fall shoulder overlaps its tail end. The southern islands like Aruba and Curacao are drier, so their weather calendar is different. Your own booking history will tell you more than any travel guide.

What changes for your guests

From the guest's side, shoulder season is a good deal. Hotel rates and flights usually drop from their winter highs. Beaches are quieter, and in the spring shoulder the Christmas Winds have usually eased, so crossings to places like Anguilla or St. Barts can be a lot more comfortable.

The tradeoff is weather risk. In late spring you start seeing more humidity and the odd squall. In November you're still technically in hurricane season, even if the worst of it has usually passed. That can make shoulder season worth pitching to flexible, price-aware guests.

What changes for you as an operator

For an operator, shoulder season changes how you run the week.

• Demand gets lumpy. You can be full on a Tuesday and half-empty on a Thursday. Cruise schedules shift too. In spring a lot of ships leave the Caribbean for Europe and Alaska, and in the fall they come back, so your cruise ship days don't look like they did in February.
• Crew is harder to plan. Some of your best people want time off after a long season. Others need the hours. You can't staff it like peak and you can't staff it like September.
• Maintenance windows open up. Haul-outs and engine service are the obvious ones. It's tempting to stack all of it into shoulder season, and that's fine, as long as you don't take your best boat out of the water the week a big group calls.
• Minimum-guest rules start to bite. If a trip needs a set number of guests to run, you'll hit that line more often now. Write down your minimum and your cutoff time, and tell guests up front what happens if the trip doesn't fill.

Don't discount shoulder season, repackage it

You might disagree with me here. The reflex in shoulder season is to drop prices across the board. I think that trains your guests and your agents to wait for the sale. And once your hotel desk partners expect it, it's hard to walk back.

I'd rather change what's in the box:

• Sell the quiet. A half-empty beach is a feature in May. Price the private or small-group version properly and say so in plain words.
• Bundle or add a shoulder-only trip instead of cutting. Add drinks or a second stop at the same price, or run a longer trip out to Tintamarre or a sunset add-on your peak schedule can't fit, rather than knocking 20% off the base trip.
• Target locals and residents. For residents who prefer quieter days, that's worth highlighting. Shoulder season gives you room for them, and a resident rate is a targeted offer, not a fire sale.

If you do discount, keep it narrow, like a single weekday departure with a clear reason attached. That makes it a promotion instead of your new normal.

What I'd do with the shoulder months

On staffing, I'd plan a core crew you can count on and a short list of people you can call in for busy days. Tell crew their expected hours early, before they take other work.

On pricing, look at your fixed costs in shoulder months, not just your rate card. Funny enough, this is something operators taught me. When we launched Junglebee I wanted to charge a monthly fee because it made our revenue easy to forecast. Operators pushed back hard. They wanted to pay per transaction, not a flat monthly fee. So we switched, and today we charge per card payment with no monthly fee. They were right, and a flat bill hurts most in a slow month. The same goes for your own costs: anything fixed that you pay in April and November should earn its place.

Then run the shoulder months on their own numbers. What does a typical shoulder week cost you to keep the boats ready and the crew paid? How many guests, at your real average price, cover that? Once you know that line, you'll see which discounts are worth running and which ones are just giving away seats you'd have sold anyway.

Use shoulder season to get the boats right and test new trips, and hold your price while you do it. Peak season pays the bills. What you do in the shoulder decides whether you feel broke by August.