Two homes in the Al Tahoe neighborhood on Sun. March 11, 2018, in South Lake Tahoe, Calif. The home on the left is a residential home while the one on the right is a rental, with the homes so close together in the neighborhood, calls from residents with noise complaints have come from around the neighborhood. The City of South Lake Tahoe has a strict Vacation Home Rental Ordinance (VHR) with fines of $1,000 for violations.
Michael Macor / The Chronicle 2018For more stories like this, check out The Chronicle’s weekly Travel newsletter! Sign up here.
A lockdown order that took effect in Lake Tahoe Friday and extends through Jan. 1 has cast doubt over many families’ holiday travel plans to California’s premier winter destination and thrown the region’s lodging industry into upheaval.
Hotels and property managers who had sold out guest rooms and ski cabins through December are now in the awkward position of canceling thousands of reservations during the busiest and most lucrative period of the year. Guests, meanwhile, are grappling with fine-print booking policies from Airbnb and rental agencies that may preclude them from claiming refunds on reservations made before lockdown took effect.
“This is happening at the worst possible time,” said Patty Baird, owner of Cedar House Sport Hotel, a 40-room boutique hotel in Truckee.
Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced new statewide health restrictions, and by Wednesday afternoon, a stay-at-home order was enacted for the “Greater Sacramento” region, which includes the California side of Lake Tahoe, after space in intensive-care units there shrunk to less than 15% capacity. Most of California is now under the strict new order, from the southern border north to Sacramento and east to Nevada. Traveling purely for recreation or vacation to or from affected regions is strongly discouraged under the order, but the legal consequences for breaking the rule are unclear.
Across Tahoe, many hotels and property managers have interpreted the order to mean that they have to cancel reservations for the entire month of December and cannot process new bookings for nonessential travelers during this period. For the past two days, they have been calling guests with the bad news. In some cases, guests have balked, indicating that they won’t yield to the cancellation or the state’s stay-at-home order.
“Frankly, we are shocked by the number of people who want to continue with their vacation as planned,” said Jim Winterberger, president and owner of Tahoe Getaways, which manages more than 200 properties in North Tahoe and the West Shore. He spent Thursday calling clients to tell them their holiday travel plans were kaput, referring them to the state order. “Some people have freaked out and said, ‘I’m coming. You charged my credit card. Squaw is open.’”
Rental properties must be registered with the City of South Lake Tahoe and display occupancy totals on the exterior of the home. The City of South Lake Tahoe has a strict Vacation Home Rental Ordinance (VHR) with fines of $1,000 for violations.
Michael Macor / The Chronicle 2018Issuing mass cancellations is a huge financial sacrifice but necessary for public safety, Winterberger said. “This will have an absolutely devastating impact (on revenue). It’s like pouring a couple million dollars into your parking lot and lighting it on fire.”
The impact is sure to be felt broadly across the region, which depends on tourism as its primary economic driver. For example, hotel taxes account for 40% of South Lake Tahoe’s income and are used to finance basic municipal services.
“It’s tough for us,” said Chris Fiore, communications manager for South Lake Tahoe. “If lodging is closed, that money doesn’t come in.”
Officials around Tahoe have been meeting with their respective cohorts since the order was announced to strategize around presenting a unified front on visitation procedures and expectations. But they face an uphill battle in trying to ward off tourists: Ski resorts are still open, and though many hotels are issuing refunds, online lodging marketplaces Airbnb and VRBO were still permitting bookings in the Tahoe region for December dates at press time.
Before lockdown, Elise Estanislau, of Santa Clara, had booked a four-day stay at a home in South Lake Tahoe through Airbnb for later this month. When the stay-at-home order came through, she went to cancel her booking, but the host initially refused to refund her the $900 cost and Airbnb customer service wasn’t helpful, Estanislau said.
Airbnb leaves cancellation policies largely up to hosts, who can set loose or restrictive rules. The San Francisco vacation-rentals company, which raised billions of dollars in an initial public offering this week and is now worth more than $100 billion, waived some cancellation penalties at the onset of the pandemic. Those waivers expired, however, and it now only allows refunds beyond what hosts choose if the guest or host fall ill from COVID-19. Changes in plans due to health orders and travel advisories are expressly not covered by the policy.
The host’s refusal put Estanislau’s family in an uncomfortable position that has become familiar to many Bay Area residents enduring the pandemic: travel in defiance of lockdown or swallow a financial loss and suffer the disappointment of a much-needed vacation deferred.
“We don’t feel like we should go. But at the same time, our kids are expecting a vacation,” Estanislau said Thursday. “It’s just a strange, hard decision.”
On Friday morning, the property management company behind her booking, Turnkey Vacation Rentals, reversed course, clearing its December bookings in Tahoe and offering guests refunds and future credits. (Estanislau’s family happily canceled their reservation.)
“We completely empathize with our guests not being able to travel during this time,” Turnkey wrote in a statement to The Chronicle. Still, issuing refunds en masse can be hard on homeowners that use Turnkey who “rely on the income from these non-refundable payments for things like mortgage payments, utilities and more.”
Representatives at Airbnb and VRBO declined to answer questions, referring information requests to their policy web pages. Many Tahoe officials and hoteliers expect that people will continue to book through those services and break lockdown.
The proliferation of short-term rentals has become a sore spot for communities across Tahoe since the launch of Airbnb and VRBO. Some had taken measures to manage and restrict them before the pandemic, citing the issues of noise, traffic and trash that come with high volumes of weekend visitors. But holding the companies to account has been all but impossible, officials say.
“As a town, we don’t have control over those third-party hosts,” said Bronwyn Roberts, Truckee’s public information officer. “They’re really hard to work with.”
After a chaotic summer in which out-of-towners inundated Tahoe, Truckee, an epicenter of ski cabins, has fast-tracked a new ordinance that creates a registry of short-term rentals and operating procedures. Starting in January, officials will have authority to revoke registration for properties where guests don’t follow state laws or lockdown orders.
“It’s not something we want to necessarily use, but we need to have tools in our toolbox,” Roberts said. “We want people to think about the spirit of these (stay-at-home) orders.”
The three California counties touching the lake — El Dorado, Placer and Nevada — have ordinances in place allowing them to fine visitors, rental companies and Airbnb hosts who violate lockdown, though they have resisted aggressive enforcement even as complaints from neighbors piled up during the summer. A small number of tourists around the lake received citations of $500 and $1,000 for breaking shelter-in-place orders earlier this year.
Stinging individuals with hefty fines is not a mechanism officials feel comfortable relying on to keep people at bay. But Fiore said South Lake Tahoe lawmakers would almost certainly discuss the issue at a meeting next week.
After a raucous summer of tense encounters between Tahoe locals and tourists, Baird, at Cedar House, expects that determined visitors will sneak up to Tahoe this month regardless of the stay-at-home order.
“Based on what happened here in spring, I’m a little more pessimistic” about people following lockdown rules, she said. “Especially with pandemic fatigue, there are all types of reasons people will come, no matter what.”
Gregory Thomas is the Chronicle’s editor of lifestyle & outdoors. Email: gthomas@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @GregRThomas
