Student accommodation
Summer stay
A summer stay is the use of a student residence's beds in the months when the academic year leaves them free: summer schools, language groups, conferences, sports teams or short stays. It keeps the building from standing empty all summer, but it changes completely how the building runs.
Also known assummer lets · summer season · summer letting · estancia de verano
How the building changes in summer
When the academic year ends, many residences change customer. Groups from language courses arrive, along with students on universities' summer schools, sports teams, conference delegates or people coming for a few weeks for work or a placement. In the United Kingdom people talk about summer lets or the summer season, and some operators run it as a separate business, with its own sales team.
The change is not just in the guest. Stays are counted by the night rather than by the year, groups arrive all at once, more cleaning and more changes of bed linen are needed, reception works in other languages and the house rules have to be explained in a day, not over a year. In Spain, moreover, what can be done with the building in summer depends on its activity licence and on each autonomous community's rules: housing tourists is not the same as housing students.
Worth knowing
Summer is prepared before the academic year ends. Rooms have to be vacated, checked and cleaned between the last resident leaving and the first group arriving, and sometimes the gap is a matter of days. It is also the only time big works fit in, so the year's preventive maintenance competes for the same weeks as the summer occupancy rate.
Sources
Related terms
- Occupancy rateThe occupancy rate is the share of a residence's beds that are occupied or committed at a given moment or over a period. It is the first figure anyone looks at in a student building, because income depends on it, and so does almost everything calculated afterwards.
- Academic yearThe academic year is the period of classes and exams in a university year. In Spain it generally runs from September to June, with two semesters and exams in January or February and in June, and it is the unit in which places in a student residence are usually contracted.