The beginning of a new year means its time to break out a new calendar and mark the important dates to watch, especially holidays or opportunities for travel.
Hotel revenue managers were likely marking their 2026 calendars with smiles on their faces, as many holidays have shifted to weekend dates this year.
Holidays such as Valentine's Day, Juneteenth, July Fourth, Rosh Hashanah, the first day of Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year's Day all fall on Friday or Saturday this year.
C. Patrick Scholes, managing director of lodging and leisure equity research at Truist Securities, said the holiday calendar shifts in 2026 favor positive year-over-year growth.
He called this year "the perfect storm of a holiday shift," but in a good way.
"Pretty much every holiday shift, with the exception of Memorial Day and Labor Day, works in the industry's favor, and some of them are pretty significant this year," he said. He cited Valentine's Day, which falls on a Saturday this year as a positive, as well as Juneteenth, which falls on a Friday.
When holidays fall on or close to weekends, it's favorable for travel in two ways: Leisure travelers are more likely to plan a weekend celebration trip, possibly with a day extension. And weekdays are more free for business and group travel.
Kristen Weaver, vice president of revenue and ecommerce for Philadelphia-based ownership and management company GF Hotels & Resorts, said her company does a day-by-day budget to stay on top of major holidays and events.
Business transient and government business tends to dip around holidays, while leisure travel sees a boost. Weaver said her company always pays close attention to the days of the week that holidays fall on.
New Year's Eve and Christmas Eve both fall on Thursday this year, with New Year's Day and Christmas falling on a Friday. That's a day later than it was in 2025, which could prove beneficial for leisure-heavy markets, she said.
"It could have a flat effect, like we saw in a lot of our markets this year, or we could see an impact in our leisure-heavy markets. You could see additional demand pick up in those markets with people wanting to come in for the entire week or take those long weekends because they can," Weaver said.
Allison Frazier, vice president of revenue management at Peachtree Group, said holidays such as Valentine's Day falling on a Saturday allows her team to promote weekend packages at the individual hotel level to drive further demand.
She said they pay close attention to shifts in the days of the week on a month-by-month basis to better contextualize growth or declines in year-over-year demand by month.
For example, January, July and October will all gain a weekend night in 2026, compared to 2025. March, August and November, on the other hand, will all have one fewer weekend night in 2026.
Adding a weekend night is generally a positive for hotels, especially for those in leisure-heavy markets.
Although these shifts generally have a nominal effect on yearly demand, there are significant swings some months that makes them worth keeping an eye on, Frazier said.
"We see anywhere from about a 1% [revenue per available room] decline in a month to a positive 1.5% depending on how those day of weeks are going to fall," she said.
Weaver said her team makes note of standard calendar shifts such as gaining a weekend date and losing a weekday date in a given month compared to last year, but the impact is different than it used to be, mostly because business transient travel patterns just don't look the same as they used to.
"It used to be, especially when we would gain a Tuesday, it would absolutely have an impact when we saw stronger business transient travel and you could rely on that transient travel every single Tuesday, Wednesday. You knew you were going to sell out at every hotel in a heavy business transient market. Since now that's no longer the case, it does seem like more of a wash," she said.
Business transient demand has been consistently weak in the weeks leading up to and following a holiday, Weaver said.
Now, the two weeks leading up to and following major holidays — regardless of the day of the week the holiday falls on, show "a major lag in business travel and government travel," she said. "It's become the new norm."
But on the flip side, Weaver said that "where we see the success is in our leisure-driven markets" during those times surrounding major holidays.
Of course, the biggest event of all on the 2026 calendar in the U.S. is one that wasn't on it last year: the FIFA World Cup.
"Everybody is keeping a very close eye on the FIFA World Cup games happening this summer, so that's something that we're monitoring very closely across all of the impacted markets," Weaver said.
There's still a lot up in the air in regard to what kind of demand will come through the host markets, Frazier said.
"We are definitely expecting [average daily rate] upside in the majority of our hotels in those markets around game days, but we're still watching over the next couple of months to see how demand trends," she said.