NASHVILLE, Tennessee — After half a decade in the doldrums, hotel group business is steadily recovering and in some U.S. markets already has returned to pre-pandemic numbers.
In a session about group demand at the recent Hotel Data Conference, Chantal Wu, CoStar Group's senior director of hospitality market analytics, said that the U.S. currently has 2,300 “meeting hotels,” or properties with more than 5,000 square feet of meeting space. This type of hotel constitutes 14% of the active U.S. hotel pipeline and has 20,000 rooms across about 80 properties.
One change is that conference attendees have followed the trend and mostly demand boutique and lifestyle hotels, Wu said.
Group business is back, but that move only started at the beginning of this year. U.S. hotel group demand declined in 2025, posting a 0.5% dip in revenue per available room, but then group demand grew in the first half of 2026, Wu said.
“We’re seeing some green shoots this year,” she said, with group demand year-to-date June 2026 growing by 2.4% to 129 million room nights.
Leah McFarland, senior vice president of revenue strategy, Crestline Hotels & Resorts, said these improvements are very market-specific.
“The convention centers and convention calendars are certainly driving a lot of the [average daily rate] gains in first-tier cities, but also what is happening at the segment level is we’re still seeing government business playing a huge impact in the group game and in the compression created in some of these markets, not just in first-tier cities but in the second-tier ones as well,” she said.
Plus, levels of group demand recovery vary across hotel types and drive different amounts of pricing power, McFarland said.
“We have to remember that it is very individualized based on mini submarkets and what is happening at each segment level,” she added.
Chicago has had a good past 12 months with a notable number of compression nights thanks to the 2026 World Cup, while Washington, D.C. has been hindered by the drop in government business, McFarland said. The big question mark for the rest of this year and into 2027 is what will happen with direct government or government-funded business.
Allie Bennett, senior principal account manager at Cvent, said the U.S. hospitality industry is still experiencing shorter booking windows since the end of the pandemic, but lead times are improving.
“We are also seeing meaningful volumes for programs that are further out, which is giving hotels the opportunity to really shape their mix earlier on, rather than having to backfill late,” she said.
Bennett said hoteliers who are capitalizing on this movement are already doing three things: They are visible and easy to find early on in the sourcing process, they are being very intentional and strategic about targeting the right planners, and they are quick to respond when demand comes in.
Meeting planners also are quicker to make decisions, a trend due not only to shorter lead times but also because planners have more and better IT and tools at their disposal, she said.
Brad Beaubien, senior director of destination development, Visit Indy, said the group-booking landscape definitely has two tracks at the moment.
The first is that there has been the return of social, military, educational, religious and fraternal groups, known colloquially as SMERF, which are booking much closer in.
“They were groups that were burned during the pandemic, that weren’t big enough to negotiate out of attrition, penalty fees. … They were much more sensitive to economic and social volatility.”
The other track is the larger, citywide business that is now booking Indianapolis through 2030, a move that has seen cities realize the need for renovation, expansion and differentiation, Beaubien said.
The Indiana Convention Center has been expanded, and by the end of this year it will add the 800-room Signia by Hilton Indianapolis, which is owned by the Capital Improvement Board of Managers of Marion County.
“We’ve just closed Gen Con, with a record attendee number for the building of 74,000,” he said, referring to a major convention catering to the tabletop gaming industry.
Booking these citywide events is a huge help not only in the revenue they bring but also in allowing Indy hoteliers to understand where bookings holes exist that they can concentrate on, Beaubien said.
CoStar's Wu said that often the “benefit of convention center upgrades takes time to prove.”
At the other end of the scale, smaller events are being booked by meeting and event planners increasingly closer to the event itself, McFarland said.
“Just when we think the booking window cannot get any shorter, it somehow manages to do so,” she said.
She added hoteliers need to be more nimble and reactive than ever and to make sense of their pricing decisions further out.
“We get really proud of ourselves … hedging our bets that it will be a banner year and then seeing pricing changing notably in the short term.
Hoteliers have to “train ourselves to better price our rooms further out,” McFarland said.
“Let’s face it, we’ve all trained our customers to wait until the last minute [because] that’s when they will get the best deal. It is all of our responsibilities to be really rational about how we are pricing our hotels and try to influence the customer buying in a little more of a reasonable timeline that will benefit all of us if that booking window gets a little longer,” she said.
Planner wants
Group guests are behaving the same way leisure guests are: They are paying higher hotel rates and have greater expectations.
“Planners want a real relationship with hoteliers. They send eight to nine [requests for proposals], so you want to be in at least the top three,” Bennett said. “They want a strong attendee experience, a clear value of the property and why they should book with you, a real differentiation between you and the hotel down the street.”
Other requirements are that website messaging and social media content show consistency and that consumers have an easy, confident path throughout the booking process.
New demands often result in new costs, so top of mind for hoteliers is upselling to group attendees, especially as margins are tight, McFarland said.
Beaubien said one big source of business for him is youth sports.
“Not just sports in general. Random volleyball and dance contests, things like that,” he said.
Such group trends are important to keep in mind to help diversify bookings, McFarland said.
“Do not walk away from [government business]. It will come back at some point,” she said.