After a prolonged period of weak performance and volatility, hoteliers at the recent Hotel Data Conference were ready to embrace a new era — while finding ways to thrive in a changing environment.
Here are some highlights from coverage of the 2026 Hotel Data Conference.
Forward-looking expectations come into focus
With just a few months remaining in 2026, a clearer picture for the full year and expectations for 2027 are becoming realistic as hoteliers navigate through budget season.
Kelsey Fenerty, manager of analytics at STR, CoStar's hospitality data analytics firm, said it's reasonable to expect more stable — if slower — growth in the new year. But the broader landscape could shift, altering those expectations.
"A forecast is really only as good as the external world around it is stable. Our world remains very uncertain these days," she said. "Right now, 'normal' is living in a world where really big changes happen semi-frequently with basically no lead-up or notice, and our long-term trends just change very abruptly as a result."
At the conference, STR released its latest forecast for full-year 2026 and 2027, with revenue per available room up 4.4% and 2.1%.
“As we look at the 2027 RevPAR growth, the nice thing that we see across each metric — ADR, occupancy and RevPAR — solid gains for each chain-scale segment,” Amanda Hite, president of STR, said. “And what’s noticeable is that we don’t see much of that K-shape anymore.”
Jake Bruno, senior forecasting analyst at STR, said the spending power of the average American bolsters that confidence.
“Households continue to move up the combined salary ladder. … U.S. households continue to be better off,” he said.
In terms of why 2026 ended up coming in so much stronger than expectations, Pyramid Global Hospitality Chief Commercial Officer Brian Berry noted growth came in hot in markets not hosting World Cup matches after a noticeable shift in consumer behavior beginning in February.
He said it's reasonable to believe this strength will continue.
“That’s a long way of saying we’re equally uncertain about next year, but I think the forecast feels right, for lack of a more scientific term,” he said.
Going forward, hoteliers also need to be thoughtful about how they benchmark and just who is in their comp sets, said STR's Hannah Smith.
“If you take one thing away, it’s that one single comp set isn’t necessarily going to be the answer to all of the ways that you’re benchmarking,” she said. “So, let’s rethink what a comparable hotel is.”
Shifts in guest behavior and desires drive demand
While demand has been strong, travelers aren't willing to just throw their money away. Instead, they're seeking value, and that means good on-property experiences are vital.
“Every macro trend has a local expression … and our job is to understand what that looks like in each market,” said Sonny Kerstiens, vice president of sales at Aspen Hospitality. “What is it we can provide as an experience that is not even a question [for the guest]. It is less driven by the comp set, more by the experience and what guests are willing to pay for now. … Tactically, we must always look at our sales deployment. So, are we deployed appropriately for what forecasts are coming, or deployed against yesterday’s reality?”
Experts from industries adjacent to hotels said it is vital to keep tabs on consumer data to make sure they're delivering the types of experiences their customers wants.
Elizabeth Mullins, president of Orlando-based resort company Evermore Hospitality, said responding to data on how guests were behaving at the Evermore Orlando Resort made them change their approach shortly after opening.
"We thought that living in Orlando and being literally adjacent to Walt Disney World, living that close to the mouse, would mean that we would have like normal homeshares — a four-day length of stay," she said. "That came true, but we also thought that we would only get a day to a day-and-a-half of that visit. We ended up getting three days of the visit. Evermore is very special. Three days of the visit and only one park day. What that meant was a rush to reprogram so that there was enough to keep people engaged throughout their entire experience."
Keeping an eye on review data is also vital.
Good reviews are sometimes a function of making sure your not over promising and under delivering said Lior Sekler, chief commercial officer at HRI Hospitality.
If guests "have the right expectations, then they'll come to the property and they won't be disappointed, and it'll increase the satisfaction," he said. "We're spending a lot of time right now on data-scrubbing and making sure that all of our hotels are properly displayed ... so when they arrive on the property, they have that true, accurate and authentic experience."
Another noticeable shift in guest behavior is the shrunken booking window, which has forced hoteliers to change marketing strategies.
"We see two guests and two different clocks and two different plans," said Diane Koczur, senior director of marketing at Evans Hotels. "One guest type is deciding on decisions 72 hours in advance. Others are settling on their trips a couple of weeks in advance. What that means for us is the booking curve is now defined by channel readiness, not just lead time."
Understanding how guests behave — and spend — is also key for planning around major events that shape a market, with sports and conferences more likely to yield highly profitable guests than concerts.
"A World Cup and Super Bowl attendee, they behave differently than a conference attendee, who behaves differently than a concert attendee," Nick Seaman, hospitality forecaster at STR, said. "What I find matters is how far people are willing to travel, how long they stay, how early they book, and how much they're willing to pay and who's paying the bill."
Business travel is seeing a resurgence, and hotels that want to capitalize on that need to adjust to the changing needs in that segment, Michael Dominguez, president and CEO of global hotel sales organization Associated Luxury Hotels International, said.
He noted that includes being flexible on timing of check in and check out to match travelers' schedules. If a hotel’s guest mix is 10% East Coasters, but the last decent flight to the region is at 3:30 p.m., why is the check-out time at 11 a.m.?
“If that's the audience you want, how can you help them?” he said. “I know what this does for housekeeping, so you have to think it through. But I don’t think we’re doing that. I think we’re treating everybody equal and we’re treating the environment the same.”
In addition to the business transient rebound, Leah McFarland, senior vice president of revenue strategy, Crestline Hotels & Resorts, said specific markets are seeing a notable rebound in group business.
“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.
Lynsey Kreitzer, executive vice president of commercial strategy at New Hampshire-based management company Lark Hotels, said her company has seen success in winning small groups, but their spending patterns are shifting.
"That's been kind of a standout for us this year across most of our hotels, where we're getting the group, but we're just not getting the food-and-beverage spend that we used to get or expected from it," she said. "We really have to think hard about what's our strategy for next year, and that's hugely important to some of our big group hotels."
AI is changing how hotels are run
The rise of artificial intelligence is changing the landscape for hotels, both in how they appear to potential guests and how they operate behind the scenes.
Hoteliers need to be increasingly aware of how they appear on large language models as more travelers use those for early discovery and eventually will rely on AI agents for booking, said Michael Goldrich, founder and chief adviser of Vivander Advisors and president of HSMAI New York.
"Now people are putting into this [search] box — instead of keywords — a question, and instead of 10 blue links, you're getting one answer, an answer that's in a paragraph, and in this paragraph could be five to seven hotels. That's it. If you're not in that list of five to seven hotels, you're invisible," he said.
AI is also likely to complicate the distribution landscape, said Linda Gulrajani, vice president of revenue strategy and distribution at Marcus Hotels & Resorts.
"I think as AI continues to evolve and drive our distribution, it's going to make things really ugly, and we're going to have a lot more rate leakage — or whatever the buzzword is around that — if we don't get control of all of those resellers of our rates, and some of them are faulty," she said.
In an era where costs are increasing and hotels are increasingly challenged to find profits, finding ways to automate functions within a hotel using AI will be key.
"We can be very intentional but ... in my opinion, there's probably more benefit — at least right now — on the back-of-house side than there is anything guest-facing," Max Spangler, vice president of technology at Charlestowne Hotels, said. "I think it's really important ... we don't appear to be trying to automate the most important thing to our industry, which is people and connections."