The New Travel Playbook: Five Trends Reshaping Bookings – and Hotel P&Ls

Every quarter brings a fresh batch of “travel trends” reports, and most of them tell hoteliers very little they didn’t already suspect. This one is different in intent, if not in subject matter. The trends covered here – AI-driven trip planning, compressed booking windows, the rise of experience and wellness spend, automated ancillary merchandising – aren’t new observations. What’s changed is the scale and speed at which they’re now moving, and the fact that room revenue alone is no longer carrying hotel performance the way it once did.

This piece sets out to do three things: separate the trends with genuine momentum from the background noise, show with named sources exactly how each one is showing up in booking patterns and on-property revenue, and identify which hotels and markets are most exposed – and least prepared. The intention isn’t to add another list to the pile. It’s to give commercial and revenue leaders a working diagnostic for where 2026 demand is actually heading, and what to do about it before the next quarter’s numbers confirm it.

• The single most consequential shift is the move from a room-centric to a total-revenue model: with RevPAR softening across most chain scales in 2025, ancillary and auxiliary revenue (F&B, spa/wellness, parking, experiences, upsells) has become the primary growth and margin lever, and the trends with genuine outsized momentum right now are AI-assisted trip planning, compressed booking windows and shorter stays, the experience/wellness economy, and automated ancillary merchandising.
• Impact differs sharply by segment: luxury and upper-upscale are capturing ancillary and rate premiums (a “K-shaped” market), while economy and midscale face the steepest RevPAR pressure; urban/business hotels are most exposed to short booking windows and AI discovery, while resort and lifestyle properties are best placed to monetise experiences and wellness.
• Most hotels remain reactive: only a minority use advanced revenue-management or ancillary technology, and roughly 16% of global hotel supply is visible in AI search; the leaders (IHG, Accor/Ennismore, Wyndham, Hyatt) have explicit ancillary targets and integrated tech stacks, and the recommended response is a unified commercial organisation built around Total Revenue Management, a connected tech stack, and GEO/AI visibility.

1. The headline structural shift is room-revenue weakness forcing a pivot to total revenue. US hotels closed 2025 with full-year RevPAR down 6.3% and Q4 RevPAR down 9.6% (Actabl/HotelData.com Q4 2025 Hotel Profitability Performance Report), and total revenue per available room (TRevPAR) fell 8.8% year-on-year, from $165.95 to $151.34. In the UK and Europe the picture is one of plateau rather than decline – UK RevPAR rose 1.2% in Q1 2026 with flat occupancy (CoStar), and European RevPAR gains were rate-led at roughly 3–4% nominal but close to flat in real terms (STR/Cushman & Wakefield). With rate strength exhausted, ancillary income is “where the margin lives” while “rooms and F&B are running flat” (Michael Grove, HotStats, Q1 2026).
2. AI-assisted trip planning is the fastest-moving discovery shift, but it is a discovery channel, not yet a booking channel. Expedia Group’s AI Trust Gap report (a YouGov survey of more than 5,700 adults across the US, UK and India, fielded 10–25 March 2026) found 53% comfortable letting AI suggest travel options but only 8% comfortable booking through AI; 68% still prefer a trusted brand to transact. As Expedia Chief AI and Data Officer Xavi Amatriain put it, “Travelers don’t have a technology problem with AI. They have a trust problem.” Travel became the largest B2C vertical in ChatGPT’s app ecosystem within months of the October 2025 launch, yet only ~16% of global hotel supply is visible in AI search results (HotelWorld AI, World’s Best at AI 2025 Index, covering 131,000 properties in 30 countries).
3. Booking windows have compressed and stays have shortened – especially in Europe. Lighthouse data shows the share of single-night-stay queries in Europe fell from 39% to 20% between Q1 2023 and Q4 2025; Criteo survey data cited by Lighthouse shows the European share completing bookings within two weeks of departure rose 4 points to 26% in Q3 2025. In the UK, around 80.5% of stays are single-night and roughly 69% of check-ins are domestic (SiteMinder Changing Traveller Report 2026 / Hotel Booking Trends).
4. Experience-led, wellness and “bleisure” travel are driving on-property and near-property spend. The global wellness economy hit $6.8 trillion in 2024 (Global Wellness Institute, Global Wellness Economy Monitor 2025, released 19 November 2025), with wellness tourism growing 13.8% and spas 14.6% year-on-year (2023–2024). GetYourGuide booked a record 10 million experiences in Q3 2025 with gross booking value up 30% year-on-year, reaching its first profitable year on revenue approaching €1 billion ($1.2bn), per CEO Johannes Reck (Skift, 21 October 2025). Bleisure and solo travel are structurally expanding the addressable market.
5. Automated ancillary merchandising is delivering measurable uplift and attracting serious capital. As we covered previously, “Over $500 million in venture and private equity funding flowed into hotel ancillary technology in 2024 alone, including two new unicorns (Mews and Lighthouse),” and “Agilysys paid $150 million for spa software alone.” Wyndham reported ancillary revenue up 18% in Q3 2025 (and 19% in Q2 2025). Oracle’s Opera Guest Engagement and Merchandising powered by Nor1 “generated almost $300 million in guest upsell demand for the global hotel industry,” an uplift of 20% in upsell revenue, across its fiscal year (1 June 2024–31 May 2025) per Oracle. Plusgrade acquired Oaky in October 2025 to build a unified upsell platform.
6. Regulation is reshaping how fees are displayed. The US FTC’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees took effect 12 May 2025, requiring upfront all-in pricing for short-term lodging, with civil penalties up to $53,088 per violation; the FTC projects it will save consumers up to 53 million hours annually, valued at more than $11 billion over the next decade. The EU has long required total-price disclosure. This pushes resort/destination fees toward transparency but does not eliminate ancillary revenue.

AI-driven trip planning and search (outsized, accelerating). Generative AI has moved from novelty to default starting point for trip research. Phocuswright found 50% of travellers expect to use AI to plan trips within twelve months; other 2025 surveys put current usage around 40% of global travellers, rising to 60% among Millennials and Gen Z. The infrastructure is being built fast: Expedia and Booking.com launched ChatGPT apps in October 2025; Accor launched its ChatGPT app in early 2026; SiteMinder connected its 53,000-hotel network to AI platforms via Model Context Protocol; Marriott began taking direct bookings originating in Google AI Mode in February 2026. Crucially, the booking still routes to an OTA or hotel site – OpenAI reportedly scaled back direct-booking integration in March 2026 – so the immediate impact is on discovery and visibility (GEO – generative engine optimisation), not transaction. The risk is concrete: chain-affiliated properties are far more likely to be surfaced than independents, creating a “two-tier system” of hotels known and unknown to AI.

Compressed booking windows and shorter stays (outsized in Europe and urban markets). This is one of the clearest behavioural shifts into 2026. European accommodation searches on OTA/metasearch grew 45% between Q1 2023 and Q4 2025 even as the search window compressed – travellers are researching more intensely but committing later. SiteMinder’s data shows a counter-current at the committed-booking level: globally guests booked slightly earlier and cancelled less in 2025, and UK cancellations edged down to 18.24% (below the 19.15% global benchmark). The reconciliation: shopping/searching is later and more intense, but once a hotel booking is made it is stickier. Either way the trading window is shorter and demand spikes and dissolves faster, making static, historical-average pricing increasingly ineffective.

Experience-led and “transformational” travel (outsized, broad-based). Experiences are now the first thing travellers research. The tours, activities and attractions sector reached $271 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $342 billion by 2029 (Arival/Phocuswright, The Outlook for Travel Experiences 2019–2029), growing faster than any other major travel segment, yet only 33% of experience bookings are online versus 64% for travel overall – a large digitisation runway. McKinsey’s “splurge index” confirms a durable consumer tilt toward experiences over goods.

Wellness and fitness-focused travel (outsized in luxury/resort, broadening). The wellness economy reached $6.8 trillion in 2024 and is forecast to reach $9.8 trillion by 2029 (GWI). Wellness tourism (13.8%) and spas (14.6%) were among the fastest-rebounding sectors in 2023–2024. Per-capita wellness spend is far higher in North America ($6,029) and Europe ($1,876) than other regions. Hotels are moving wellness from amenity to demand driver: Hilton + Calm (2,400+ hotels), Hyatt + Headspace, Marriott + Aescape robotic massage at Ritz-Carlton/W, and sleep technology (Bryte smart mattresses) in luxury properties. HotStats reports European spa treatment and membership-fee revenue up 4.7% and 6% respectively in 2025, reaching roughly €10–€11 per occupied room.

Bleisure and remote-work travel (background-to-moderate, but structurally large). Market estimates vary widely ($430bn–$580bn for 2024–2025 depending on definition; CAGR ~9–10% on the more conservative Business Research Company / Research and Markets figures). In the UK, 42% of surveyed travellers added leisure to business trips (IHG). The effect is longer stays, weekend shoulder-night capture, and demand for co-working, F&B and flexible check-in/out.

Solo and multigenerational travel (moderate, segment-specific). Solo travel is a structural growth segment – the global market was ~$549.8bn in 2025 (Grand View Research), with bookings up 24% since 2019; women are ~54% of solo travellers. Multigenerational travel is the biggest growth area for luxury advisors – Embark Beyond reports multigen at 32% of transactions and 43% of revenue. These reshape room-mix and F&B/experience demand rather than channel mix.

Social media / TikTok-driven discovery (outsized for Gen Z/Millennials). TikTok is a search-and-discovery engine for younger travellers: 64% of Gen Z and 49% of Millennials use it as a search engine; 71% of European TikTok users intentionally search travel content. The “destination dupe” trend has produced measurable demand shifts (flights to Bosnia up 284% year-on-year in 2025 reporting). This drives compressed, non-linear booking funnels.

Loyalty programme shifts (moderate, strategically important). Loyalty membership grew 14.5% in 2024 to 675 million across major brands (CBRE) – more than twice the rate of room supply – but engagement per member is falling, pushing brands toward revenue-per-member, transparency and experiential redemption (Skift Research, The Future of Hotel Loyalty, November 2025). Marriott Bonvoy ended 2025 at ~271 million members (75% of US/Canada room nights). Brands are repositioning loyalty as an anti-OTA and anti-AI-disintermediation moat.

Dynamic/algorithmic pricing of ancillaries (emerging, high-potential). Most parking, premium Wi-Fi, early check-in and spa slots are still statically priced. Tools applying demand-based pricing to ancillaries report a roughly 30% upsell-revenue uplift from dynamic pricing alone (vendor data, treat with caution).

• Economic: Cost-of-living pressure and a “K-shaped” consumer underpin shorter stays, harder shopping, and trading-down in economy/midscale while affluent travellers sustain luxury spend. UK travel spending fell year-on-year in March 2026 for the first time in five years (Barclays UK Consumer Spend Report, via CoStar). Rising labour and input costs (UK total payroll up ~5.3% YoY; F&B margins now under 20% UK-wide and closer to 15% in London, per HotStats) make high-margin ancillaries (parking at 80%+ margins) strategically vital.
• Demographic: Gen Z and Millennials drive AI planning, social discovery, solo and experience-led travel; around 59% of Gen Z are not enrolled in any travel loyalty programme, prioritising value and uniqueness over brand prestige.
• Technological: Generative AI, agentic booking tools, Model Context Protocol, and cheap automated upsell/CDP technology have lowered the cost of personalisation and merchandising.
• Social/cultural: Post-pandemic prioritisation of experiences, wellness and mental health over material goods; social storytelling as identity.
• Regulatory/structural: FTC junk-fee rule and EU pricing rules; OTA commission burden (~15–25%, estimated at $25bn in 2025) driving direct-booking and loyalty strategy; asset-light franchising concentrating ancillary innovation at brand level.

Booking patterns. Shorter windows and compressed trading periods mean the next 28 days become the critical pricing window; static, historical-average pricing fails. Channel mix is fragmenting – OTAs captured roughly 55% of online bookings in 2025, but direct remains the highest-value channel (hotel websites generate higher average revenue per booking than OTAs, per SiteMinder). In Spain, SiteMinder data shows direct booking has become “a structural component within the distribution mix” rather than a complementary channel. AI discovery threatens independents’ visibility most.

On-property / ancillary revenue. F&B remains the largest non-room contributor (20–40% of full-service revenue; 30% at Ennismore’s Hoxton Southwark) but margins have compressed from 32% (2018) to 22% (2023). Spa contributes 3.4–4.2% of total revenue at luxury properties (CBRE). Parking is the highest-margin line (80%+). Automated upselling delivers measurable lift: the average online-check-in upsell is $48 (Mews); IHG attribute-based selling adds ~$22/night; Revinate’s 2025 Hospitality Benchmark shows EMEA hotels earned ~$836 in upsell revenue in 2024 versus $1,208 in North America and a $941 global average. European case studies show large uplifts off low manual baselines: Clarion Hotel Sign Stockholm achieved a 381% upsell-revenue increase (€47.57 average upsell per guest per month, Nov 2024–Mar 2025, using Oaky Front Desk + Mews); Grand Hotel Amrâth Amsterdam +284%; and Kabannas (UK) achieved a 71% open rate and ~35.7% conversion on automated WhatsApp upsell campaigns (HiJiffy + Oaky + Cloudbeds). For wellness-led hotels, ancillary spending reached 56% of TRevPAR at “Major Wellness” properties and 38% at “Minor Wellness” properties in 2024 (RLA Global/HotStats – global figure).

• Luxury/upper-upscale (resort and lifestyle): Best placed to monetise wellness, experiences and attribute-based selling; sustaining rate and ancillary performance in the K-shaped market (Actabl). Most exposed to – and best able to fund – sleep tech, spa, and longevity investment.
• Economy/midscale: Steepest RevPAR pressure and most exposed to trading-down; ancillary opportunity is narrower but real (Wyndham proves ancillary growth at economy scale via co-branded cards and Wyndham Connect, deployed at ~5,000 hotels).
• Urban/business hotels: Most exposed to short booking windows, AI discovery and bleisure; high single-night-stay share.
• Resort/leisure: Best positioned for experiences, wellness, multigenerational and longer stays.
• Independents vs branded: Independents are most exposed to AI invisibility and lack the tech stack to merchandise ancillaries; branded/chain properties dominate AI visibility and loyalty.
• Geography: The UK is a domestic-led, short-stay, stable market (occupancy 76.1% YTD 2025, second in Europe behind Ireland at 77.2%, per CoStar/Savills). London is more exposed to international/long-haul and US-dollar softness (London RevPAR -2.0% YoY July 2025). Regional UK (e.g. North West, where business trips rose 153% YoY) is gaining business demand. Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal, Italy) leads leisure performance; Germany and regional/business-heavy markets lag. UK GOPPAR fell 6.6% YTD 2025 as TRevPAR dipped ~1% against a 4%+ rise in labour costs (HotStats).

Most hotels are reactive. Only ~10% of hotels purchase advanced revenue-management technology and only ~28% use RMS tools (Skift); 45% of hoteliers struggle with siloed tech stacks; on-property systems (spa, golf, parking) rarely connect to CRS/CRM/PMS. Roughly 16% of global supply is visible in AI search.

Proactive leaders (named): IHG (explicit 100–150 bps annual fee-margin improvement target; attribute-based selling; co-brand card operating profit projected to double by 2025 and triple by 2028); Accor/Ennismore (ancillary-first lifestyle model – Hoxton Southwark at roughly 40% rooms / 30% F&B / 30% coworking; lifestyle hotels generate around 3x the fees of standard Accor hotels, per Deputy CEO Jean-Jacques Morin); Wyndham (double-digit ancillary growth, ~5,000 hotels on Wyndham Connect); Hyatt (Way platform merchandising, fastest loyalty growth). Marriott and Hilton are scaling lifestyle/wellness partnerships but are described as relatively slower on dedicated ancillary strategy.

Laggards: the long tail of independents and unbranded midscale/economy properties without connected technology, invisible to AI, and still pricing ancillaries statically.

1. Adopt Total Revenue Management (TRM). Shift the KPI from RevPAR to TRevPAR and profit-per-guest. CBRE named TRM a critical industry trend; McKinsey advises hotels to “take a page from the airline playbook” by unbundling rates and cross-selling, and estimates a 10–30% revenue-per-customer uplift from personalised ancillary offers, with up to 30% higher profitability for hotels prioritising ancillary strategies.
2. Restructure the commercial organisation. Merge revenue management, sales, marketing and distribution under unified commercial leadership; the revenue manager becomes a cross-functional commercial strategist (Revenue Analytics/Starfleet Research, 2025).
3. Build a connected tech stack. Integrate PMS, CRS, RMS, CRM/CDP and upsell/merchandising tools so ancillary offers are personalised, dynamically priced and attributed. Prioritise published, maintained integrations with major PMS platforms (Oracle OPERA, Mews, Cloudbeds, Infor, Agilysys).
4. Win AI/GEO visibility. Clean up listings, add structured data/schema, improve review volume and recency, and write specific, factual, agent-readable content. Treat “how does an AI find my hotel?” as the new SEO question.
5. Automate and dynamically price ancillaries. Deploy pre-arrival, check-in and in-stay upsell across email/SMS/WhatsApp; dynamically price parking, early check-in, late check-out and spa. European data shows breakfast, parking, room upgrades and early/late check-out as the top-performing deal types.
6. Protect and grow direct + loyalty. Use loyalty for first-party data, transparency and experiential redemption as an anti-disintermediation moat.
7. Comply transparently on fees. Treat all-in pricing as a trust and conversion advantage, not merely a compliance obligation.

Immediate (0–3 months):

• Audit AI/GEO visibility (test ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity for your property and comp set); fix structured data, listing consistency and review recency. Benchmark: appear in AI results for core “best hotel in [location] for [segment]” queries.
• Deploy or optimise an automated upsell tool across the full guest journey. Benchmark target: EMEA upsell revenue meaningfully above the ~$836/hotel 2024 average; conversion above ~6%.
• Shift reporting to TRevPAR/GOPPAR and profit-per-guest; expose ancillary lines in the daily commercial review.

Near-term (3–12 months):

• Move to dynamic pricing on at least three ancillary lines (parking, early/late check-out, spa). Trigger to escalate: if statically priced ancillaries exceed 50% of ancillary revenue.
• Integrate PMS–CRS–RMS–CRM and connect on-property outlets (spa, F&B, parking) to the guest profile. Trigger: if fewer than two of these are integrated, prioritise this above any new point solution.
• Build segment-specific commercial plays: wellness/experience bundles in luxury/resort; co-working and flexible-stay packages for bleisure in urban; value bundles in economy.

Strategic (12+ months):

• Implement attribute-based selling where the PMS/CRS supports it (Amadeus estimates up to ~$5,300/room/year incremental for mid-range).
• Restructure commercial leadership around unified Total Revenue Management.
• Thresholds that change the plan: if AI booking trust rises materially above the current 8%, accelerate agentic-commerce and payment-token readiness; if RevPAR recovers strongly, maintain ancillary discipline regardless, because it protects margin in all conditions.

Caveats

• Source quality: Much upsell uplift data (Oaky, Canary, Revinate, HiJiffy) is vendor-published and self-interested; large percentage uplifts (e.g. +381%) are often measured off low manual baselines. Neutral benchmarking (STR/CoStar, HotStats/Duetto, GWI, McKinsey, Skift Research) is weighted more heavily here.
• Geographic skew: Several headline datapoints (Actabl RevPAR/TRevPAR declines, the FTC rule, ancillary-market sizing) are US-centric; UK/Europe data (CoStar, HotStats, SiteMinder, Savills, Knight Frank) shows plateau rather than decline and is flagged as such throughout.
• Definitional variance: Bleisure, wellness and solo “market size” figures vary by an order of magnitude between sources depending on definition; the more conservative, methodologically transparent figures are used.
• Forward-looking items: AI agentic booking, OpenAI’s direct-booking plans, and loyalty restructures are evolving; several are announcements or projections rather than realised outcomes and are described as such.
• Region labelling: Revinate’s “$836” figure is EMEA, not strictly Europe; the wellness-of-TRevPAR shares (RLA Global 56%/38%) are global, not Europe-specific.

Sources:

• Actabl / HotelData.com – Q4 2025 Hotel Profitability Performance Report
• CoStar
• STR / Cushman & Wakefield
• HotStats / Duetto
• Expedia Group – AI Trust Gap Report (YouGov survey, March 2026)
• HotelWorld AI – World’s Best at AI 2025 Index
• Lighthouse
• Criteo
• SiteMinder – Changing Traveller Report 2026 / Hotel Booking Trends
• Global Wellness Institute – Global Wellness Economy Monitor 2025
• GetYourGuide (via Skift, October 2025)
• Skift / Skift Research – The Future of Hotel Loyalty (November 2025)
• White Sky Hospitality
• Wyndham Hotels & Resorts
• Oracle (Opera Guest Engagement and Merchandising, powered by Nor1)
• Plusgrade / Oaky
• US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) – Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees
• European Union – total-price disclosure regulations
• Phocuswright
• Arival / Phocuswright – The Outlook for Travel Experiences 2019–2029
• McKinsey & Company
• CBRE
• Embark Beyond
• Grand View Research
• IHG Hotels & Resorts
• Accor / Ennismore
• Hyatt Hotels Corporation
• Marriott International / Marriott Bonvoy
• Hilton (Hilton + Calm partnership)
• Amadeus
• Revinate – 2025 Hospitality Benchmark
• Mews
• Oaky
• HiJiffy
• Cloudbeds
• Barclays – UK Consumer Spend Report
• Savills
• Knight Frank
• RLA Global