Hotel Trends 2027: What Hotel Leaders See Coming

“These days, you no longer go or the majority, seems to have shifted from googling hotels, from googling trips, to going to Claude or ChatGPT or whatever is out there and say, book me a hotel in Zurich next week from this time to that time.”

“What we believe will happen is that you will see more and more what we call an agent to agent type of interaction, meaning that you will start your purchasing journey on your smartphone.”

“The other part of AI that's going to disrupt the market quite strongly, and there's already the first signs of that, is something us as hoteliers, not even the big chains, are able to control, which is the way that people book hotels.”

“Most of the AI utility is gonna happen on the back end in order to make the guest experience even better on the front end.”

“Reservations, I think we're going to see, like, so many jobs being done over there in the next four or five years because so much of the work reservations is doing can already be automated by good AI software.”

“What I see happening is the revenue manager role kind of not fading, but changing where you have less revenue managers and more analysts who are actually just validating our revenue management systems.”

“Human talent is gonna be the luxury. So I see, like, a split between lower tier hotels with mostly installed by technology. So you check-in on your mobile, check out on your mobile. There's maybe one person on the desk just in case, but there's no real human interaction.”

“We are really bumping along in, demand growth. Certain, like, higher tier hotels are doing better. Luxury, even upper upscale to a certain extent, are seeing demand growth. Everyone else has been, flat to down.”

“I wanna have a recommendation of a human being. And then for this, I'm willing to pay €300, €500 a night.”

“Sleep is the very one thing that every guest is going to do in your hotel. Not everyone is gonna go to your restaurant. You hope so, but not everyone is going to the restaurant. Not everyone is going to the spa, but everyone is going to sleep.”

“We're designing experiences absent of the biological understanding of what the human being needs in order to rest and recover.”

“Our guests began to realize that wellness wasn't just confined to the treatment rooms. It could be woven to every single aspect of their stay.”

“I've never seen such a disparity in interest in coming into hospitality than at any point in twenty years, and which is kinda scary.”

“Labor market is challenging and will remain challenging. The demographics in the country show that a lot of people will leave the market at some point because they will retire, and the inflow of new talents to the business is probably not at the same level.”

“I think that it's very hard for hotels to find good people today. I'm afraid I don't think that it will get any easier going forward.”

“Coming from the kitchen, it used to be a crazy toxic world. Screaming, scolding, stuff being thrown around. It was quite normal. And then next to the 16 plus hours per day working. And nowadays we see way more that is not being tolerated anymore.”

“If you have someone serving that guest in any capacity that is dysregulated in any capacity, you are diminishing the ability of that experience. Right? That's how you get people to start valuing the employee health.”

“We found the interest of the younger generation to come work for a true sustainable brand so great that, you know, after one recruitment day, we already had all our ambassadors hired to the team. And actually we had a waiting list for people that wanted to join us.”

“Hotels are relying much more on food and beverage to make money because TRevPAR has become the new metric that everyone's being benchmarked against. So now all of a sudden, it's not on that RevPAR. It's on the TRevPAR.”

“Depending on the company, we're talking about up to 50% in some locals airlines is coming from ancillary revenue. Top revenues are ancillary. In the cruise liner, like 35%. If we think about hotels, we're talking about, like, 8% of revenues coming from ancillary, so it's a massive growth potential in there.”

“Return on investment starts at ADR level because everyone I mean, in essence, in every market, in every corner of the world, you should be able to run a 80% occupancy. So the differential of what, where profit will be higher or lower is because of ADR levels.”

“Borrowing money or getting a mortgage for a company that which is very sustainable will be much cheaper as for a company which is too late to invest in sustainability. So there will be a big competitive advantage for those or disadvantage for the other hotels that didn't invest.”

“From our corporate bookings, all of our corporate bookings demand this regardless. So all of the hotels have it anyway. And if you're talking about something like Amsterdam specifically, almost probably every hotel has a sustainability certification.”

“Most guests, for example, kind of up style or budget hotels, they're not necessarily willing to pay a surcharge for, you know, sustainability measures, but it's taken into the booking decisions where if they have same price category and sustainable versus non-sustainable, they prefer sustainable over non-sustainable.”

“I really believe that in years to come, you're not going to walk into hotels and see restaurant bars and lounges on repeat in every hotel that you go in.”

“I made a new brand for the restaurant independently of the hotel, allowing people to have a recognition itself for the food and beverage part of the hotel.”

“I think that also was within five years, the guests will be more and more open to visit hotel bars because they will know that there is a special standard that we keep in, and they will be they will know that if they go to hotels, they will get amazing service.”

“When you think that we bought in late twenty one and we're selling in early twenty six, that's, barely five years. And one of the key success of this particular project is that we had, all the time, the exit in mind.”

“What we found was, particularly after COVID, a lot of the owners were next generation owners. And therefore, investment timelines were completely different to that perhaps of their fathers or their parents. And they wanted to talk about five year turnarounds and ten year turnarounds.”

“We have seen on the market that some hotels or some owners, they renovate. They do an excellent job in renovation. The product is fantastic. But the market, there's only so much room for ADR growth, and you may overinvest, and you may not get the return you're expecting.”