Meeting the Moment: Capitalizing on Emerging Hospitality & Travel Trends

The year ahead is sure to be shaped by a host of macro- and micro-trends in hospitality and travel. Hoteliers across the globe are grappling with generational change, rising expectations for personalized experiences, and how to maximize revenues when faced with a mixed bag of market conditions. 

So what can you do to make the most of these shifts? We’ve highlighted a few ways commercial leaders and hoteliers can tap into these trends.

Broadening Revenue Horizons Beyond the Room

For many properties, the prospects for room revenue growth in 2025 may be looking limited. Paired with rising operational costs eating into profitability, hoteliers will need to sharpen their focus on ancillary revenues and facilitating improved commercial strategies. Some solid starting points for this include:

Evaluate Meeting & Event Space Utilization

If available, consider how closely you’re monitoring the usage of function space at your property. A focus on utilization rate alone may reveal some low-hanging fruit opportunities, but the value of this effort increases as commercial teams learn to adopt a revenue management mindset to leverage available function space. That is, striving to sell the right function space to the right group at the right price at the right time—with “right” being what’s best for the bottom line.

Facilitate Smarter Group Business Decisions

When an event-based group business opportunity comes, do stakeholders from sales, revenue management, and events teams have what they need to determine if this is the “right” opportunity to take? With advanced revenue management tools, properties can make better-informed decisions by weighing the likely value of a displaced transient business, accounting for expected ancillary spending, and understanding the servicing costs of a group.

Personalized Upselling

Use guest data to target those most likely to spend with well-timed offers. When effectively implemented, personalized offers for F&B, ancillary services, or even room upgrades can be an excellent way to drive incremental revenue.

Tap into Experiential Travel Demand

Among younger (Millennial and Gen Z) travelers, there’s a growing emphasis on exploring the world and valuing experiences over material belongings—with some even being willing to go into debt for the right travel opportunities. Pair this with remote work flexibility and the growth of “bleisure” travel, and it’s clear that hotels have an opportunity to differentiate themselves with offerings catering to a growing segment of experience—and let’s face it, social media—driven travelers.

Consider how you can work with internal and external partners to deliver highly memorable excursions. Whether it’s a scenic sightseeing itinerary, a chef-led cooking class, or a guided local brewery tour, you may have more options than you realize to develop appealing experience-focused stay packages.

Additionally, secondary market properties outside of traditional tourism hotspots may be able to tap into this trend. There’s a generation of value-conscious travelers who aren’t afraid to go off the beaten path for a unique and authentic experience when seeing the world, so lean into it.

Start Building the Foundation for Success

As hoteliers and revenue leaders look to the future, it’s as clear as ever that having the right technology, data infrastructure, and people in place are critical for both strategic and tactical success.

A host of capabilities, whether that’s the tried-and-true automated revenue optimization functionality of today’s advanced revenue management systems or the next iteration of the latest and greatest in AI functionality, are all predicated on having a solid foundation of data fuelling them.

To date, this shared foundation of hospitality technology systems has often looked more like a messy patchwork, but the tides are shifting. Accelerating the adoption of cloud-based systems and a focus on easing interoperability challenges between providers is helping to clear the way for hotels to start laying an ideal groundwork for data-driven success.

For hoteliers looking to make the most of today’s (and the future’s) tech capabilities, it’s time to give some serious consideration to your organization’s hospitality technology ecosystem. Are there significant gaps in capabilities? Old or under-supported tools that don’t “play well” with others? There’s never going to be a perfect time to upgrade, but having a clear vision of what’s needed and when will certainly help your organization take that step when the time comes.

Meeting the moment and making the most of your opportunities in today’s complex hospitality environment is no small feat. The trends shaping this year and beyond will depend on savvy operators using integrated technology to its full potential. But with the right pieces in place, hotel revenue leaders will be well-positioned for durable revenue success.

Free Report: 5 Predictions Shaping Hospitality 2025: Insights & Actions

The hospitality industry is undergoing digital transformation due to evolving traveler behavior, market shifts, and advancing technology. Success requires agile, connected systems enabling real-time decisions. This report, 5 Predictions That Will Shape Hospitality, offers insights and actionable steps for success.

Click here to download the “5 Predictions That Will Shape Hospitality” report.