US guests want value and experiences but have more purpose and barriers
US guests want value and experiences but have more purpose and barriers
Americans are flocking to Europe, but international demand to US hasn't returned the favor
From left: Aran Ryan, of Tourism Economics; Brian Allen, of Atrium Hospitality; and Sonny Kerstiens, of Aspen Hospitality, speak on a forecast panel at the Hotel Data Conference. (Terence Baker)
https://www.costar.com/article/1107945735/us-guests-want-value-and-experiences-but-have-more-purpose-and-barriers
NASHVILLE, Tennessee — U.S. travel demand is benefiting from stronger economic fundamentals, but that demand cannot be taken for granted as guests require more and know what they want.
During a forecast session at the Hotel Data Conference, industry experts addressed hotel performance this year and expectations for 2027.
Despite the U.S. co-hosting the 2026 World Cup, international travel demand has not been kind to the U.S. hotels, said Jan Freitag, national director of hospitality market analytics at CoStar Group.
The factors driving U.S. performance are national economics and corporate transient travel, said Aran Ryan, director of industry studies at Tourism Economics. U.S. households with a combined income of $200,000 or more account for 36% of lodging spending. There are 2.3 times as many households in this category than there were in 2018, making up approximately 11% of all U.S. households currently.
Brian Allen, vice president of operational performance at Atrium Hospitality, said 20% to 30% of his company's owned hotels are in the middle of a renovation, and that is one opportunity for driving value. Atrium has 74 hotels, and 70% are in the upper-upscale segment, he added.
Last year was an outlier, with U.S. hotel revenue per available room down 0.2%, Freitag said.
"But this year, rock n’ roll, group demand’s back, America is fully employed and people do not want to buy stuff, they want to buy experiences,” he said.
RevPAR is expected to grow but at a percentage lower than that of inflation, which adds more pressure to hotel margins.
The three levers driving increased inflation right now are higher energy costs, the impact of tariffs and AI companies driving so much investment that it's increasing the cost of everything else, Ryan said.
"That is the headwind right at this moment: rising inflation, which slowed real growth,” he said.
The economic outlook for 2027 is better, Ryan said. Non-AI investments in the second quarter this year bode well for group travel.
Sonny Kerstiens, vice president of sales at Aspen Hospitality, said some of the U.S. hotel industry must look at itself as being a differentiated jewel.
“Every macro trend has a local expression … and our job is to understand what that looks like in each market,” Kerstiens said. “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?”
Allen agreed.
“We know in our markets, which is secondary and tertiary, nobody is building a brand new 300-room Embassy Suites with 40,000 square feet of space, so we feel we have to protect the demand for that,” Allen said. “As we look at overall strategy from an occupancy versus average daily rate side, our strength has been in occupancy … and we see upper-upscale driving that.”
But increasing U.S. inflation is a major concern, he said. This is an area where hoteliers have to manage the levels of the profit-and-loss statement.
"That is in our strategy this year, and yield is difficult," Allen said. "We did … have a much better result than we first thought we would, and that has driven profitability up and helped us with margins."
Labor
If the demand is there, will hoteliers be able to staff their properties appropriately? Current U.S. government policy has seen a reduction in net immigration, but the data does not show a marked hole in labor, Ryan said.
“It is retention and recruitment that becomes vital. We have to be an employer of choice, which is what protect us from the risks in the macro data,” Kerstiens said, noting that his company has been challenged to find employees, and the cost-of-living concern is prominent among the labor pool.
Atrium conducted a study and changed all processes connected with labor following the pandemic, Allen said.
“We want to ensure [employees] have a good experience from the time they walk in the door, that they have appropriate training, and the result is a very low turnover rate, which helps us drive productivity," he said.
It's tough finding employees, and in some markets that leads to leaning into contract labor, he said.
“Everyone wants more to stick around,” Allen said.
International
Referring to the 2026 World Cup, Freitag said the biggest concern is that the U.S. had “the single largest sporting event in the world in this country, and if we can’t get people off the couch … well, why are they going to come in 2027?”
The U.S. “borrowed from 2025 and stole from 2027,” he said.
Hoteliers on the panel said a lack of international guests just leads to more opportunities to push the right levers and attract domestic ones.
“That worked in Canada,” Freitag added.
Another opportunity is to attract guests who might now be avoiding Dubai or have less opportunity to get there due to reduced airline flights.
“We certainly haven’t seen this in stronger overseas arrivals,” Ryan said.
Instead, American travelers have fallen in love again with Europe.
“Global international travel spending is growing 8% to 10% annually, the same [from Europeans], 10% spending growth forecast for next year outbound, so even if we get a decline in share of that, we think that’s set to become a tailwind” for the U.S., he said.
Travel demand remains resilient in most parts of the globe, but in turn, guests have a larger range of purpose and barriers, panelists said.
One bright spot for U.S. domestic travel is that corporate transient demand is shrugging off macroeconomic concerns and getting their employees out into the world.
“That’s a really interesting disconnect from the macro to the micro,” Freitag added.
The increase in corporate demand likely will be aimed at the U.S. midscale hotel segment, panelists said.
“We are seeing more spending and more wealth,” Ryan said. “When you think about travel and go back to your economic textbook, and you look up the definition of a ‘luxury good,’ it is something that grows faster than income.”
Regardless of the hotel segment, the experience still matters to the guest, Kerstiens said.
“You have to go up to and beyond expectations," he said. "There are levels of that at every class of hotel, not just luxury.”
Climate change
Another tailwind for hoteliers is that insurance costs are decelerating due to 2025 having a muted hurricane season, Freitag said. Europe, however, is getting warmer, so any reductions in one market might be offset by increases in others.
“We have to be ready with an incredible amount of flexibility, not just with our forecasts but with what we are doing from a programming and activation standpoint,” Kerstiens said, referring to his company's resorts.
Allen said he has seen these tailwinds materialize this year in the U.S.
“We don’t budget for the weather either … but we also take advantage of opportunities when they are presented,” he said.
10 Night Hikes That Will Make Your Skin Crawl
Artush/iStock
https://www.fodors.com/news/photos/10-scariest-night-tours-around-the-world
These unforgettable night tours reveal the world's creepiest wildlife after dark.
“Paren! Paren!” our lead guide shrieks as he leaps forward deeper into the Costa Rican darkness. He lands, sprints forward 10 feet, heaves a sigh, then implores us to remain still.
“Don’t move!” yells our back guide after their animated dialogue.
Giddy with a blend of anxiety and anticipation, a feeling one often experiences on tropical trails in the dark, we soon learn the source of our spontaneous game of statues, an adult fer-de-lance coiled at the base of the last step leading off the trail.
Sure, hiking under the Milky Way is wonderful, but what’s more fun than spying a goliath tarantula among the leaf litter, flying foxes in the night sky and, yes, Central and South America’s most venomous snake curled beneath your next step in Costa Rica? Here are 10 night hikes guaranteed to get a rise out of the hair on the back of your neck.
PHOTO: BEN ROBERTS
1 OF 10
Rios Lodge
WHERE: Costa Rica
Fer-de-lance encounters may not be the best way to promote Rios Lodge, but every element of the Rios experience screams adventure. Guests access the lodge by rafting Class II and III whitewater on the Pacuare River. Class IV rapids greet you upon departure. Rios Lodge, a global leader in conservation hospitality, has added eco rooms to a newly built hostel, providing budget-conscious travelers with jungle access. The Bullet Ant Night Hike regularly reveals scores of vibrant tree frogs, “wandering” among other large nocturnal spiders and, if you’re lucky, snake species aplenty.
PHOTO: DEVON MATTHEWS
2 OF 10
Tarantula Mating Season
WHERE: Eastern Colorado
Eastern Colorado may not be Australia’s Outback, but it is no stranger to walkabouts, specifically, thousands of Oklahoma brown tarantulas that depart from their cozy burrows at sunset in search of female companionship. La Junta fully embraces “love prairie,” playing host to the fifth annual Tarantula Fest in October. Come dusk, guided tours will head into the 443,000-acre Comanche National Grassland to observe all the arachnid action as merrily it creeps along.
PHOTO: MARION PAYR
3 OF 10
The Datai Langkawi 'Rainforest After Dark'
WHERE: Malaysia
Rainforests contain the greatest biomass on Earth. This biodiversity headlines the marquee at sundown. The Rainforest After Dark tour at The Datai Langawi resort reveals a Tony-worthy roster of nocturnal actors, beginning with flying lemurs, the red giant and red-cheeked flying squirrels. The ensemble cast features aptly named ghost crabs, reticulated pythons, and two species of monitor lizards, to name a few of more than one dozen regular nighttime players.
PHOTO: BRAD NEWTON/COURTESY OF TOURISM AND EVENTS QUEENSLAND
4 OF 10
Undara Volcanic National Park
WHERE: Australia
“What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine/the fleet limbs of the antelope?” wrote Robinson Jeffers to poetically (and perfectly) capture the predator-prey relationship, a duet that often proves painfully mesmerizing to observe. Undara Volcanic National Park is the site of one of the world’s most dramatic nocturnal spectacles. Every night, visitors can watch myriad microbats emerge from the lava tubes and fly through a gauntlet of perched brown tree snakes poised for mid-flight ambushes.
PHOTO: MUKESH/NATURETREK
5 OF 10
Night Tours
WHERE: Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, the land of elephants, sloth bears and the endemic Sri Lankan leopard, keeps on tripping the night wildlife fantastically, so much so that Naturetrek Tours offers a whopping 15-“day” tour dedicated to nocturnal exploration. The primary “targets” read like something out of Dr. Seuss: rusty-spotted cats, red and grey slow lorises, and palm civets. “I’ve seen the elephants,” was a boast in the Victorian age to indicate one’s worldliness. “I’ve seen the Indian pangolin and spot-bellied eagle owls,” nails the same global-adventurer cred today.
PHOTO: HADCO EXPERIENCES AT ASA WRIGHT NATURE CENTRE
6 OF 10
Nighttime Experiences at Asa Wright Nature Centre
WHERE: Trinidad
Birders flock from around the world to Trinidad’s Asa Wright Nature Centre in search of coquettes, honeycreepers, and other brilliant island species. Night tours offer a very different life list, with the lush Arima Valley rainforest providing habitat for whip scorpions, tree porcupines, and hundreds of insect species, including otherworldly lanternflies and giant moths. Did you know that harvestmen (“daddy longlegs”) are more closely related to scorpions than to spiders? Your night hike guide will tell you all about it.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF VOYAGER TRAVEL
7 OF 10
Night Float in an Amazon Skiff
WHERE: Peru
Who doesn’t want to, just once, peer into the dark to find a pair of wide eyes staring back? The Zafiro High Water itinerary from Voyager’s Travel conveys guests into the Peruvian Amazon with an emphasis on the nocturnal safari. And it isn’t just those eyes, likely from caimans patrolling the riverbank; the auditory odyssey is equally spellbinding, especially when each shriek, call and siren is identified by local naturalists.
PHOTO: NATHAN WHITE/COURTESY OF TOURISM AND EVENTS QUEENSLAND
8 OF 10
Bats by the 80,000
WHERE: Australia
Study a bat closely, and you’ll instantly understand why Bram Stoker transmogrified Dracula into a bat and back again. One other observation: bats are really cool, especially when 80,000 take flight overhead as they exit Central Queensland’s limestone cave labyrinth. Located along the Capricorn Coast, the Queensland Parks and Wildlife rangers lead adventurers through the bush to a narrow bat cleft, the portal used by endangered bent-winged bats to enter the night. The nocturnal ecosystem comes alive as the tree frogs sing and the insects buzz.
PHOTO: THOMAS GALEWSKI (CC BY 4.0) VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
9 OF 10
Kakamega Forest Night Trek
WHERE: Kenya
Few habitats excite wildlife enthusiasts more than the rainforest understory, a seething, vibrant, churning terrarium where every resident is adapted to its niche. Rangers in Western Kenya’s Kakamega Forest guide the curious where beetles, vipers, and cobras patrol the night understory, and hammer-headed fruit bats, with 3-foot wingspans, fly overhead. While you can be forgiven for perpetually searching the trees for galago, aka bushbabies, remember to look down, where the bioluminescent fungus will blow your mind.
PHOTO: DENNIS VAN DE WATER/SHUTTERSTOCK
10 OF 10
Lemur Fest
WHERE: Madagascar
What’s not to love about lemurs, those wildly acrobatic, ultra-social primates that are, though it’s anthropomorphic, a biology no-no, to say so, damn cute. Kirindy Mitea National Park is home to, count ‘em, six nocturnal lemur species with names as mirthful as the critters themselves. On most nights, local guides lead guests into the dry forest in search of grey mouse, pale fork-marked, fat-tailed dwarf, Coquerel’s giant mouse, red-tailed sportive, and, wait for it, Madame Bertha’s Mouse Lemur, the best-named and, weighing but 30 grams, smallest primate in the world. On the other end of the scale, keep your eyes peeled for the Malagasy giant rat.
The One Good Thing About Europe’s Airport Chaos? It Delayed Even More Airport Chaos
Mihai_Andritoiu/Shutterstock
https://www.fodors.com/world/europe/experiences/news/the-one-good-thing-about-europes-airport-chaos-it-delayed-even-more-airport-chaos
The EU has delayed ETIAS indefinitely as airports struggle with long lines and technical problems following the rollout of the Entry/Exit System (EES).
The European Union has a new estimated start date for the ETIAS system: TBD.
ETIAS, or the European Travel Information and Authorization System, is a planned system that would require travelers from outside the EU to register for a travel authorization before boarding their flights. It was designed to be implemented once the bloc’s automated Entry Exit System (EES) was fully in place over the summer.
The rollout of EES, however, has been something of a disaster. Phased in over the slower winter travel season, and completely cut over on April 10, the system has been notoriously slow, causing hours-long waits in many airports across the EU.
On paper, the system makes sense. Calculating eligibility to enter the EU for most travelers is easily automated. The idea is that the EU collects biometrics, like a face scan and fingerprints, during the first border crossing, then stores them, allowing for faster processing using automated scanners on future visits.
In my personal experience, that’s not how it worked. I’ve entered the EU four times since the cutover, and it was a decidedly mixed bag in how the system worked. At Amsterdam in April, the system was easy: I visited a kiosk, had my passport, fingerprints, and face scanned using an automated terminal, and I was on my way. The whole thing took about five minutes, including the wait in line.
My next entry in Frankfurt two months later was a slow-rolling mess. They’re only using the automated gates for EU citizens—everyone else must wait for a border guard to process their entry manually. On my first entry at Frankfurt in June, the wait was well over an hour, and I missed my connecting flight. On my second entry in July, there was just a five-minute wait, which I chalked up to my flight arriving at a luckily quiet hour. However, my biometrics were collected again, each time, in spite of them already being in the system.
Confoundingly, they also have a “pre-registration” kiosk in Frankfurt for you to provide your biometrics ahead of time to speed everything up. You’d think that gets you to a bypass lane of some sort, but it doesn’t—you go right into the gen pop lane with everyone else, just at the end of a longer line since you made the extra stop and not everyone else did. To add insult to injury, it was completely pointless—my biometrics were taken again by the border guard.
It was in Paris CDG where the EES system was the easiest. There was no line, no biometric collection, and the automated system worked perfectly. The only bummer in Paris is if you’re connecting to another flight, the French don’t trust anybody else’s airport security, and you have to go through again before proceeding to the EES checkpoint (this isn’t required in Frankfurt or Amsterdam).
The bigger mess, in most cases, seemed to be leaving.
At Munich in July, the lines for the EES checkpoint snaked all the way down the corridor. They clearly weren’t ready. Frustratingly, the premium lanes for elite frequent fliers and premium cabin travelers were also closed, and when I told the helper in the area my flight was boarding at that very moment, she directed me to an automated checkpoint, which had no line.
The problem with that, however, was that Munich appears to be using a hybrid system. The automated gates seem to work as a holding pen, scanning your passport and biometrics and then keeping travelers captive so they don’t overwhelm the two border agents working the six gates. Once I reached the border agent after being held in limbo for several minutes, they scanned my passport, but it took another several minutes for the system to pull anything up. “The system is slow today,” the border guard said apologetically.
Departing from Amsterdam, the line wasn’t as horrendous as it had been in April, but there were again only about four slow-moving automated gates to process hundreds of travelers, and the gates were terribly finicky, not liking when passengers tried to enter them with, well, luggage, thinking more than one person was inside the gate, and slowing down the whole process.
I later learned that airports in Paris and Amsterdam have switched off biometric collection after asking the EU for help processing their crowds of passengers. The EU has issued a waiver for biometric collection until September 6, but many countries where airport wait times have ballooned have asked for the waiver to be extended.
Many other countries around the world, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, use similar systems at border crossings, but what makes the EES different is its sheer scale. The system is designed to be used across the Schengen Area, which comprises 29 countries (EU members Cyprus and Ireland are not part of the Schengen Area).
Last month, the European Chapter of the Airports Council International (ACI) asked the EU to allow countries to completely suspend EES if needed to get passengers moving, but the bloc has so far been reluctant to do so.
With all of this still up in the air, it’s not only prudent for the EU to indefinitely suspend implementation of ETIAS, but it’s also necessary.
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