Hotel Industry Trends 2026–2035
A summary of The Next Guest, Maison Voyage's foresight report on the decade ahead.
Read time 5 minutes
Run the last few years of hospitality industry reports through a sieve and six words remain: personalisation, experience, wellness, human warmth, sustainability, AI.
None of them is wrong. Their uniformity is the problem. In forecasting, when everybody agrees, it rarely means the truth has been found. It usually means the question has stopped being asked.
There is a second problem, and it is the more consequential one. The forces the industry talks about most are the forces it can sell solutions for. The forces that will actually determine whether a hotel is full in 2032, the temperature in August, the price of a room relative to a wage that has not moved, whether the destination is still insurable, appear in the footnotes, if at all.
We wrote The Next Guest to correct both. This is what it argues.
What is already settled
It is worth knowing where the argument has ended, so we can spend our time where it hasn't. Six propositions now command near-universal agreement across the sector. They are not trends any more. They are the operating assumptions of anyone competent.
The room is a hygiene factor and the memory is the product. Segmentation has given way to individualisation. Wellness has become longevity. Sense of place is the defence against interchangeability. Technology belongs backstage and people belong where it counts. And sustainability has become regeneration, with the next fight already forming over who verifies the claim.
Notice what is missing from that list. Climate. Affordability. Geopolitics.
They are absent because they are commercially inconvenient. No consultancy, technology vendor or hotel group has a product to sell against a heatwave, a stagnant wage or a closed border.
Force one: climate is the pacemaker of geography
This is the force the industry least wants to write about, and the one that will move the map.
Extreme heat is no longer a projection. It already closes attractions — the Acropolis shuts in the afternoons — and it is quietly dismantling the assumption on which the entire Mediterranean summer economy rests: that July and August are when Northern Europeans go south. The observable result is the phenomenon the trade has christened the coolcation: demand shifting toward cooler, higher, more northern destinations, and out of the peak into the shoulder season.
The economics are unforgiving. Tourism accounts for roughly 18% of Greek GDP and around 12% each in Spain and Portugal. A structural softening of the July–August peak in those markets is not a marketing problem. It is a fiscal one.
And alongside the heat comes the insurer. Hotel insurance premiums in fire-, flood- and coastal-exposed locations are rising by double digits annually. In parts of California and the Caribbean, cover is becoming effectively unobtainable at any sensible price.
This is the mechanism by which climate stops being an environmental question and becomes a balance-sheet one. Before a hotel is destroyed by weather, it can be made uninvestable by the cost of insuring it against weather.
Which reframes the whole sustainability conversation. Regeneration is usually argued as ethics. It is more usefully argued as risk management. A destination that keeps its water, its reef, its forest and its residents' goodwill keeps its licence to operate — and keeps its insurability. Hotels treating this as a compliance exercise are mispricing their own survival.
Force two: the forgotten price
Industry forecasting talks about desire, experience, wellness and personalisation, and almost never about budgets.
The defining economic pattern of the coming decade is not growth or contraction. It is separation. Wealth is bifurcating and hotel performance is bifurcating with it. In the year to August 2025, luxury RevPAR grew 5.3% while the economy segment fell 1.8%.
What is happening in the middle is the interesting part. The classic mid-market — competent, unremarkable, three-and-a-half stars, priced to be unobjectionable — is the structural loser of this decade. It offers neither the meaning of the top nor the honesty of the bottom. Guests trade up for occasions and down for everything else, and the middle catches neither.
The middle is not being disrupted. It is being evacuated.
The strategic instruction that follows is unpleasantly simple: pick an end. A hotel that is slightly better than the competent one down the road, at slightly more money, is describing a business that will be worth less every year of this decade.
Force three: the front door has moved
In the OTA era, the question was whether you were listed and how you ranked.
In the LLM era, the question is whether a machine — asked "where should I stay near Lake Como for a quiet week in October" — knows you exist, understands what you are, and can describe you accurately.
Most independent hotels are, at this moment, invisible to that question. They have beautiful websites written for humans, structured for nobody, and no presence in the corpus of text from which the machine assembles its answer. The commercial consequence of that invisibility is not yet fully priced. It will be.
The disciplines that fix it — structured, accurate, unambiguous information about a property, distributed where models actually read it — do not yet have a settled name or a settled budget line. Within two years they will have both. The independents who move first will enjoy the same disproportionate advantage that early SEO handed to whoever bothered: the advantage of being legible when the competition is merely beautiful.
The reframe that matters most
If you take one idea from the report, take this one.
The evidence on exhaustion is unambiguous. Across surveyed affluent markets, roughly seven in ten adults report feeling persistently tired; six in ten say modern life does not permit genuine rest. Travel has become, for a large and wealthy cohort, the only reliable mechanism of recovery available to them.
Here is where almost everyone misreads it. "Exhausted" is taken to mean "passive" — that the tired guest wants a lounger, a spa menu and to be left alone.
The data, and our own experience with guests, say otherwise. The valuable guest does not want to rest. They want to be restored by something extraordinary. They will heli-ski all day and want the steam room and the perfect dinner at seven. They will walk twenty kilometres in a landscape they have never seen and come back calmer than a week on a beach would have made them.
Exhaustion is the starting condition. The extraordinary experience is the vehicle. Regeneration is the outcome.
That chain explains why the best adventure lodges and the best wellness retreats are converging on the same guest from opposite directions. And it explains why a hotel offering only stillness, or only activity, is offering half a product.
What is in the full report, and not in this summary
The Next Guest runs to twenty-four pages and draws on around forty studies, datasets and regulatory instruments. Beyond what is above, it contains:
It is deliberately opinionated. Where the evidence supports a firm view, we state it. Where it does not, we say so and give the confidence level. A report that answers every question with "on the one hand, on the other hand" helps no one.
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