The U.S. hotel industry is having a good year. The luxury travel advisor channel is having a much better one.
At this year's Hotel Data Conference in Nashville, Amanda Hite — president of STR — delivered a revised forecast from the industry's gold standard for data: 4.4 percent U.S. RevPAR growth for 2026, upgraded from earlier projections, with occupancy nudged to 63.1 percent. (RevPAR, for anyone who has managed to avoid a hotel earnings call, is revenue per available room, the performance metric the asset side of this business lives and dies by.)
Days later at Virtuoso Travel Week in Las Vegas, Misty Belles, vice president of global public relations at Virtuoso, displayed some major bragging rights: Network sales for the luxury travel advisor consortium are up 20.8 percent from a year ago.
Those two figures do not measure the same thing. Virtuoso's covers total network sales across hotels, cruise, tours and on-site partners worldwide. Hite's covers U.S. hotel rooms. But put them side by side and you still get a sense of how things are panning out.
Industry-wide average daily rates are tracking just above 3 percent this year, per STR. Virtuoso's preferred hotel ADR opened January at $1,632 and closed the first half at $1,983 in June — up 11.2 percent year over year and the highest monthly figure the network has recorded against any year going back to 2019. Bookings above $1,500 a night are growing 37 percent, better than twice the pace of lower-priced hotel bookings.
Hite expects no segment's ADR growth to exceed the 2.4 percent inflation forecast in 2027, with luxury and upper upscale landing roughly in line with it once the World Cup comparison months are stripped out. Everything below that will struggle to keep pace.
The overall luxury sector within Virtuoso’s orbit might beg to differ.
The Mix
Over at Virtuoso, hotels led by product type bookings at 24.5 percent, with cruise at 22.4 and on-site partners at 17.5. Tours trailed at 11.0, less than half the hotel rate.
All nine member regions grew, though the spread runs more than 20 points. Greater China led at 34.4 percent, followed by the United Kingdom and Ireland at 25.5, the Middle East and Africa at 24.0, Continental Europe at 23.0 and the United States at 21.3. Latin America and the Caribbean came in at 16.3, Canada at 13.4, North and Southeast Asia at 12.9, and Australia and New Zealand at 12.8.
Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics, told the Nashville audience that U.S. outbound travel has slipped about 2 percent over four months, with those trips reshoring into domestic hotels. Americans in general may be traveling abroad less, but luxury travel advisor clients are traveling abroad more once you factor in the data from both groups.
Fall is the New Summer, Wellness is a Rate Driver
David Kolner, executive vice president at Virtuoso, has been making the fall argument for years, and the case keeps getting stronger. Fall sales are up 69 percent so far this year against the same point in 2025, with bookings up 59 percent. The comparable sales gains were 27 percent two years ago and 39 percent last year, so the curve is steepening rather than flattening.
Festive is tracking the same way. Sales for the coming holiday season are up 56 percent and bookings up 65 percent, against gains of 29 percent and 38 percent in the two prior years.
September sales are up 77 percent and October 54, with November at 71. Bookings for September travel have risen 98 percent since 2023. September may outsell August this year, Kolner said.
Europe is where the shoulder season stopped being a shoulder season. Fall bookings there are up 49 percent, overall sales 64 percent and ADR 7.4 percent. The biggest rate movers are the French Riviera at +179 percent, the Greek Isles at +131% and Puglia at +78%.
Further out, global preferred leisure sales for travel one and two years away are up 50 percent over the same point last year.
Kolner spent part of his trends segment on looksmaxing, the online fixation on optimizing your face that has migrated from TikTok and Clavicular into spa menus. The numbers underneath the riff are the ones worth keeping. Wellness bookings are up 28 percent and ADR is up 23 percent, growing faster than the network average. Nearly one in four global luxury travelers named health and wellness as the reason for a leisure trip, with the strongest interest from the Middle East, Latin America and Greater China.
The K-Shaped Economy, and the Argument Against It
Virtuoso presentations continued to beat the drum of the K-shaped economy: Knight Frank counts more than 89 people crossing the $30 million net worth threshold every day, a population up 29 percent since 2021, with private jet demand up 238 percent between Abu Dhabi and London and 192 percent between New York and Nantucket. Altrata puts the coming generational wealth transfer at $84 trillion. Bain and Altagamma found that experiential luxury accounted for all net growth in the global luxury market last year, which is the case for this channel made by the luxury industry's own scorekeeper.
But Sacks at Tourism Economics noted the travel economy isn’t just humming along thanks to the one percent these days. He argued the bottom of the K has started curling upward, citing Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta's suggestion that the shape now looks more like a C, with middle- and lower-income consumers returning to the market. Tourism Economics numbers still favor the top: Households earning $200,000 or more grew from 6 percent of the U.S. total in 2018 to 11 percent today, and their share of leisure lodging spend climbed from 25 to 36 percent.
Sentiment held up alongside the performance. Virtuoso surveys two groups: its member agencies, meaning the advisors, and its preferred partners, meaning the hotels, cruise lines and tour operators on the supply side of the network. Optimism among members sits at 68 percent, down three points from the previous reading, with partners at 60 percent. The more telling number is at the other end of the scale, where only 2 percent of members and 4 percent of partners called themselves pessimistic.
Advisors credited client budgets and traveler spend most often, at 73 percent. Technology and emerging tools registered as a reason for optimism among 41 percent of members, nearly double the 23 percent among partners.
Asked which factors would shape luxury travel in 2026, 35.3 percent named artificial intelligence as an opportunity and 17.8 percent named it a threat. Accuracy is the leading worry about the technology, cited by 62 percent of members and 49 percent of partners. After that, both groups land in the same place: striking the balance between AI tools and human judgment and protecting the personal touch.
For some of the differences in the two events, they arrived at a similar position: Hite opened Nashville by describing a year of renewed optimism across travel and a 2027 forecast revised upward, with gains expected across every chain scale segment. Sacks pointed to survey work from Future Partners showing that 61 percent of consumers still rank travel as a high priority, and that dining out, subscriptions and entertainment all get cut before a trip does. Virtuoso's version of the same finding is that only 2 percent of its advisors describe themselves as pessimistic.
A roaring 2027 isn’t guaranteed. The comparisons get harder, inflation is forecast at 2.4 percent, and Hite has already said no segment's rate growth is expected to beat it.
But luxury clients are committing to trips one and two years out at a 50 percent clip, and nobody selling those trips is behaving like they expect the money to stop.
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