By the end of 2025, three major data drops quietly confirmed what many of us in hospitality already suspected:
📉 The old growth model is done.
📈 Experience, efficiency, and trust now drive revenue.
RMS’s State of Outdoor Hospitality Report, Hostaway’s Summer Snapshot Report, and AHLA’s State of the Hotel Industry Report each captured different corners of the same reality. Whether you’re managing cabins, campsites, or city suites, the next wave of growth won’t come from expansion; it’ll come from optimization.
Across all three sectors, guests are done with clunky booking flows.
RMS found 64% of glampers prefer booking directly on a property’s website.
Hostaway reported 37.5% of STR operators increased direct bookings year-over-year.
Hotels are earning more but filling fewer rooms. AHLA says guest spending hit $777 billion, while occupancy stalled out at 63% with a reminder that revenue doesn’t always equal profit.
But the deeper issue hiding behind those numbers? Guest communication.
Across all three reports, poor communication ranked as the #1 guest complaint in 2025.
Hostaway identified “information and communication” as a top driver of negative reviews.
RMS noted that 61% of campers rated booking confirmations as extremely important to their experience.
AHLA echoed the same concern, emphasizing that trust and clarity are now central to the guest relationship.
Guests don’t just want to book faster they want to feel informed, acknowledged, and guided from the first click to checkout. When that doesn’t happen, frustration builds long before they ever arrive.
What we’re seeing here is that friction costs more than commissions. Every unanswered message or confusing confirmation screen eats into profit just as much as OTA fees once did.
Mobile-first design, instant checkout, and automated yet human-sounding communication will define the winners.
The best operators will build trust not just at checkout, but in every message, reminder, and confirmation, turning “book now” buttons into “trust now” experiences.
RMS’s report shows social media discovery among 18–29-year-olds jumped to nearly 30%, while Hostaway found “marketing” remains a top challenge for STR operators.
Meanwhile, AHLA spotlights a shift toward “new traveler archetypes” — solo travelers, multi-gen families, DINKs (dual-income, no kids), and wellness seekers. These guests are finding brands through people, not platforms.
You can see this shift play out in real life. Picture a 27-year-old traveler scrolling TikTok on a lunch break. She doesn’t search “places to stay in Sedona.” She watches a five-second clip of someone’s sunrise coffee on a cabin deck, clicks the tag, and books it before she’s finished her sandwich. Now flip to her parents, they’re planning a multi-generational trip and discover the same property through a Facebook reel their friends shared. Two generations, one booking… and without a single Google search involved.
Discovery isn’t about visibility anymore; it’s about relatability. Guests trust the people living the experience more than the platforms listing it.
Travelers will book through trusted humans — creators, past guests, or friends — long before Google Ads get their click.
Your best campaign in 2026? Turn every guest into a storyteller.
Both RMS and Hostaway agree: when guests complain, it’s most often about maintenance, cleanliness, and communication.
Hostaway data shows 40% of STRs list maintenance as their #1 operational challenge, directly tied to the top guest complaints of 2025: property condition and poor communication. Hotels mirror this struggle. AHLA found that rising labor costs and local regulations are squeezing margins even as wages rise above $125B nationally.
It’s the same story playing out everywhere, just at different scales. Think about the guest who arrives at their glamping dome after a long drive. The view is perfect, but the lock code doesn’t work. They message the host, no reply for twenty minutes. Frustration sets in before they’ve even unpacked. Multiply that by hundreds of guests a year, and you can see why communication, not just cleanliness or pricing, often defines whether someone leaves five stars or two.
The truth is, guests will forgive the occasional burnt-out bulb or late check-in, but not silence. Every missed message erodes trust faster than a dirty window.
Operators who use AI for task routing, messaging, and housekeeping logistics will outperform those who only use it for pricing. In the new era, your operations are your marketing.
Glamping officially hit parity with luxury tent camping at 29% in RMS’s data, while hotels are diversifying beyond the stay — investing in events, co-working, wellness, and entertainment experience.
The outdoor and hotel worlds are merging in spirit: both are selling transformation, not just transacting.
Picture this: a couple books a weekend in a luxury safari tent tucked in the woods. They arrive exhausted. Phones buzzing, inboxes full. By the next morning, they’re sipping coffee under string lights, phones forgotten, talking about dreams they hadn’t had time to say out loud in months. That feeling, not the tent, not the coffee, is what they’ll pay to come back for.
It’s the same impulse driving hotels to add yoga terraces, chef pop-ups, and coworking lounges. Whether you’re under canvas or in a penthouse, guests aren’t chasing amenities anymore — they’re chasing meaning.
We’ll see clear sub-categories emerge “eco-luxury,” “wellness-weekender,” “family adventure.” Properties that build value ladders (chef boxes, saunas, on-site adventures) will maintain margins while everyone else races to the bottom.
Hostaway reports AI adoption jumped from 60% to 84% in one year — the single biggest operational change across the STR sector. Hotels are right behind: AHLA calls technology “the single most powerful force driving the future of hospitality,” highlighting generative AI as a path to rebuild trust and personalize service. Outdoor operators, meanwhile, are focused on getting mobile-ready, with only 10% of outdoor bookings now happening on desktop.
But here’s what that really looks like on the ground. Picture a resort owner named Jake who used to spend his evenings answering guest messages by hand — Wi-Fi passwords, directions, late-night firewood requests. Now, his AI assistant replies instantly and kindly (“We’ve got you covered! Firewood bundles are outside the check-in hut 🔥”). Jake finally eats dinner before 9 p.m., and his guests feel like someone’s always there for them.
That’s the heart of it: AI isn’t replacing hospitality; it’s giving hosts their evenings back so they can focus on being human again.
Automation is the new air conditioning: if guests notice it’s missing, you’ve already lost them.
The divide between tech-forward and tech-fatigued operators will widen dramatically.
Each report signals the same warning in a different way: travelers are still spending, but they’re getting cautious.
RMS found 45% of outdoor travelers are concerned about economic conditions.
Hostaway says 40% of STR operators felt a “big or severe” macro-economic impact.
AHLA projects record spending in 2025 but notes that costs are rising faster than revenue, driven by utility spikes, wage mandates, and insurance hikes of more than 15%.
You can feel that tension on both sides of the check-in desk. Take Mia, who’s been saving for a family road trip all year. She still books the getaway she fell in love with on Instagram—but she skips the add-on kayak tour and packs groceries instead of dining out. The host notices it too: fewer upsells, shorter stays, more questions about discounts and loyalty perks.
It’s not that travelers have stopped wanting experiences—they just want value that feels grounded in reality. Operators who read that mood and build flexibility into pricing, perks, and stay options will earn both bookings and trust.
💡 Prediction for 2026
Flexibility is your hedge against uncertainty.
Expect more local loyalty programs, off-peak experiences, and drive-to-market targeting to defend occupancy.
Hotels, outdoor operators, and STR managers are no longer playing in separate sandboxes.
Major hotel brands are moving outdoors, literally. In late 2024, Marriott acquired Postcard Cabins, adding more than 1,200 glamping-style cabins and tents across 29 properties to its booking ecosystem. Hyatt partnered with Under Canvas, bringing luxury safari-style tents into its loyalty and marketing network. And BWH Hotels (Best Western + WorldHotels) joined the trend by acquiring Zion Wildflower Resort, integrating tents, cabins, and covered wagons into its branded portfolio. Together, these moves signal a clear shift: hotels are no longer just competing with glamping—they’re becoming part of it.
Short-term rental brands are quickly adopting the same automation as hotels, as well as service standards once reserved for large chains. Platforms like Hostfully now power everything from automated guest messaging and smart-device integration to seamless self-check-ins—cutting manual communication by as much as 20 hours a week for some operators (Hostfully). On the operations side, STR company Host Wise uses Breezeway to automate maintenance, inspections, and quality checks across its portfolio, reducing “checklist fatigue” and boosting consistency (Breezeway). Meanwhile, resort-scale operators like Villatel rely on RoomChecking’s cleaning and audit automation to standardize housekeeping and eliminate human error. Together, these examples show how STRs are evolving from casual hosts to hotel-grade operators—delivering the same reliability and polish guests expect from traditional hospitality brands.
Outdoor resorts are leading the charge in creator-driven marketing and mobile-first booking experiences. Brands like Under Canvas® have mastered the art of storytelling—using immersive visuals and curated experiences to turn their glamping sites into lifestyle brands. Across the industry, outdoor operators increasingly partner with social media creators and guests to capture authentic, shareable content that fuels discovery and trust (The Journeyest; Kogneta). It’s a strategy perfectly suited to the modern traveler: in the RMS data, fewer than 10% of outdoor bookings happen on desktop, proving that mobile and social are now the dominant discovery tools. Even traditional hotels are taking note—Hospitality Net reports that mobile-optimized booking experiences directly increase direct reservations and guest loyalty.
The 2025 data sets read like parallel verses of the same story: Hospitality is decentralizing and experience equity (how well you deliver connection, comfort, and control) is becoming the new currency.
2025 proved that hustle doesn’t scale — structure does.
Growth in 2026 won’t come from new listings; it’ll come from operational fluency.
Here’s what to double-down on:
✅ Own the guest journey — from discovery to checkout.
✅ Automate the repetitive, but humanize every touchpoint.
✅ Design your brand around real, lived experiences — not OTA algorithms.
The smartest move you can make now?
Audit your systems. Fix the leaks. Automate the boring stuff.
And tell stories so good that when AI recommends your property, it feels like a human made the choice.