On the intersection of hospitality, culture, and what travelers have actually wanted all along.
A Forbes study published in early 2026 made a claim that hospitality professionals are now treating as revelation: 25% of travelers begin their search not with a destination, but with a feeling. Vibe-first booking, the researchers called it. CNTraveler’s concurrent 2026 trend report echoed the finding, pointing to a surge in nostalgia-driven escapes, ancestry pilgrimages, communal relaxation rituals, and hands-on participatory travel — all of it pointing toward something the industry is only now naming: travelers want to be changed by where they go, not just accommodated.
For Heather Dunwoody, this is not a trend. It is a confirmation.
Dunwoody, a branding and hospitality consultant whose work centers on what she calls “sewn in soil and spirit” — the idea that a property’s most powerful asset is its specific rootedness in place — has been building a framework around this insight for years. She sat down with the Vacation Rental Success podcast to unpack what the shift from the experience economy to the transformation economy actually demands of hosts, and what she found is both simpler and more demanding than most marketing strategies suggest.
The conventional wisdom in short-term rental marketing has long been additive: add a hot tub, upgrade the kitchen, install faster WiFi, and watch your occupancy numbers climb. What Dunwoody argues, and what the Forbes data now supports, is that guests are increasingly unbothered by features and deeply responsive to something harder to photograph. Atmosphere, intention, and the sense that a place was designed with a specific human being in mind.
“Guests today want more than just a place to stay — they’re seeking life-affirming experiences.”
This is not abstract philosophy. Dunwoody offers concrete examples of what intentional guest experience design looks like in practice: a birdwatching kit left on the kitchen counter, keyed to the specific species found on the property. A recipe card written by the host, tied to herbs growing in the garden just outside. A laminated stargazing guide paired with the Night Sky app, pointing guests toward the constellations visible from that exact latitude on that exact week of the year.
None of these require renovation budgets. All of them require attention — specifically, the kind of attention that comes from a host who has spent enough time at their own property to know what it offers that nowhere else does.
Central to Dunwoody’s thinking is the concept of the “one-of-one” property — the idea that every listing, regardless of size or amenity level, carries a story that no other listing can replicate. A cabin surrounded by old-growth forest is not competing with a lakefront cottage. It is its own category, and the host’s job is to articulate what that category feels like from the inside.
This is where guest experience design intersects with something closer to literary craft. The host must identify the details that make their specific place irreplaceable. The birdsong at dawn, the way light moves through the kitchen in the afternoon, the particular quality of silence, and then build rituals that let guests inhabit those details rather than simply observe them.
Dunwoody points to wild foraging, mushroom inoculation walks, pollinator garden tours, and night hikes as examples of participatory experiences that convert a stay into something memorable. The Forbes data backs her up, and CNTraveler specifically cites museums removing artifacts from behind glass, letting visitors touch and feel exhibits, as part of the same cultural shift. People want contact, not display.
“Designing with intention doesn’t have to be expensive — it starts with noticing what’s already there.”
I was paying close attention to this exact shift three years before Forbes published its findings. While serving as Head of Marketing for a startup treehouse resort, I made a deliberate decision to follow culture rather than conventional hospitality marketing. I partnered with micro creators and gave them clear deliverables but no brand script — trusting real voices to tell the property’s story in their own terms.
The strategy was difficult to explain in a boardroom, but then something real happened. In two years, the property generated nearly $2 million in revenue, 600 leads per month, a 34% conversion rate, and 93% direct bookings — on a budget that’s almost embarrassingly modest.
“I am still baffled why so many still struggle to keep a pulse on culture in a way that allows them to move with consumers on shifts in behavior rather than wait until the masses catch on.”
What I identified, and what the Forbes report now corroborates, is that travelers had already restructured their expectations before the industry recognized it. Emotional resonance was already the currency. The guests already knew what they wanted. The brands that were listening — the ones embedded in the cultural conversation through human voices rather than polished brand content — were simply positioned to meet them there.
One of Dunwoody’s strongest arguments is one that speaks directly to the book-direct movement: hyperlocal community connection is the one thing no platform can commoditize. An algorithm can surface a listing. It cannot replicate the experience of a host who knows the name of the mushroom forager two miles down the road, or who has arranged for a local astronomer to walk guests through the night sky on request.
This is what she calls hospitality’s biggest differentiator and it is also, not coincidentally, what the Forbes research identifies as a defining feature of 2026 travel behavior. The report notes a broad turn away from algorithmically curated itineraries toward human intelligence: travelers want recommendations from people on the ground, not platforms. They want to meet someone who actually knows the place.
For hosts who have built those relationships — with local guides, farmers, artisans, and community institutions — this is an argument for visibility, not renovation. The asset already exists. Guest experience design, in Dunwoody’s framework, is largely the practice of making it findable.
The practical takeaway from both my and Dunwoody’s lived experience building real traveler demand is both a relief and a challenge.
The relief: extraordinary guest experiences do not require extraordinary budgets.
A foraging guide printed on card stock. A seasonal recipe tied to something growing on the property. A curated list of apps like Merlin for bird identification, PictureThis for plants, or Night Sky for constellations. These are the materials of transformation-economy hospitality, and they cost almost nothing. The challenge is the attention required to produce them.
A host has to know their property well enough to understand what it offers that no other property does. They have to be curious about their own place, its ecology, its light, its rhythms, its relationship to the surrounding community, in the way a writer is curious about a subject. And then they have to know how to tell that story.
That is where my work with creators has made this especially clear. The right creator does not just show a room or a view. They translate the experience through a human perspective. One sees the quiet morning light. Another sees the family memory. Another notices the trail, the table, the swim, the ritual, the tiny detail that turns a stay into a reason to book.
When those stories move through social media with clarity and specificity, they do more than create content. They build real traveler demand around experiences guests can picture themselves inside.
That is the shift Dunwoody is describing, and that Forbes is now quantifying: from hospitality as service to hospitality as invitation.
From “here is a comfortable space” to “here is something worth experiencing.”
The guests, as it turns out, have been ready for the second version for a while.
— Heather Dunwoody’s article “Sewn in Soil and Spirit” is available on Medium at hospitalityinbloom.medium.com. Her conversation with Heather Bayer appears on the Vacation Rental Success podcast, episode VRS649.