NASHVILLE—For years, hotel operators have relied on familiar segmentation models to understand demand: business versus leisure, weekdays versus weekends, group versus transient. But speakers at Hotel Data Conference, held earlier this month, argued that traveler behavior has evolved far beyond those traditional definitions.
The Piecing Together the Leisure Puzzle panelists shared that a combination of compressed booking windows, blended business and leisure travel, AI-driven trip planning and experience-focused spending is forcing hotels to rethink how they forecast demand, price rooms and market to guests
"The traveler filling today's demand gap is often not the same traveler as before," said Diane Koczur, senior director of marketing at Evans Hotels. "Success requires a different message, different channels and different timing, not just a lower rate."
The New Weekend?
Brannan Doyle, senior data analyst at STR, opened the discussion by exploring one of the industry's biggest challenges: How do we measure leisure demand?
Because industry performance data does not directly separate leisure and business travelers, Doyle examined demand growth through alternative methods, including a nontraditional day-of-week analysis. Instead of defining weekends strictly as Friday and Saturday nights, he grouped Thursdays and Sundays with weekend demand.
The results revealed stronger growth patterns on shoulder days. According to Doyle's analysis, Thursday and Sunday demand was growing faster than other days of the week, suggesting consumers are increasingly extending trips around traditional weekends.
Panelists noted that the trend aligns with changing traveler behavior. More guests are combining remote-work flexibility, holidays and personal travel into longer stays that blur the line between weekday and weekend demand.
"We see two guests and two different clocks," Koczur said. "One guest type is deciding 72 hours in advance. Others are settling on trips a couple of weeks in advance."
Shrinking Booking Windows
Using STR's Forward STAR booking database combined with historical occupancy data from more than 10,000 hotels, Doyle found that nearly one-third of room nights are booked within the week of arrival. Approximately two-thirds of bookings occur within the final month before travel.
The findings highlight just how rapidly booking windows have compressed since the pandemic. "I knew there were a lot of last-minute bookings," Doyle said. "But to say that two-thirds of rooms are getting booked in the last month, and almost a third in the last week, was a big revelation."
For revenue managers, the trend creates both challenges and opportunities. Paula Weissend, senior regional director of revenue management at Pivot Hotels & Resorts, said long-term pricing strategies remain important, but increasingly serve as directional guides rather than rigid plans.
"I think of long-term pricing as a GPS," Weissend said. "The route may change based on traffic, but you still need a destination."
Shorter booking windows can make forecasting more difficult, she noted, but they also allow hotels with strong confidence in demand to hold rates longer and capture higher pricing closer to arrival.
Traveler Intent
Another key theme was the growing importance of understanding why guests travel rather than how the industry traditionally labels them. Business and leisure are no longer reliable indicators of purchasing behavior, price sensitivity or guest expectations.
"I think traveler intent is a better predictor of behavior," Weissend said. "It's more important to know why somebody is traveling than whether they're a business traveler or a leisure traveler."
Guests attending concerts, sporting events, wellness retreats, family reunions or culinary experiences often exhibit distinct booking patterns regardless of their traditional traveler classification.
Hotel Discovery and AI
Technology is becoming a critical tool for keeping pace with evolving demand patterns. Victoria Noe, senior territory account executive at IDeaS, said AI and advanced analytics can help hotels identify behavioral patterns that traditional segmentation misses.
As travelers become harder to categorize, hotels increasingly need systems capable of processing large amounts of data in real time, she said. "What we want to do in the technology space is take that really granular information and understand the behavior around those trends and patterns," Noe said. "Behavior is what ultimately drives revenue."
Koczur added that AI-powered search and discovery tools are already changing how guests plan trips. Instead of conducting extensive searches on travel websites, consumers are increasingly turning to conversational AI tools to identify destinations, activities and hotel options.
Demand Drivers
While booking windows are shrinking overall, major events continue to reshape demand patterns.
Doyle highlighted the impact of a South Korean boy-band BTS' concert in El Paso, Texas, which created a dramatic surge in bookings immediately after tour dates were announced. Occupancy on the books jumped rapidly, then essentially went flat, and eventually climbed above 95 percent in the weeks before the performance.
Hotels have become more sophisticated at forecasting demand associated with large-scale events, particularly after studying the impacts of Taylor Swift concerts, Beyoncé tours and other major attractions.
However, Weissend cautioned against assuming all events behave similarly. "A mega concert, Formula One and a college football championship all have unique booking curves," she said.
Adaptability
Despite concerns over economic uncertainty and changing traveler behavior, Doyle's broader analysis showed leisure-focused hotels generally continue to outperform.
Properties in resort destinations, theme park markets and other leisure-driven locations posted healthy performance growth through 2026. An exception was ski destinations, where poor snowfall conditions hurt results.
Doyle also developed a methodology using school vacation schedules to identify leisure-dependent and business-dependent hotels. The analysis found leisure-oriented properties generated stronger growth in revenue per available room year to date, though business-focused assets also posted gains.
There was a common theme from all of the panelists: Adaptability. Whether through revenue management, marketing or technology lens, successful hotels will be the ones that can quickly identify changing traveler behaviors and respond accordingly.
"We're moving away from being able to put travelers into nice, perfect little boxes," Noe said.