The ability to forecast accurately and act quickly on those signals often determines how well a hospitality brand weathers slowdowns, revives sales, or strengthens profits. In this margin-sensitive and hyper-competitive industry, it’s an edge that everyone longs to have.
And Yet Most Travel & Hospitality Brands Fail:
Every major trend – whether it’s about traveller behavior, spending patterns, or destination preferences, quietly rejigs and reshapes demand, pricing, promotions, and even day-to-day financial operations.
But while most brands notice these shifts only few manage to adapt fast enough. By the time their teams align and make changes, the market has already moved on.
In an era where trends emerge and fade faster than seasons, success depends on how quickly one’s ready to act before everyone else. And that’s exactly what this blog is designed to help you do.
Unpack ’26 by Expedia Group :
So if you are already scanning for the travel & hospitality trends that 2026 is set to shape, then this year’s Expedia Group’s Unpack ’26 report has a lot of prescient & powerful insights to offer you.
So today we’ll look at the key trends that their research study found out are set to shape the next phase of travel and hospitality. But that is not all. In this extensive guide
- We break down their real impact across revenue, operations, and guest experience.
- Explore the common barriers that slow down even the most capable brands from pivoting their operations.
- More importantly, we’ll outline the strategic moves and optimization steps that can help your business stay ahead of change
- And for those who may not yet have the right tools, data, or structure to adapt quickly, we’ll share practical ways to start building that agility now.
The future favours those who can see the shift coming and adapt with it as quickly as possible. Read on to know how you can today.
Index
- Unpack ’26 by Expedia: What to Anticipate and Act On
- How the 2026 Trends Will Reshape Hospitality – and What That Means for Your Business
- Why Most Hotels Will Miss the Wave and How to Get Ahead
a. Step 1: Automate and Use Data to Stay Adaptive
b. Step 2: Four Strategic Moves for Hotel Finance Teams to Capture the 2026 Shift - Building a Strategy That Moves With Change – How Profit AI Powers the Pivot
- What Profit AI Brings to Hospitality Finance Teams
- The 2026 Trends Are Here – Can Your Finance Keep Up?
Unpack ’26 by Expedia – What to Anticipate and Act On:
Released in October 2025, unpack 2026 captures a turning tide in how people travel and what they seek.
It identifies and outlines four movements that signal how traveller intent is set to reshape demand in 2026. (You can check out the complete study here.)
Here are the key insights the study offers which everyone must keep their eye on:
Set-Jetting: 81% of Gen Z and Millennials indicate plans to visit destinations they have seen on screen. The pattern is expected to lift lesser-known towns into sudden visibility and naturally, it also can strain existing capacity in places that are not exactly built for sustained volume.
Fan Voyage: 57% of travellers are shaping trips around local sporting events (a big win for sports tourism hospitality!) This indicates that demand will likely cluster by tournament rather than by season. So resulting irregular surges in occupancy and labor needs are expected.
Farm Charm and Readaways: Longer, slower, nature-anchored stays are projected to gain share across leisure markets.
So urban properties may experience lower booking velocity. And rural stays may attract longer durations which is a positive. But rural stays also attract ‘lower daily spending’, which can be a problem without right optimizations.
Hotel Hopping: Travelers are expected to divide a single trip among multiple hotels within a single destination. This micro-mobility fragments booking data and weakens forecast reliability. As a result, average stay length will shorten, and yield management models built on continuity will require a new recalibration.
Owing to how each new shift impacts the fundamentals, the shifts mapped out by Unpack ’26 change how hotels operate at a practical level:
What’s ahead isn’t a drop in demand, it’s a different shape of it and everything else.
Here’s exactly how these trends together can trigger a change across key categories & what that means for the business underneath:
1. Revenue Mix:
Farm Charm and Readaways extend the guest’s stay but narrow the daily spend. A ‘once’ steady nightly revenue now spreads thin across slower cycles.
Now add Fan Voyage and Set-Jetting, and income splinters again – tickets, packages, and themed stays begin to replace the uniform rate card. Finance teams find that the familiar categories dissolve. Every stay becomes its own economy, and unless tracked that way, profit becomes difficult to evaluate.
2. Cost Structure:
Expenses start moving in unfamiliar patterns.
Fan Voyage attracts temporary vendors and fluctuating event costs; Farm Charm, on the other hand, partners with new local suppliers, including growers, guides, and instructors.
Large chains usually spread these across markets; independents absorb them in bursts. But the danger actually is invisibility, when these outlays aren’t tied to specific experiences, margins quietly lose their way and you will never how.
3. Labor and Operations:
Longer stays from Readaways make staffing a challenge. Teams will have to shift from turning rooms to sustaining their presence. And when the spikes like Fan Voyage weekends, Set-Jetting peaks arrive scheduling can become a burden.
Without real-time oversight or flexible labor scheduling, that balance is hard to achieve. Overtime, it may even disrupt operations and damage guest experience.
4. Finance and Visibility:
Guests no longer travel in straight lines. Hotel Hop scatters a single itinerary across multiple hotels which naturally breaks the neat predictability of yield forecasts.
Revenue streams fragment, and traditional models can struggle to keep pace. If financial systems can’t track the movement, clarity quickly goes for a toss. The issue isn’t bad math; it’s a lack of visibility that may cause invisible problems.
Together, these movements reveal the quiet truth of 2026: profitability isn’t lost; it’s scattered and changes its shape & structure. And when not efficiently evaluates, managed and optimized, hotels stand to lose the revenue and reputation as well.
2026 is Hospitality’s Next Big Opportunity. But Here’s’ Why Most Hotels Stand to Miss It
Most hospitality establishments understand what’s changing, but they lack the machinery to keep up with it. Forecasts reveal the signal, but without automation and structured data, finance teams can’t convert it into action. They see the wave coming but have no engine to ride it.
Manual reconciliation, static coding, and delayed reporting all act as brakes on the process.
For example, every new experience category, such as a farm stay, a local sports package, or a nature tour, brings new revenue lines and vendor costs that don’t fit neatly into legacy systems. When this happens at scale, insight gets lost and margin leaks follow.
To stay ahead, hotels must evolve on two fronts simultaneously: they must automate the way data moves through finance, and they must restructure how that data is understood. Only then can accurate forecasting translate into decisive action.
Let’s look at what that means.
Step 1: Automation and Data Are Critical in This Shift
As travel becomes more experiential, finance operations struggle to keep pace.
Manual systems built for rooms and F&B now face hundreds of moving parts. For instance, coding an adventure package touches multiple ledgers, while a sports-tourism stay brings invoices from guides, ticketing partners, and event vendors, each on a different schedule. Similarly, when a portfolio expands into nature or sports-driven properties, the complexity multiplies
Automation resolves this friction.
- It classifies new revenue and expense streams like nature add-ons, sports-event sponsorships, and partnered excursions without manual coding. It automates payables and receivables for vendors like farmers, guides, and promoters, keeping transactions clean and cash flow visible.
- Dashboards track margins and labor in real time, flagging drift before it becomes loss. And when groups add new properties or experience-led brands, automation unifies data instantly, giving finance elasticity without adding headcount.
However, automation alone is only the hull, not the ship.
Step 2: Four Strategic Moves Hotel Finance Teams Need to Make to Capture the 2026 Shift
Having strong systems gives you stability, but reaching your destination faster requires accuracy, process, and the right methods to steer.
If you’re a hospitality establishment preparing to ride the shifts of 2026, here are four strategic moves that can help you turn clarity into advantage and opportunity into growth.
1. Segment revenue and cost by experience type:
Guests no longer book by room alone, they book by purpose, be it, a nature escape, a sports weekend, a cultural stay. So finance should reflect that reality.
- Create categories around guest intent rather than standard departments.
- Utilize automation to assign a tag to every transaction based on its corresponding experience type.
When revenue and expense carry the same label, patterns emerge. You’ll see which experiences expand the margins and which quietly leak them.
2. Automate vendor workflows for experience-based partners:
Hospitality now runs on networks, not just teams. A single stay can involve farmers, event planners, guides, or local transport operators. Each team brings its own billing cycle and format.
And automation connects them all. It processes invoices, matches them with bookings, and ensures that accounts payable and receivable are up to date. Costs tie directly to the experiences they support. The result is clean data and freed-up time for finance to focus on analysis rather than chasing paperwork.
3. Use live analytics to watch margins and labor move together.
When a property introduces a new sports package or farm-stay program, performance should be visible in near real-time.
If labor hours begin to outpace bookings, the system should flag it before it becomes a loss. That is where automation turns data into defense – by transforming late reconciliations into early corrections. The difference lies in timing, and timing ultimately determines profit.
Explore more how live labor analytics can transform your hotel’s efficiency: Docyt’s Smarter Scheduling & Payroll Optimization
4. Build visibility that scales across properties and brands.
As portfolios diversify, data must stay connected. Without a unified view, growth only multiplies confusion.
Centralized systems enable finance to function as a single network while preserving the independence of each property. Routine accounting runs automatically. Reports align instantly and insights move across the brand instead of being confined to a single desk.
That said, hotel back-office automation does stabilize operations, but it doesn’t guarantee momentum. Strategic initiatives only work when you automate your way through the entire process.
So actual progress occurs when automation integrates with strategy – when your systems not only record the business accurately but also help steer it.
A Complete Pivot Needs a Strategy Built on Automation
For hotels preparing to navigate 2026, the tools that matter most are those that adapt as fast as traveller intent changes, deliver clarity on demand, and let finance teams pivot without friction – like Docyt’s Profit AI does.
Profit AI, an AI-powered accounting automation platform, delivers end-to-end accounting automation with built-in intelligence.
- From real-time dashboards to adaptive insights, Profit AI transforms fragmented transactions into live metrics that reflect actual business performance, across properties, experiences, and brands
- It connects the dots across properties, experiences, and brands & turns financial activity into live performance data.
- With real-time dashboards and adaptive intelligence, it transforms fragmented inputs into a single, accurate picture of business health.
Whether you run an independent hotel, manage a boutique group, or oversee a large multi-brand portfolio, Profit AI scales effortlessly, streamlines accounting, and powers growth — all on a single unified platform.
Suggested Reading: Explore how Profit AI’s multi-property accounting automation delivers instant insights and smarter control across every property here.
What Profit AI Means for Hospitality Finance Teams
Instant onboarding and adaptive AI:
New revenue streams, such as farm stays or sports-tourism packages, can be added immediately. The system recognizes new patterns, classifies them correctly, and maintains accurate reports from the very first day.
Visibility made for multi-property portfolios:
Whether one hotel pilots an eco-retreat or several launches fan-based packages, Profit AI consolidates all numbers into a single dashboard. Finance tracks performance by site, segment, or brand, all without manually compiling reports.
Automated vendor management:
Farms, event promoters, and transport vendors often operate on different terms. Profit AI automates AP and AR for all of them, matching invoices to packages and eliminating manual reconciliation.
Real-time margin and labor tracking:
Dashboards flag cost drift as it happens. When payroll or vendor spend rises faster than revenue, finance gets the signal immediately. Adjustments happen early, not after the quarter closes.
Scalable control without new hires:
As guest behaviour diversifies, automation absorbs the added layers of work. Teams stay focused on strategy and forecasting rather than data entry. Growth expands without extra headcount.
Profit AI provides hotel groups with the control and foresight necessary to translate predictions into performance.
In an industry where timing decides profit, it becomes more than a platform; it’s the engine that keeps finance aligned with every shift ahead.
The 2026 Travel Trends & Insights Are Here.
The Question Is – Can Your Accounting & Finance Keep Up and Leverage the Opportunity?
The traveller of 2026 looks for meaning and experiences, not itineraries. But behind every experience lies the question of accounting and financial readiness.
Because it is not enough to know where to steer, one must also have the systems that can move as fast as the opportunity itself.
Automation and intelligence tools like Profit AI help make that possible. They enable finance teams to move in sync with travellers, safeguard margins, and scale operations across properties and programs – all while giving you the visibility, speed, and control needed to capture emerging opportunities and unlock new revenue streams seamlessly.
For hotel CFOs, controllers, and portfolio operators, the next step is clear: assess your capabilities.
Ask whether your financial systems can detect change early, adapt quickly, and scale without friction. If there is even the slightest doubt, this is the moment to evaluate readiness, and act on it
If you’re already exploring AI accounting automation tools, see how Profit AI can help your team see sooner, decide smarter, and stay ahead of every turn 2026 is set to bring.
Schedule a Profit AI demo today.
References:
https://partner.expediagroup.com/en-us/resources/research-insights/unpack-26-travel-trends
https://www.costar.com/article/1443871422/for-2026-travelers-seek-meaning-from-trips-with-emphasis-on-nature-sports
