Every year, the industry loves to talk about “what’s next” in revenue management. New tools, new tech, new buzzwords. There is always something shiny making the rounds. But the trends that actually matter going into next year aren’t flashy at all.
NB: This is an article from Topline Revenue, one of our Expert Partners
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They are the structural shifts in how guests book, cancel, compare, and choose hotels.
For GMs and owners, the real question isn’t whether revenue management is changing. It is whether your strategy is changing with it. The hotels that adapt early usually feel steadier and more profitable. The ones that don’t often spend the year in reaction mode.
Here are the revenue management trends that genuinely deserve your attention as the calendar turns.
Booking Windows Are Staying Shorter Than You Want Them To
If you are waiting for booking windows to “go back to normal,” it might be time to release that dream politely into the universe.
Across both branded and independent hotels, booking behavior keeps shifting closer to arrival. Guests are more comfortable waiting, more willing to cancel, and far more likely to shop around at the last minute. This tightens pickup curves and makes traditional pacing comparisons a lot less trustworthy.
What this means in practice:
- Forecasts need more flexibility
- Pricing decisions should be made closer to arrival
- Panic discounting becomes more tempting and more dangerous
The hotels that perform best are the ones that stay calm when demand shows up late and resist the urge to overreact too early.
Cancellation Behavior Is Becoming More Important Than Pickup
Pickup still matters, but cancellation data is quickly becoming the signal you can actually trust.
With flexible policies, mobile bookings, and OTA loyalty tiers, gross bookings just don’t tell the whole story anymore. A hotel can look beautifully ahead of pace, only to watch a chunk of that business vanish a few days before arrival.
Going into next year, the revenue teams that stay ahead are the ones:
- Tracking net bookings instead of gross
- Monitoring cancellations by channel and lead time
- Using cancellation curves to guide overbooking and inventory decisions
Hotels that ignore cancellation behavior almost always overestimate demand and end up pricing too low, too late.
