The 2027 Hotel Growth Agenda

2026 in review: Room vs. non-room revenue growth

Historically, hotels were all about selling rooms. Today, the landscape is shifting, and hotels are focusing on their “beyond-the-room” products as much as on rooms. This is true in the luxury segment, with experiential brands like Capella Hotels & Resorts and Six Senses rapidly expanding their portfolios, but it is also happening in the mass market, with brands like Accor and Marriott.

Affluent customers today are seeking more diverse lifestyle offerings — enriching experiences and services, vibrant food & drink venues, and social spaces — that far go beyond the traditional hotel offering. Agnès Roquefort, Global Chief Development Officer, Luxury & Lifestyle, Accor

This is not just strategic talk in boardrooms. Turneo measured growth in room and non-room products across a portfolio of hotels in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC, and found that, for hotels focusing on selling beyond the room, room revenue grew by 6.5% in Q1–Q3 2026, while non-room revenue from experiences and services grew by 35%. This means non-room revenue was growing 5x faster than room revenue.

It is fair to say that, for most hotels, non-room revenue is growing from a smaller base. However, at the pace of growth these investing hotels are seeing, it will not be long before non-room revenue catches up with room revenue in absolute terms.

What is driving this shift?

The first major factor is consumer demand. Overall consumer spend on experiences is growing much faster than spend on rooms. Arival and Phocuswright estimate that, in 2026, spend on experiences will grow 1.6x times faster than spend on other travel components.

Second, the technology for selling experiences is maturing. Historically, hotel technology investments went towards rooms, both for operations (PMS) and for sales (RMS). Today, companies like Turneo are helping hotels manage their experience operations and sales much more effectively, enabling them to achieve higher utilisation of their in-house and partner programmes. Recent data showed that more than 60% of guests engage with a hotel’s non-room offers before arrival when those offers are presented in a personalised way.

Third, AI is changing the game.

AI - the catalyst for non-room revenue growth

Expedia and Booking.com report that 40–60% of travellers are using AI to plan trips. That is no surprise: AI tools like ChatGPT have become very good at helping people plan trips and discover hidden gems. They are still poor at price shopping. That matters because the hotels winning in AI search are not necessarily the ones with the best prices, but the ones with an offer that AI considers worth surfacing to travellers. This offer is increasingly focused on experiences and non-room services, as guests move away from searching for “a hotel in Rome” to asking, “Find me a hotel that is well located for exploring Rome with two kids. Ideally, it should also have in-hotel activities for the children in case of bad weather or if we need a break from walking around.”

This is already happening today and has a huge impact on hotels, but what is coming next is even bigger. With the launch of tools like Meta’s Muse, AI is moving from trip planning to execution. Muse can browse the web, fill in forms, make purchases, and book travel on a user’s behalf. The good news is that if you have a room-booking engine, your hotel rooms are already discoverable to Muse and similar AI agents.

But with AI agents, travellers plan their trips and execute bookings in the same thread. This means that, by the time a traveller asks an AI agent to recommend a hotel, the agent has a rich understanding of the traveller’s interests and can make a decision based on many more factors than the room rate. The issue for hotels is that most of their non-room content is not discoverable to AI agents. As a result, AI will not recommend the hotel with the best overall offer, but the one about which it has information. If a hotel’s full inventory cannot be understood and booked, demand will flow elsewhere.

There is an even bigger implication. AI agents do not think about travel in the categories the industry uses today. Instead of finding the best hotel, then the best flight, and then the best in-destination activities and dining options, an agent can optimise the entire trip against one objective and one budget. A traveller might ask it to “plan a week in Crete for €3,000” and let the agent decide whether the next €200 creates more value through a better room, a direct flight, an extra night, or a memorable experience. In that world, hotels are no longer competing only with other hotels for spend; they are competing with everything else in the trip. That makes having a rich, discoverable, and transactable non-room catalogue even more important: the hotel needs to give the agent more reasons to allocate the guest’s wallet back to the property.

The 2027 hotel growth priorities

1. Make the full catalogue discoverable by AI

For years, digital distribution focused overwhelmingly on the room. The next step is making the whole stay machine-readable. A hotel may have a relatively small set of room types but dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of dining products, spa treatments, activities, transfers, upgrades, and experiences. That complexity is exactly where AI can add disproportionate value.

2. Own more of the guest wallet

Hotels should increasingly ask not just how much revenue a room produces but how much of each guest’s total travel spend they capture. Non-room revenue is usually managed with far less sophistication than room revenue: fewer benchmarks, less revenue management, fragmented ownership, and limited visibility at group level.

Turneo’s data suggests that, once hotels focus on the category, the upside can be substantial. The immediate opportunity is not necessarily better yield; it is increasing the proportion of existing guests who transact.

3. Move from experimentation to rolling out AI tools that drive revenue

In 2026, hotels experimented with AI, looking for use cases where it could deliver measurable ROI. In 2027, it is time to begin full rollouts of solutions that have shown they can deliver value.

This does not mean that experimentation should stop. However, if, by the end of 2027, your AI deployments are not showing a visible impact on the bottom line, you are falling behind.

For non-room products, the opportunity is particularly large because the catalogue is so much broader than accommodation. AI can use a guest’s profile, stay context, timing, availability, and prior behaviour to identify which of hundreds of possible products is relevant—and then act on that opportunity.

The next growth engine is beyond the room

Hotels have spent decades optimising rooms. The systems are mature, pricing is sophisticated, and most incremental growth now comes from extracting more value from each room night.

Beyond the room, the opportunity looks very different. Turneo data shows non-room revenue growing by 35%, driven by hotels getting more guests to transact across a much broader catalogue of experiences and services.

AI should widen that gap. A hotel may have three or four room types, but it can have hundreds of things a guest could buy around the stay: treatments, restaurants, transfers, activities, upgrades, rentals, and local experiences. Matching the right guest to the right product is exactly the type of problem AI is good at solving.

That makes 2027 less about experimenting with AI and more about deploying it where it can impact the bottom line in 2027. The room will remain the core revenue driver of the hotel business for some time. But for hotels looking for the next meaningful source of growth, the biggest opportunity may increasingly sit beyond it.