Consumer Confidence Hit 90.8. Your September Pace Report Already Knows.

I worked with a revenue manager once who had this habit that drove her DOS crazy. Every time a macro number dropped... consumer confidence, employment, gas prices spiking... she'd pull her 60- and 90-day pace reports before anyone asked her to. Just quietly, on her own. She'd compare them to the same window the prior year, calculate the variance, and if the number was off by more than 3%, she'd walk into the Monday revenue call with a one-page scenario already built. No drama. No panic. Just "here's what I'm seeing, here's what it might mean, and here's what I'd adjust." Her GM told me she saved them from getting caught flat twice in three years. Twice. Because she watched the leading indicators while everyone else was staring at last night's pickup.

That's the conversation we need to have right now. The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index came in at 90.8 for July. That number by itself doesn't scare me... it's not 2008, it's not even close. What gets my attention is the Present Situation Index, the component that measures how consumers feel about conditions right now, not six months from now. That piece dropped 3.6 points to 114.9, its lowest reading since February 2021. Three consecutive months of decline. And the Expectations Index has been sitting below 80 (the Conference Board's own recession signal threshold) since February 2025. The direction is what matters here, and the direction has been consistently down. Meanwhile, gas prices are up 45% since the start of 2026. Grocery mentions in the survey are climbing. When consumers start noticing what eggs cost, the weekend leisure trip is the next thing they renegotiate.

Here's the trap. Your August numbers might look fine. Summer momentum is real... families booked those trips months ago, deposits are paid, kids are out of school. August occupancy can mask what's happening underneath. But the 60- to 90-day forward booking window... that's September and October... is where the cracks show first. This is what I call the Rate Recovery Trap in reverse. When leisure demand starts softening, the instinct is to chase occupancy with rate cuts. And the moment you drop rate to fill rooms in October, you spend the next six months retraining your market to pay what you were worth before the cut. That's a hole you dig yourself into, and climbing out takes longer than you think. I've seen it happen at drive-market resorts, beach properties, mountain lodges... anywhere that depends on the discretionary dollar. The consumer is telling you, right now, that the discretionary dollar is getting tighter.

Now, some balance. CoStar and Tourism Economics just revised their full-year 2026 RevPAR growth forecast upward to 4.4%, driven by a 3.1% ADR increase. FIFA World Cup markets and America 250 markets are going to have a strong year regardless. Business travel spending is projected up 7.2% globally, though (and this is important) the number of actual trips is only growing 1.3%. That means companies are spending more per trip but taking fewer of them. If you're an urban full-service property leaning on corporate demand to offset leisure softening, check whether you're actually seeing more room nights or just higher rates on fewer bookings. Those are very different stories with very different implications for your Q4 forecast.

The play here isn't panic. It's preparation. Pull your 60- and 90-day pace reports this week. Not next week. This week. Compare September and October pace to the same window last year. If you're flat or down in leisure transient... and I suspect a lot of drive-market and resort properties will be... you need a plan before budget season starts. Because the worst version of this is walking into a September budget conversation with ownership, having the owner pull up the consumer confidence number on their phone, and asking you what you're doing about it while you're still looking at August actuals. Don't be that GM. Be the revenue manager with the notebook. Be the one who already looked.