I knew a GM once who ran a 280-key resort in a secondary fly-to market. Nice property. Good team. Solid group base in the winter, leisure-heavy in the summer. His whole revenue strategy from Memorial Day through Labor Day depended on one thing he never thought about... cheap airfare getting bodies to his market. He didn't sell rooms. Southwest and Spirit sold rooms for him. He just happened to have a hotel at the other end of the flight.

Then a route got cut. Not the airline going under. Just one route. Load factors were soft, so the carrier pulled the frequency from daily to three times a week. His July occupancy dropped 11 points that summer. Eleven points from one route adjustment on one carrier. He spent the rest of the season chasing it with rate cuts that took him 14 months to recover from.

Spirit didn't cut a route. Spirit is gone. All of it. As of May 2nd, lights out, no customer service, no rebookings, nothing. They burned through $2.7 billion in losses in 2025 alone, tried to emerge from their second bankruptcy, and the fuel spike from the Iran situation finished them off. The $500 million federal lifeline fell apart when the creditors said no. Twenty-one million seats removed from the U.S. market between now and December. Not reduced. Removed.

Here's what nobody in our industry is talking about yet... Spirit wasn't just an airline. Spirit was a demand engine for a very specific guest segment. The family that was going to drive to Panama City Beach but saw a $49 fare to Orlando and changed the plan. The bachelorette group that picked Nashville over Asheville because the flight was cheap enough to make the math work. The budget-conscious retirees who turned Fort Lauderdale into a viable winter option instead of driving to Savannah. Those travelers aren't upgrading to Delta at $289 each way. A family of four looking at an additional $800-1,000 in airfare isn't saying "well, I guess we'll just pay it." They're saying "let's drive somewhere." Or they're saying "let's stay home." Either way, your fly-to resort market just lost a feeder pipeline that most revenue managers never quantified because it was always just... there. And now it's not. Meanwhile, if you're running a property within a four-to-six hour drive of Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Chicago, or any major metro... pay attention. Those families are still taking a vacation. They're just loading up the minivan instead of checking bags. Gas at $4.53 a gallon hurts, but for a family of four, a 500-mile drive is still $120 in fuel versus $800 or more in incremental airfare. That's not even a close calculation. Drive-to markets are about to have a summer they weren't forecasting.

The markets I'd be watching hardest right now are the ones that lived on Spirit connectivity and don't have enough alternative low-cost capacity to absorb the loss. Fort Lauderdale. Baltimore. Detroit. Cleveland. Orlando just lost over 250,000 seats in May alone... a 40% capacity reduction at that airport compared to last year. If you're a convention hotel in any of those markets, your group attendance assumptions for summer are optimistic right now whether you know it or not. Attendees book their own air. When the cheapest option disappears and the next option costs twice as much, some percentage just don't come. You'll see it in your pickup reports before you see it in the headlines. This story has legs through Labor Day, and the GMs who figure that out this week instead of mid-June are the ones who'll have a plan instead of a problem.

I managed a 280-key resort property during the last fuel spike... must have been 2008. Gas hit four bucks a gallon and the conventional wisdom was that leisure travel would crater. Every revenue call that spring was doom and gloom. You know what actually happened? Our weekday occupancy dropped about 6 points. Our weekend leisure rate went UP $22. Because the families who would have flown to Cancun drove four hours to us instead, and they were spending the airfare money they saved on suites and room service. Different guest. Higher spend. We just had to be smart enough to see it coming instead of panicking with everyone else.

That's exactly what's unfolding right now, except the math is bigger and the window is shorter. Spirit didn't just go bankrupt... they evaporated. Over 800,000 seats gone inside two weeks. And the carriers picking up the scraps aren't doing it out of charity. Jet fuel is running around $179 a barrel. Fares are climbing 5-15% depending on the route. Frontier and JetBlue are backfilling some of Spirit's old routes, but they're doing it at higher price points, and they're cherry-picking the profitable ones. Cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, Providence... markets where Spirit was sometimes the only affordable option for a family of four trying to get to Orlando... those travelers aren't finding a substitute flight. They're finding the car keys.

Here's the part that makes this urgent. Memorial Day is three weeks out. The families who just lost their Spirit flights to Fort Lauderdale are right now, today, searching for alternatives. Some will rebook on another carrier at $200 more per person. But a family of four staring at $800 in unexpected airfare increases? A significant chunk of those families are going to pull up Google Maps and start looking at what's within a four-hour drive. If you're a resort, a waterpark hotel, a beach property, a lake property, anything leisure within driving distance of a mid-size metro... your phone should be ringing more than it was last week. If it's not, check your rates. You might be priced so low that you're attracting the wrong search results, or you might not be showing up at all because your OTA positioning hasn't been adjusted since March.

Now, if you're on the other side of this... if you're running a property in a fly-to market that Spirit used to feed... this is a different conversation. Hawaii. The Florida Keys. Mountain resort towns where the nearest major airport is the only way in. You just lost your budget feeder. That $89 Spirit fare from Baltimore to Fort Lauderdale? It's now a $189 Frontier fare. Or it doesn't exist at all. The budget leisure traveler that filled your shoulder nights isn't coming this summer. Full stop. You can't market your way out of a capacity problem. What you CAN do is shift your mix. Go harder after the traveler who's still flying... they've got more money and they're booking fewer trips. Your ADR ceiling just went up if you're willing to let go of the volume play.

One more thing, and this is the one I'm not hearing anyone talk about. Flight delays and cancellations aren't going away this summer. TSA staffing is a mess. Airlines are over-scheduled and under-crewed. That means your fly-in guests are showing up later, angrier, and with shorter stays. If you haven't briefed your front desk team on managing late arrivals... not just the logistics, but the emotional temperature of a guest who's been sitting on a tarmac for three hours... do it this week. That interaction at 11 PM is worth more to your TripAdvisor score than anything your marketing department will do all month. Your best people need to be working those late shifts, and they need the authority to make it right without calling a manager. This summer is going to test your team's ability to recover moments that the airlines are going to break for you, over and over again.

I managed a 180-key resort property through the 2008 gas spike. I remember the exact week it turned. Didn't start with cancellations. Started with shorter stays. The family that always booked four nights started booking three. Then two. Then they stopped coming and we pretended it was weather.

That's what's happening right now, and most revenue managers aren't seeing it yet because they're watching the wrong line.

Consumer confidence at 92.8 is a number that sounds abstract until you translate it into behavior. This isn't a recession indicator... it's a spending indicator. The Conference Board is telling you that American households are actively deferring discretionary purchases. Not thinking about deferring. Doing it. And your hotel room is the definition of discretionary for a family deciding between a weekend getaway and keeping the grocery budget intact while inflation sits at 3.3% and gas just crossed $4.43 a gallon nationally. A 300-mile round trip that cost roughly $34 last May now costs about $47. That's $13 more per trip (the source material overstated this gap, but the real number is bad enough). Multiply that by a family of four with two cars, layer it on top of groceries and utilities that have been climbing all year, and you've got a household that's not canceling the trip... they're just never booking it in the first place. You won't see it in your cancellation report. You'll see it in pace that softens so gradually you convince yourself it's a timing issue until June hits and it isn't.

Here's what to watch. If your pace is holding but only because you've been shaving rate to maintain it, you're already in trouble. You've traded margin for volume and you haven't even hit the real booking window yet. The more dangerous signal is what I call the silent compression... pace softening AND ADR drifting down simultaneously. That means the price-sensitive leisure traveler isn't just negotiating. They've left the market entirely. I've seen this movie before. It doesn't reverse in July. By the time you feel it in occupancy, the summer is already half gone and your options are bad or worse.

The segment split matters here and it matters a lot. Hyatt just reported 5.4% systemwide RevPAR growth in Q1, driven by luxury and resort demand. Their CEO said it out loud... high-end guests aren't flinching. But lower-income households are going to feel this the hardest. If you're running a luxury drive-to resort charging $450 a night, that $13 in gas is noise. If you're running a 120-key select-service or a mid-tier resort where your average guest household income is $85K-$120K, that $13 is the difference between booking and browsing. Know which guest you have. Not which guest you want.

The play right now isn't to panic. It's to get ahead of this before the window closes. Build value packages that offset the perception of total trip cost... not rate cuts, but bundled experiences that make the math feel different. Inclusive breakfast. Free parking (if you charge for it, this is the summer to stop). Gas rebate promotions tied to direct booking. Loyalty point accelerators for drive-to stays. Whatever you do, do NOT lead with rate discounting. This is what I call the Rate Recovery Trap. You drop rate $15 to fill rooms in June, and you spend the next 18 months trying to retrain your market to pay what you were getting before the cut. Once you teach a leisure guest that your Saturday night is worth $139, good luck selling it at $169 next summer. Build the value around the rate. Protect the rate itself like your asset value depends on it... because it does.

I watched a revenue manager lose her job once over something exactly like this. Property was a 180-key resort about two hours from a major metro. Gas prices spiked, consumer confidence dropped, and she held rate because the brand's forecast tool was still showing green. "The pace looks fine," she kept saying in the Monday calls. Pace looked fine because the bookings that were going to evaporate hadn't evaporated yet. They were just... not materializing. By the time the 30-day pickup report confirmed what the macro data had been screaming for six weeks, she'd missed the window to adjust. Occupancy fell 11 points in April. The owner replaced her by Memorial Day.

That's the thing about consumer sentiment as a leading indicator. It doesn't show up in your PMS first. It shows up at the gas pump. It shows up in the conversation a family has at the kitchen table when they're deciding between the beach weekend and staying home. The Michigan number hitting 55.5 is that kitchen table conversation happening simultaneously in millions of households. Gas just crossed $3.79 nationally... up more than 80 cents in three weeks because of the Iran situation... and the year-ahead inflation expectation is stuck at 3.4%. That's not a number that says "let's book the resort." That's a number that says "let's see what happens."

Here's what nobody's telling you about the 60-90 day correlation between sentiment drops and leisure travel softening. It's not uniform. It hits drive-to leisure hardest because those travelers feel gas prices twice... once getting there, once in their psychological willingness to spend at the destination. A family that was planning a $1,200 weekend (room, gas, dining, activities) is now looking at $1,350 for the same trip because fuel went up. That $150 delta doesn't cancel the trip for everyone. But it cancels it for enough of them to move your occupancy 5-8 points. And for the ones who still come? They trade down. The suite becomes a standard king. The steakhouse dinner becomes the sports bar. Your ADR compresses even before occupancy does. The luxury and upper-upscale segments will weather this better (they always do... the K-shaped recovery that's been playing out since 2023 isn't going away). But if you're running a select-service or an independent in a secondary drive-to market, the math is coming for you. Right now.

The instinct when you see softening is to cut rate. I understand the instinct. I've given in to that instinct myself a few times and regretted it every single time. This is what I call the Rate Recovery Trap. You drop your rate $20 to fill rooms in April, and you spend June, July, and August trying to retrain your market to pay what you were worth before the cut. The OTAs lock in your lower rate. Your comp set adjusts. The price anchor resets in the consumer's mind. Instead of losing 5-8 points of occupancy for two months, you lose $15-20 of ADR for six months. The math on that is catastrophic. Don't do it. There are better moves.

What you should be doing right now... today, this week... is pulling your 60-90 day pickup data and comparing it to 2023 and 2019. Not 2024. Not 2025. Those were anomaly years with pent-up demand dynamics that no longer exist. If your Q2 pace is trailing 2019 by more than 3-4 points, you have a demand problem that isn't going to self-correct. Second, shift your promotional strategy toward value-add instead of rate reduction. Package the room with breakfast. Throw in parking. Add a late checkout. You protect your published rate while giving the guest the perception of a deal. Third, increase your OTA visibility now... not in April when every other revenue manager in your market has the same idea and bid costs spike. The window to capture displaced demand (families who are still going to travel but are shopping harder) is the next 3-4 weeks. After that, the travelers who were going to cancel have cancelled, and the ones who are still booking have already made their decision. You're either in their consideration set by then or you're not.