So here's the headline making the rounds: Airbnb is cheaper than hotels again in Orlando, Branson, Gatlinburg, and a bunch of other leisure-heavy markets. Cheapism ran the numbers, and for a family of four booking a two-bedroom rental, Airbnb saves about $300 over a three-day weekend compared to hotels. Roughly 30% cheaper. In over 60% of U.S. coastal towns, apparently.

And look... for a family that needs two bedrooms, a kitchen, and space for kids to run around without destroying a 250-square-foot hotel room? Yeah, Airbnb is probably the better deal. That's not a crisis. That's a different product for a different use case. The crisis is when hotel operators see this headline and panic-adjust their pricing strategy to "compete" with something they were never competing with in the first place.

Here's what actually matters in the data. An April 2026 analysis from AirROI found that hotels were cheaper than whole-unit Airbnbs in 27 of 28 U.S. markets for solo or couple stays. Twenty-seven out of twenty-eight. The only exception was New York, where hotel ADR hit $338 and Airbnb's market average was $226. For the traveler segment that most select-service and upper-midscale hotels actually serve... one to two guests, one to three nights... hotels are already winning on price in almost every market. But that's not the headline anyone's writing, because "Hotels Still Cheaper for Most Travelers" doesn't get clicks.

The real dynamic here isn't price. It's distribution shift. Airbnb's stock just hit a 52-week high of $150.19 on July 15. They beat Q1 2026 estimates by $60 million. Revenue up 18% year-over-year. They've removed over 550,000 low-quality listings since 2023 and grown their "Guest Favorites" category by 30%. They're not trying to be the cheap option anymore... they're curating upward, competing directly with mid-to-upscale hotels on experience while maintaining the price advantage for groups. And they're quietly onboarding boutique and independent hotels onto their platform with competitive commission rates. That's the part that should have your attention. Not the Cheapism headline. The fact that Airbnb is building a distribution channel that could pull inventory from your comp set while simultaneously taking demand from it.

I talked to an independent operator last month who told me he was considering listing three of his room types on Airbnb "just to see what happens." He runs a 74-key property in a mountain leisure market... exactly the kind of destination where this headline hits hardest. His logic made sense on the surface: if you can't beat them, join them. But the question I asked him was simple... what's your cost to acquire a guest through Airbnb versus your direct channel versus your OTA partners? He didn't know. Most operators don't. And until you know that number, you're not making a distribution decision. You're guessing. The technology exists to track this. Most properties just aren't using it, or they're using it and ignoring the output because it's uncomfortable.

So a glass octagon in Otis, Massachusetts... one bedroom, two bathrooms, sits on seven acres of woods... just got named the most wishlisted Airbnb in the state. 464 reviews, 4.95 rating, starting at $232 a night. And Airbnb didn't bury this in some data dump. They built an entire marketing campaign around it. National press. Category placement. Algorithmic boost for wishlisted properties. This isn't a cute story about a cool house. This is Airbnb's distribution engine working exactly as designed, and it should make every independent operator in a leisure-driven market pay very close attention.

Here's what actually happened. Airbnb figured out years ago that hotels compete on consistency and convenience. They can't win that fight. So they stopped trying. Instead they built an entire discovery layer around properties that are fundamentally unbookable through any hotel channel... treehouses, converted barns, glass octagons in the woods. The "OMG!" category, the "most wishlisted" lists, the search algorithm that rewards saves and engagement... this is infrastructure. Not content marketing. Infrastructure. They're training travelers to start their trip planning with the question "what would be cool to stay in?" instead of "what hotel is near where I'm going?" And once that question changes, the competitive frame shifts entirely. You're not losing to another hotel. You're losing to a feeling.

Look, I've consulted with independent operators who look at these Airbnb stories and dismiss them. "That's a different customer," they say. "Our guests want a front desk and daily housekeeping." And for some segments, sure. But Airbnb just told us that 86% of surveyed travelers are interested in remote or rural destinations. Searches for unique stays jumped 94% between 2019 and 2021 and haven't come back down. The Berkshires property is 20 minutes from Great Barrington, 30 minutes from Tanglewood. That's the same demand pool feeding every boutique hotel and B&B in western Massachusetts. The glass octagon isn't stealing your confirmed reservations. It's capturing demand before the guest ever searches for a hotel. That's worse.

The technology angle here is what bugs me most. Airbnb's wishlist feature isn't just social... it feeds their ranking algorithm. Properties that get wishlisted over several months get a search boost. That's a self-reinforcing distribution loop. More wishlists, more visibility, more bookings, more reviews, more wishlists. Meanwhile, most independent hotels I work with are running a booking engine from 2019 with no discovery layer, no engagement loop, no reason for a traveler to save or share their listing anywhere. The distribution gap between a single Airbnb property and most independent hotels isn't about the product anymore. It's about the platform mechanics. And those mechanics are getting harder to replicate every quarter.

What I'd actually tell operators in leisure markets: stop dismissing these stories as novelty. This glass house has a 4.95 rating from 464 guests, which means it's been consistently delivering an experience that people remember and recommend. That's operational excellence packaged in a weird shape. The question isn't whether you should build a glass octagon. The question is whether your property gives anyone a reason to wishlist it... to save it, to share it, to tell a friend about it. If the answer is no, that's not an Airbnb problem. That's a product problem. And no booking engine upgrade fixes a product problem.

I've seen this movie before. Different setting, same plot.

A destination gets popular. Too popular. Locals complain. Politicians respond to the complaints instead of managing the growth. The messaging shifts from "welcome" to "we're full." And then... demand listens. Demand always listens eventually. The tourists go somewhere else. And now the restaurants are empty, the hotels are cutting hours, and the same people who wanted the visitors gone are wondering where the paychecks went.

Cornwall hit a record 5 million domestic tourists in 2022. Post-pandemic staycation boom. And instead of building infrastructure to handle the volume... better parking, smarter traffic flow, investment in the things that make a destination work at scale... the conversation turned hostile. "Turn around." "We don't want you here." Local sentiment made national press. Message received. Visitor counts dropped 10-15% in 2023. Another 10%+ in 2024. They're now back to 2013 levels. Twelve years of growth, gone.

Here's the part that should make every destination operator's stomach turn. Visit Cornwall, the organization responsible for marketing the region, went into voluntary liquidation last October. Bankrupt. The entity whose entire job was getting people to show up... ceased to exist right when the region needed it most. Government funding through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund was ending. Nobody had a backup plan. So now you've got a £2.1 billion tourism economy with no marketing organization, declining visitor counts, and operators staring down £100,000 in additional annual costs from rising business rates, National Insurance, VAT, and minimum wage increases. One hotel owner on the north coast did that math publicly. It's not pretty.

I knew a GM once in a beach market (not Cornwall, but the dynamics were identical) who told me something I never forgot. She said the worst thing that ever happened to her hotel wasn't a hurricane. It was when the local newspaper ran a front-page story about how tourism was "ruining our town." Took three years to recover the booking pace. Three years. Because once you tell someone they're not welcome, they remember. You can spend millions on marketing after that and people still carry the feeling. This is what I call the Rate Recovery Trap... except it's not about rate, it's about demand sentiment. You can destroy market perception fast. Rebuilding it is slow, expensive, and not guaranteed. Cornwall's learning that in real time, and the tuition is brutal.

The really painful irony? Tourism accounts for 20% of all jobs in Cornwall. One in five. When Rick Stein's restaurant group... arguably the region's highest-profile hospitality brand... reports a 5.4% revenue drop and the broader UK hospitality sector sees a 41.7% year-over-year increase in businesses hitting critical financial distress, you're not looking at a rough patch. You're looking at structural damage. And now there's talk of a "holiday tax" on visitors... a levy that operators estimate could add £100 to a two-week family stay. In a market where you're already losing visitors to cheaper European alternatives. In a market where you just killed your own tourism marketing body. I don't have a polite way to say how spectacularly bad that timing is.

I worked with a GM years ago who had a phrase for properties like this one. He called them "orphan hotels." Buildings that were perfectly fine... decent bones, good location, loyal local following... that ended up abandoned because the company above them imploded. The hotel didn't fail. The ownership structure failed. And now someone with fresh capital and a longer time horizon picks it up for a fraction of replacement cost and everyone acts like they discovered something.

That's what's happening in St Mawes, Cornwall. BH Group acquired the Ship and Castle Hotel as part of a five-property deal last year. The previous parent company, a leisure group, collapsed in May 2020 when COVID pulled the floor out from under the UK tour operator model. The hotel sat. For years. Now BH Group is pouring multi-millions into a full restoration... 56 rooms, new spa with hydrotherapy pool, restaurant, bar, the works. First phase opens this summer. Full reveal by autumn. They're projecting 75 permanent jobs in a village that probably doesn't have 75 people looking for work.

Here's what caught my eye. Cornwall ran 83% occupancy with ADR north of £120 last summer. That's a market that wants product. And BH Group isn't new to this game... they dropped £7.5 million on a resort renovation in Falmouth about eight years ago and reportedly £8 million on another property in the Lake District. So they have a playbook. They buy distressed or underloved assets in strong leisure markets, invest heavily in the physical product (particularly spa and F&B), and bet on the UK staycation trend that's been building since well before the pandemic. It's not complicated. But "not complicated" and "easy to execute" are very different things, and the renovation timeline they're advertising... acquired in 2025, phased reopening by summer 2026... is ambitious for a property that's been sitting dormant.

This is what I call the Renovation Reality Multiplier. The press release says summer 2026. The building says 1978 wiring, years of deferred maintenance from an ownership group that was circling the drain long before it actually went under, and a construction market where skilled trades in tourist-heavy coastal towns aren't exactly sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. Every renovation I've ever been involved with had a timeline. Every renovation I've ever been involved with also had a REAL timeline. The gap between those two numbers is where operator pain lives. If they open the first phase on schedule with the product dialed in, I'll be the first to tip my cap. But I've been doing this too long to take a press release timeline at face value.

The bigger story here is one that applies well beyond Cornwall. The pandemic created a generation of orphan hotels. Properties attached to overleveraged operators, tour companies, or ownership groups that couldn't survive 18 months of zero revenue. Those properties are still working their way through the system... being picked up by better-capitalized groups who see the asset underneath the distress. If you're an owner or investor looking at similar opportunities, the acquisition price is only the beginning. The real question is what five years of neglect did to the MEP systems, the roof, the guest bathrooms, and the local reputation. Because you're not just renovating a building. You're resurrecting a brand that the community watched die. That takes more than a spa and a new lobby. It takes operational excellence from day one, and it takes longer than you think.

I once watched a guy buy a 40-key lakefront property that had been running at maybe 35% occupancy for years. Beautiful bones. Gorgeous location. Previous owner just couldn't crack the code on demand outside of summer weekends. New owner walks in, spends a fortune on renovations, reopens with a "lifestyle resort" concept, and within 18 months he's running the same 35% occupancy with nicer furniture. Location wasn't the problem. Demand pattern was the problem. And no amount of marble countertops changes a demand pattern.

That story is what I kept thinking about reading the plans for this Lake Martin redevelopment. A developer picked up a waterfront property in Dadeville, Alabama... 24 hotel rooms and three suites on 3.5 acres... and has turned it into something genuinely interesting. Part boutique hotel, part seasonal private club. The club piece is what caught my eye. Memorial Day through Labor Day, members get a dedicated room for the entire summer. Their room. Their spot. No booking, no availability anxiety, just show up whenever you want between May and September. Outside of summer, it operates as a traditional boutique hotel and event venue (weddings, retreats, Auburn football weekends... this is Alabama, so that last one probably carries more weight than the first two).

Here's why this concept is worth watching. The seasonal membership model solves the single biggest problem in leisure lake markets: demand volatility. A 24-key lakefront hotel in Alabama is going to crush it from June through August and struggle from November through February. That's just physics. But if you've pre-sold a chunk of your inventory as seasonal memberships, you've essentially guaranteed summer revenue before the first guest arrives. You've turned your peak season from a variable into a fixed number. That's smart. Really smart. It also means your off-season hotel operation only needs to fill whatever inventory isn't committed to members... which is a much more manageable revenue management problem than trying to fill 24 rooms in January on a lake in central Alabama.

But here's where my operator brain starts asking uncomfortable questions. A seasonal membership that gives someone a dedicated room for the entire summer is a capacity bet. Every room locked into a membership is a room you can't sell at premium transient rates on Fourth of July weekend, on sold-out Auburn weekends, on any night where demand would have exceeded your membership rate. You're trading upside for certainty. That trade might be the right one... but you better price it right, because if your membership fee doesn't at least match what you'd have earned selling that room night by night through peak season (including F&B and ancillary spend from transient guests), you've left money on the table with a smile on your face. And then there's the operational complexity. Members are going to treat that room like it's theirs. Because it is theirs. They're going to leave stuff in the closet, have opinions about the minibar, want their coffee a certain way. Your housekeeping, your front desk, your F&B team... they're now managing two completely different guest populations with completely different expectations under the same roof. Hotel guests want hospitality. Club members want ownership. Those are not the same thing, and the staff caught in between will feel the difference on every shift.

The concept works if the pricing model is airtight, the membership mix is right (not too many members eating your transient upside, not too few to matter financially), and the operational team understands they're running two businesses in one building. That's a lot of "ifs" for a 24-key property with a May opening timeline. I genuinely hope it works. The bones are there. The location is there. The idea is legitimately creative. But I've seen too many beautiful lakefront properties assume that a clever concept replaces the grind of making it work Tuesday through Thursday in the shoulder season. The concept gets you in the door. The operation keeps you alive.

I worked with a GM once who ran a 45-key independent in a ski town. Beautiful property. Great staff. His ADR was around $280 in peak season, and he thought he was killing it. Then a boutique hotel opened down the road charging $600 and positioning itself as "accessible luxury." Within two seasons, his $280 rate was perceived as the cheap option... and not in a good way. Guests started expecting less from him BECAUSE he charged less. The new hotel didn't just compete with him on price. It reframed the entire market's definition of value.

That's what's happening in Aspen right now, and honestly, it's happening in luxury resort markets everywhere. A 68-room boutique property... $50 million in development costs, which works out to roughly $735,000 per key... is being positioned as the "surprisingly affordable" alternative to properties like The Little Nell and Hotel Jerome, where you're looking at $900 to $1,000-plus a night. The math on "affordable" here is interesting. Standard rooms starting at $500, with midweek discounts pushing 30% off. That's a $350 entry point on a slow Tuesday. For Aspen, that IS a deal. For the rest of the planet, that's a car payment.

Here's what I find genuinely smart about the play, though. The developer is local. They know this market cold. The design is intentional... Scandinavian-Japanese minimalism, native materials, 68 keys (not 200). They brought in a serious F&B group. They got a Michelin Key. At $735K per key on a $50 million build, they're betting that "understated luxury" is a positioning sweet spot between the $150-a-night lodge properties and the $1,000-a-night grand dames. They're not trying to be everything to everyone. They picked a lane. That alone puts them ahead of about 80% of new hotel concepts I see.

But let's be honest about what "affordable luxury" actually means in 2026. It means luxury for people who are affluent but not ultra-wealthy. It means the traveler who makes $300K a year and feels priced out of The Little Nell but won't stay at a place with a continental breakfast and a hot tub that closes at 9 PM. That's a real segment. It's growing. And smart operators in premium markets are carving it out. What it does NOT mean is that Aspen is suddenly "doable on any budget." There are genuinely budget properties in Aspen... $110 to $220 a night, places that have been serving that market for decades. Those operators are the ones I think about when I read a headline like this. They're not getting the USA Today write-up. They're not getting the Michelin Key. They're grinding it out at rate points where the margins are razor-thin in a town where your labor costs and your property taxes don't care that you're charging $175 a room.

The real story here isn't one hotel. It's the continued bifurcation of luxury hospitality into "luxury" and "luxury-lite," with the gap between those two tiers and the genuinely affordable tier getting wider every year. If you're operating in a premium leisure market... any of them, not just Aspen... understand this: the definition of "affordable" is being reset upward by properties that spend $50 million to look effortless. That reframes YOUR rate, whether you like it or not.

Let me tell you what I see when I read a press release about nine new hotel signings in a leisure market that just had a record year. I see a beautiful PowerPoint with aerial drone shots of Crete, a slide about "sustained demand" and "growing traveler segments," and a room full of owners nodding along because the numbers look gorgeous... in the base case. They always look gorgeous in the base case. I've sat in that room. I've been the person presenting those slides. And I've been the person who had to sit across from an ownership group when the base case turned out to be fiction.

Marriott just announced nine new hotels in Greece... nearly 1,000 rooms spanning everything from a 57-room Residence Inn in Athens to a 314-room resort in Crete. Two brand debuts for the market (Residence Inn and Le Méridien), plus Autograph Collection, Tribute Portfolio, and Luxury Collection additions. The headline framing is pure brand theater: Greece outshines Europe, tourism boosted like never before, tremendous confidence from owners and franchisees. And look, the fundamentals aren't wrong. Greece welcomed 37 million international arrivals through November 2025, tourism revenue hit €22.38 billion through October (up 8.9% over 2024), and average visitor spending climbed to €602 per trip. That's a market with real momentum. I'm not disputing the momentum. I'm questioning whether momentum is the same thing as a guarantee, because here's what the announcement doesn't mention: bookings for Greek hotels declined nearly 5% year-over-year through March 30, 2026, revenue growth dropped roughly 2% following Middle East tensions in late February, and searches for "Is Greece safe" surged almost 600%. That's not a catastrophe. But it's a crack in the narrative, and cracks in narratives are where owners get hurt.

Here's what I want every owner being pitched a Marriott flag in Greece (or anywhere in a hot leisure market) to internalize. The brand is making a portfolio play. Nine signings across island, coastal, and urban destinations, multiple brand tiers, different traveler segments... that's diversification. Smart diversification, honestly. If Crete softens, Athens holds. If luxury pulls back, extended-stay absorbs. Marriott's risk is distributed. YOUR risk is not. You own one hotel in one location with one flag and one set of projections, and if your loyalty contribution comes in at 22% instead of the 35-40% someone put on a slide, your math breaks. I've watched exactly this happen. A multi-generational ownership group, a flag they trusted, projections that were "optimistic" (which is franchise sales code for "aspirational"), and when actual performance landed 30% below the deck, the hotel was gone. The brand moved on. The family didn't.

The mix here matters too. A 40-room Autograph Collection on Paros and a 40-room Tribute Portfolio in Heraklion are boutique conversions... likely existing independents getting a flag. That can work beautifully if the brand actually delivers incremental demand the property couldn't capture on its own. But the Deliverable Test is brutal for soft brands in island markets. What does an Autograph Collection flag get you on Paros that a well-marketed independent with strong OTA presence doesn't? The loyalty program, yes. But at what total cost when you add franchise fees, loyalty assessments, reservation system fees, brand-mandated standards, and the rate parity restrictions that limit your ability to price dynamically in a market that's inherently seasonal? For a 40-key property, those fees as a percentage of revenue can be punishing. Run the real number. Not the franchise sales number... the number that includes everything you'll actually pay.

I want to be clear: I don't think this is a bad expansion. Greece is a real market with real demand and genuine upside. Marriott's brand portfolio is legitimately well-suited to the range of experiences Greek destinations can deliver. But "the market is good" is not a substitute for "the deal is good for THIS owner at THIS property." Over 450 new four- and five-star hotels have opened in Greece in the last five years. That's a lot of supply chasing the same traveler. When the next disruption hits (and something always hits... geopolitics, pandemics, economic slowdowns, a bad TripAdvisor cycle), the properties that survive are the ones whose owners stress-tested against the downside, not the ones who signed because the drone footage was stunning and the CDO said "significant opportunities." My filing cabinet full of FDDs doesn't lie. The variance between what gets projected and what gets delivered should keep every prospective franchisee up at night. And if it doesn't, they haven't been paying attention.

So here's what happened. An 18-year-old guest at an Airbnb in Otter Tail County, Minnesota, consumed mushrooms, went completely off the rails... throwing furniture, breaking mirrors, assaulting his girlfriend, biting through a spit hood at the hospital. Deputies found him unclothed and screaming on the upper level. The property got trashed. Charges filed. Local news picked it up. And now the county board is actively drafting new short-term rental ordinances driven by exactly this kind of incident.

Look, the incident itself isn't the story. People do dumb things in hotel rooms too (I've heard enough 2 AM front desk calls to know). The story is what's happening at the regulatory level. Otter Tail County is a vacation destination with hundreds of short-term rentals, and the complaints have been piling up... noise, parties, gatherings that overwhelm residential neighborhoods. This arrest just gave local officials the ammunition they've been waiting for. And this isn't isolated to rural Minnesota. Municipalities everywhere are tightening STR rules, and every incident like this accelerates the timeline. Federal agents busted an alleged Airbnb drug network in Minnesota just last month... 1.6 pounds of meth, $26,000 seized, rentals being used as stash houses. That's the pattern local governments are responding to.

Here's what actually matters for hotel operators, especially independents and select-service properties in leisure and vacation markets. Every new STR ordinance... every occupancy cap, every registration requirement, every noise violation fine... adds friction to the short-term rental supply in your comp set. Friction reduces supply or raises operating costs for hosts, which narrows the rate gap between an Airbnb and your property. I talked to an independent operator in a lake market last year who told me his weekday occupancy jumped 4 points after the county started enforcing STR permit requirements. Four points. Not because he did anything different. Because 15% of his Airbnb competition didn't bother getting permits and quietly disappeared from the platform.

But here's the part most operators miss. This regulatory wave doesn't help you automatically. It helps you if you're positioned to capture the demand that gets displaced. That means your booking channels need to be visible where STR guests are searching (and that's not just your brand.com... it's Google Maps, it's metasearch, it's the OTA filters that vacation travelers actually use). It also means your product needs to compete on the things STR guests value... kitchen access, space, flexibility, pet policies. If displaced STR demand shows up at your front desk and the experience feels rigid and institutional compared to what they're used to, you've won the booking and lost the repeat guest.

The technology angle here is real too. Airbnb has invested heavily in trust and safety tools... guest verification, neighborhood support lines, listing removal for violations. They removed thousands of listings that failed quality standards in Q1 2024 alone. The platform is self-regulating because the alternative is government regulation that's much worse for their model. Hotels have had this infrastructure forever... it's called a front desk, a security team, and a GM who answers the phone at midnight. That's actually your competitive advantage, and it's worth more in markets where STR incidents are making headlines. The question is whether your tech stack lets you tell that story to the guest before they book. Most hotel websites don't. Most booking engines don't. The "safe, professionally managed, someone's-actually-here-if-something-goes-wrong" message is sitting right there and almost nobody in our industry is using it.

A revenue manager I worked with years ago had a saying that stuck with me: "The airlines spend more on demand forecasting in a week than your hotel spends in a decade. When they're raising prices into headwinds, stop second-guessing and follow the money." She was right then. She's right now.

Delta, American, and United all confirmed record Q1 booking volumes this week. American reported its highest quarterly revenue growth outside the pandemic recovery period... eight of their top ten booking days in company history happened in the first quarter of 2026. United's CEO went on record saying fare increases would come fast. These aren't optimistic projections from a sales deck. These are airlines watching real-time booking curves and betting hundreds of millions of dollars on the strength of summer demand. Jet fuel hit $4.56 a gallon on March 20th... up 60% since January, largely driven by the Iran conflict disrupting shipping routes. The airlines are absorbing that and still pushing fares higher because they know the seats will sell. That's not hope. That's data.

Here's what this means if you're running a hotel in a leisure market. The correlation between airline booking volume and hotel occupancy isn't theoretical... it's one of the most reliable leading indicators we have. When airlines are filling planes to Orlando, Las Vegas, coastal Florida, and mountain resort towns at record pace, those passengers need rooms. And they're booking now. If your revenue manager is still sitting on last summer's rate strategy waiting for your comp set to move first, you're leaving money on the table during a window that won't stay open. First-mover advantage on rate in a compression environment is real. Once the comp set catches up, you've lost the margin.

Now here's the nuance that matters. This demand signal is strongest for fly-to leisure markets. Drive markets are a different story. Gas just crossed $3.94 a gallon nationally and it's still climbing. That won't kill drive-market leisure (people don't cancel vacations over gas prices alone), but it creates drag... especially on the mid-week shoulder demand that fills your Tuesday and Wednesday in summer. And there's a transatlantic wrinkle worth watching. Early data from February showed advance bookings from Europe to the U.S. down over 14%. The record volumes may be heavily concentrated on domestic routes and non-European international corridors. If your market depends on inbound European travelers, don't assume this rising tide lifts your boat equally.

The other piece nobody's talking about is group displacement. If you're a group sales director holding blocks for June through August at rates you locked six months ago, transient leisure demand at premium rates is about to compress your available inventory faster than your pace report shows. Every group room you're holding at $189 that could sell transient at $239 is a choice... and right now, the math favors transient in most leisure markets. Review those blocks this week. Release what isn't going to materialize. And if you're running a select-service or extended-stay near a major airport, get ready for spillover. When the primary hotels in a compression market sell out, late-booking leisure travelers land in your lobby. Make sure your OTA availability reflects that opportunity and your rates are positioned to capture it, not discount it.