Travel advisors' hotel sales are up 24.5% this year. The fastest growth is at $1,500 a night.
Virtuoso's travel advisors sold 24.5% more hotel this year, and bookings above $1,500 a night grew more than twice as fast as cheaper rooms. Where your rate sits decides how much of that reaches you.
by Markus Busch
The number. On August 9, on stage at Virtuoso Travel Week in Las Vegas, David Kolner, the luxury network's executive vice president of strategic communications, put its 2026 sales on pace for a 20.8% rise over last year. Hotels led every category, up 24.5%, ahead of cruise at 22.4% and tour operators at 11%. The figures combine first-half results with Virtuoso's projection for the rest of the year. They are Virtuoso's own, reported the same way by Travel Weekly, PAX and others.
The travel advisor is back. For a hotel, the question is where she's booking.
Where it went. Up. Bookings at hotels charging more than $1,500 a night grew 37%, more than twice as fast as cheaper rooms, Kolner said. Asked what drove the hotel growth, he split it roughly into thirds: higher rates, longer stays, more bookings. And in every market, sales to Virtuoso's preferred partners, the hotels inside its program, grew faster than sales to everyone else.
So a third of the growth is rate. The hotels at the top raised their prices, and the travel advisors sold them anyway.
Not only Virtuoso. Signature Travel Network, a separate consortium, said in January that it closed 2025 with record sales, and that same-store sales to its preferred partners rose more than 10%. In 2024, 92% of its sales went to preferred partners. Two networks, one direction: the business flows to the hotels inside the program. Research firm Phocuswright had projected that travel agencies' share of US travel spending would reach 26% this year, up from 21% in 2022. That's a forecast, not a count.
What each of those stays costs. For a hotel in Virtuoso's program, the guest pays your best available rate or better, and the travel advisor's agency earns at least 10% of it. On top of that, according to Preferred Hotels' published summary of the program, the guest gets breakfast for two every day, an upgrade and early check-in or late check-out when available, and one more amenity, typically a $100 food and beverage credit.
At $1,500 a night, the commission is $150 and the breakfast barely registers. At $300, the commission is $30 a night, and over a three-night stay the breakfasts and the credit can weigh more than the commission does. The package fits the top of the market best. That is also where the growth is.
In June, Virtuoso says, the average nightly rate at its preferred hotels was $1,983. If your room sells for a fraction of that, most of the comeback is happening somewhere else.
Read also: Travel agencies grew hotel bookings twice as fast as the OTAs · Fora is inside Virtuoso — and just raised $60 million at a $1 billion valuation
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