Insider

🏨 Europe swung from −17 to +44. Have you locked your 2027 hotel rates yet?

GBTA's new poll: European travel sentiment made the biggest turnaround of any region since April, and 65% of Europe-based buyers now expect to spend more. Your 2027 hotel rates are being negotiated right now, on a year of soft European demand. Here's how to lock them in before the market moves.

Egor Karpovich

01 Oct 2026 — 6 min read

This week

On 22 September, GBTA published its latest industry poll, and Europe's numbers stand out. In April, 38% of Europe-based respondents were pessimistic about business travel and only 21% optimistic, a net score of −17. By September, 55% were optimistic and 11% pessimistic: net +44, a 61-point swing in five months and the largest of any region. Among Europe-based buyers, 65% now expect their travel spend to rise, the highest share anywhere. The timing matters because hotel RFP season is under way. Most 2027 corporate hotel rates in European markets will be proposed, countered and signed between now and November, and they're being priced off a year in which European hotel demand was soft enough to keep regional rate growth below 1%. Buyers have just told the industry, in public, that demand is coming back. Hotel revenue managers can read the same poll.

Why it matters

1. EMEA hotel rates were flat because demand was soft, and that's changing. The GBTA and ALTOUR forecast puts global hotel ADR at $168 in 2026, up 3.7%. By region, the spread is wide: Latin America +9.5%, APAC +5.0%, North America +3.2%, and EMEA just +0.6%, which the report describes as the most stable hotel market because of softer demand. That has been the European buyer's advantage all year. But hotels don't set rates on last year's demand. They set them on expected demand, and the expectations shifted this month.

2. Most corporate hotel rates are still fixed for a full year, so this negotiation is the one that counts. Cvent's analysis of the last RFP season found that roughly 85% of accepted corporate rates were fixed, slightly more than the year before, and that accepted fixed rates grew only about 1–2%. 92% of bids went to at least one round of negotiation. A fixed rate signed at the bottom of the demand cycle protects you for twelve months. One signed after the market has repriced locks in the higher number for the same twelve months. In 2027 the difference between those two outcomes gets decided in October and November.

3. Buyers already expect costs to rise faster than trips. In the same GBTA poll, 69% of buyers named rising travel costs as their top concern, well ahead of geopolitical uncertainty at 45%. And 56% of buyers expect higher travel spend, but only 45% expect more trips, so spending growth is expected to outpace volume. When that gap shows up in a hotel program, the usual cause is rates that drifted up in the markets where travel grew, not extra nights.

What this means for your program

Close first-round hotel negotiations in your top European markets before demand data catches up with sentiment. Suppliers counter on forward bookings, and the poll shows intra-Europe travel is set to rise: 47% of Europe-based buyers expect more of it. Get fixed-rate commitments while the trailing data still shows a soft year.
Choose fixed or dynamic city by city. Where your volume is real and demand is recovering, fix the rate. Where your volume is thin or rates swing with events, negotiate a dynamic discount off the best available rate. One blanket rule across the program will be wrong in half your cities.
Insist on last-room availability where you're adding volume. A cheap negotiated rate that disappears when a hotel fills is worthless in exactly the weeks you need it. If European demand really is returning, compression dates are when non-LRA rates stop appearing.
Set hotel caps per city, not as one global number. A single nightly cap that fits your average city is too loose in cheaper markets and too tight in Paris or London. City-level limits aligned with your new negotiated rates stop the policy from approving everything or blocking everything.

The numbers

63% of business travel professionals are optimistic about the industry outlook heading into 2027, up from 41% in April and above January's 59%; pessimism fell from 24% to 7%. Among corporate buyers alone, optimism rose from 39% to 61%. The GBTA poll surveyed 604 members and non-members worldwide between 27 August and 9 September 2026. (GBTA poll via CPA Practice Advisor, 22 Sep 2026, Business Travel Executive)
Europe's net optimism moved from −17 in April to +44 in September, a 61-point improvement and the sharpest turnaround of any region. 65% of Europe-based buyers expect travel spend to increase, and 47% expect more intra-Europe travel. Rising travel costs are the top buyer concern at 69%. (CPA Practice Advisor, Business Travel Executive)
Global hotel ADR is forecast at $168 in 2026 (+3.7%) and $171 in 2027 (+1.8%). Regional growth in 2026 ranges from EMEA at +0.6% to North America +3.2%, APAC +5.0% and Latin America +9.5%. The report calls EMEA the most stable hotel market because of softer demand. (GBTA / ALTOUR 2027 Global Business Travel Forecast, The Business Travel Magazine)
Roughly 85% of accepted corporate hotel rates in the last RFP season were fixed, slightly up on the prior year. Median and average accepted fixed rates grew only about 1–2%, and about 92% of bids went to at least one negotiation round. (Cvent Transient Insider, 2026 Hotel RFP Season Analysis)
49% of corporate hotel programs saw their number of dynamic discounts increase, compared with 17% whose fixed rates increased. Only 47% of EMEA travel managers perceived favorable negotiating conditions, against 65% in North America. 32% of programs used AI in their most recent RFP cycle, and 69% expect to use it in the next one. GBTA surveyed 258 travel managers, predominantly in the US, Canada and Europe, between 20 April and 13 May 2026. (GBTA & Radisson Hotel Group via Hospitality Net, 23 Jun 2026)

Two tools built exactly for this moment

A hotel program negotiated in October only protects you if people book the rates you negotiated, and if you can show whether they did.

Travel Code Expense Management →: hotel folios, card transactions and bookings reconcile in one record, so you can see what each city actually cost per night against the rate you signed. It adds receipt capture, automatic checks against your policy, approval routing and Excel export. You'll have the evidence for next year's RFP before this one is finished.
Travel Code Net-60 Card →: 60-day settlement at 0% interest, per-transaction visibility, and budget rules that auto-freeze at 80%. If European travel grows as buyers now expect, hotel spend grows before the budget does. This keeps the cash timing under your control and categorizes each stay the moment it posts.

The bottom line

Europe spent most of 2026 as the quiet hotel market, with the lowest rate growth of any region and buyers who were more worried than anywhere else. That quiet was the leverage. The GBTA poll published this week is the first clear signal that it's ending: European buyers expect to travel more and spend more, and they said so while the 2027 contracts are still open. Most of those contracts will be fixed for a full year. Programs that close their key cities over the next few weeks, pick fixed or dynamic city by city, require last-room availability where volume is growing, and match their policy caps to the new rates will carry this year's pricing into next year. Programs that wait for the demand data will be negotiating after the hotels have seen it.

What's new at Travel Code

Did you know an over-the-limit hotel booking no longer has to be cancelled or paid in full by the company? With split payments, the company pays up to its travel-policy limit and the employee covers the difference with a personal card. The supplier still sees a single booking. Limits are calculated per service and follow city overrides: if you've set a separate hotel limit for a city, that limit applies, and other cities use the policy's base limit. So the per-city caps you set after this RFP season become the line where the company's share ends. If the trip is cancelled, refunds are split in proportion to each side's contribution. It works for hotels, flights and trains. (Changelog →)

Sources

Travel Code helps corporate travel and finance teams see, control, and reconcile every dollar of trip spend in one platform. travel-code.com · Expense Management · Net-60 Card