Sixty-two percent of American travelers now say they prefer a hotel over a short-term rental like Airbnb or Vrbo for holiday travel, according to a new survey — a number that captures a real pendulum swing back toward the traditional check-in desk after years of travelers experimenting with someone else’s house instead.
The Survey Behind the Number
The finding comes from a study released by the travel company Upgraded Points, which surveyed 2,193 U.S. travelers across 45 states in late October 2025. The reasons respondents gave for choosing hotels track almost exactly with the specific pain points that have dogged the vacation rental industry for years: 73% cited amenities, and 62% specifically pointed to not having to deal with cleaning rules or surprise fees. Another 52% valued easier booking and cancellation policies, and 76% said they believed hotels were more transparent about pricing overall.
“Travelers are thinking beyond price this year,” said Keri Stooksbury, editor-in-chief at Upgraded Points, in the company’s release. “Convenience, transparency, and even community impact are shaping where people stay for the holidays.”
What’s Actually Driving the Shift
The complaints behind that 62% cleaning-fee figure are not new, but they have accumulated over years into something closer to consumer fatigue. Vacation rental guests grew accustomed to arriving at a property only to be handed a lengthy checkout list — start the laundry, run the dishwasher, take out the trash, strip the beds — on top of a cleaning fee they had already paid at booking. Add in keyless entry systems that occasionally fail at the worst possible moment, with no front desk to call for a replacement key at 11 p.m., and the appeal of a staffed lobby starts to look less like nostalgia and more like a rational tradeoff.
The underlying market data backs up the sense that the rental side of the industry is under real pressure. A 2026 industry report from AirDNA, the short-term rental analytics firm, projected demand growth of just 2.7% for the year — a modest figure for an industry that spent much of the previous decade posting double-digit growth. AirDNA’s own director of economics, Bram Gallagher, pointed to broader economic headwinds, including inflation and mortgage rates climbing back above 6%, as forces that have delayed new investment in the space.
International Travelers Are Pulling Back Even Faster
The slowdown is not evenly distributed. Industry coverage of the 2026 travel season found that international demand for short-term rentals fell 4.7% in January, a steeper decline than the 3.5% drop in overall international visitation to the U.S. Canadian bookings alone were down more than 20% year over year, a category that vacation rental operators in border-adjacent and warm-weather markets have historically relied on heavily.
Hotels Haven’t Won the War, but They’re Winning Back Ground
None of this means the vacation rental model is collapsing. Renters still clearly value what hotels cannot easily replicate: more space, full kitchens, and a better setup for large groups or multigenerational trips, all reasons a majority of travelers who prefer rentals cited in the same Upgraded Points survey. But the fact that a majority of surveyed Americans now lean toward hotels for holiday travel specifically — historically one of the vacation rental industry’s strongest occasions, when families want a house instead of adjoining rooms — signals that the loyalty rental platforms built up over the past decade is more fragile than it looked at its peak.
Hotel chains did not have to do much to capitalize on the moment beyond staying consistent. Standardized cleaning included in the room rate, a person at the front desk who can hand over a physical key, and pricing that shows the total upfront rather than tacking on fees during checkout are not new innovations. They are simply the baseline hotels have offered for decades — and after enough surprise charges and keyless lockouts, that baseline started to look like the upgrade.
A Predictable Correction, Not a Reversal
What is happening looks less like travelers abandoning vacation rentals outright and more like a market correcting after years of one-directional momentum. When Airbnb and Vrbo first scaled nationally, the appeal was novelty and price as much as anything else, and hotels were slow to respond with anything beyond loyalty points. Now the categories have specialized: hotels lean into consistency and full-service convenience, while rental platforms lean into space and self-contained privacy for families and groups who never wanted a hotel experience in the first place.
The 62% preference figure from the Upgraded Points survey is a snapshot of holiday travel specifically, not a verdict on the entire lodging industry. But it is a meaningful one, because holiday trips are exactly the occasions where a family’s calculus about space, cost, and convenience gets tested hardest — and where enough of them are now concluding that a hotel room, fees and all, beats gambling on whether the keyless lock will actually work when they arrive with the kids and the luggage at midnight.
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