How to Leverage Trends and Tech to Increase New Year's Bookings with Hotelbeds
New Year’s Eve travel sees a surge in demand, searches, and bookings. To make the most of these opportunities, your offers need to stand out, and your systems must work smoothly.
Hotelbeds can help with both. Here’s what travellers are looking for and how you can use our technology to meet their expectations.
What do today’s travellers want for New Year’s Eve travel?
Let’s take a look at some of the enduring travel trends of 2025, which are expected to continue well into 2026:
Events and Live tourism: Fans who attended Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour spent $1,300 per show on average, while sports tourism is expected to reach $2.1 trillion by 2030. For New Year’s Eve, consider bundling the big day with a concert, cultural event, or sports match taking place a few days before or after to encourage travellers to extend their trip. How might cross-industry partnerships or packaging opportunities benefit you as travel distributors, to help you capitalise on the highly-valuable live tourism segment?
Multi-generational travel: Families are increasingly turning to travel as a meaningful way to spend time together. They often seek destinations and travel experiences that cater to all ages, from child-friendly activities to spacious accommodations. And New Year’s Eve is a great occasion to highlight packages that different age groups can enjoy.
Transformational travel: Condé Nast Traveller named wellness retreats one of the latest New Year’s Eve trends in 2025, while transformational travel itself, which wellness falls into, is well worth accommodating, in order to stay agile in the face of traveller booking behaviours.
Transformational travel is the type of trip that helps travellers reconnect with themselves, or loved ones, discover new cultures or aspects of themselves, prioritise their health, conservation, regenerative of the natural environment – consider how you might best package trips and experiences which accommodate the rising prioritisation of immersive, authentic trips, and encourage travellers to start the year with a trip with true meaning.
- Detour destinations: This year saw a growing interest in alternative destinations, as travellers swapped busy capitals like Paris for smaller cities like Reims, and chose quieter beach escapes such as Cozumel instead of busier spots like Cancun. This will also be the case for New Year’s Eve. Think of a more intimate celebration in a small-town restaurant rather than fireworks in an overcrowded square.
These trends have something in common: travellers want experiences. A concert, quality time with the family, or a solo wellness retreat to think about their New Year’s resolutions.
Besides experiences, they also want to feel seen, with their values and interests reflected in the trip. For example, sustainability-focused travellers will be interested in local, eco-friendly accommodations instead of hotel chains.
Capitalise on seasonal demand with timely offers
Top tip: prepare for this high-intent purchasing period with our New Year Sales campaign, and offer incentivising deals to your ideal travellers. By browsing the promotion in our Booking Engine, you can determine which opportunities would be most advantageous for your business.
Sign up to become a Hotelbeds partner to access our timely promotions, including this year's New Year Sales campaign, taking place on 30th December.
With a travel window that lasts all the way to 31st December 2026, you can make the most of the thousands of destinations and experiences participating in one of our biggest annual campaigns, with highly competitive rates and availabilities to help you stand out. Start the year smart and capitalise on this high-demand sales period with New Year Sales.
Broaden your client base during the peak travel period
To attract a more diverse client base for NYE travel, think beyond midnight fireworks displays and focus on experiences aligned with travellers’ values.
Here are some examples:
- Highlight hotels with sustainability credentials: 86% of survey respondents to a recent survey, aged 25-34, suggested that they preferred eco-friendly options when choosing a destination, or accommodation (according to World Economic Forum’s Future of Travel and Tourism Report). By highlighting sustainable hotels, and especially those with industry-approved accreditation and certification such as those found in our Sustainable Hotels Programme via our parent company HBX Group, you can heighten your appeal to today’s ever-more discerning traveller, for whom sustainability is increasingly a necessity, not just ‘nice to have’.
- Communicate accessibility features clearly: Over 80% of travellers with accessibility needs reported transportation challenges on their most recent trip. Other common barriers include hotels failing to communicate accessibility details on their websites, higher costs, and a general lack of transparent information. Start by making sure your platform includes up-to-date, accurate information.
- Get creative with global destination recommendations: Instead of focusing on major capitals and popular destinations, think in terms of experiences. Which places offer experiences that would delight your clients? Maybe it’s an up-and-coming restaurant in a small town, a wellness retreat on a warm island, or a festival in a lesser-known city.
For destination inspiration, discover our partner-only Hotelbeds Booking Engine, offering seamless access to thousands of hotels, activities, and experiences in 170+ countries, as part of our global portfolio with over 300,000 travel products.
Hotelbeds: Your booking partner for NYE travel and beyond
Hotelbeds makes sure you display accurate information, broaden your reach, and get unique rates. Here’s how:
Leverage Hotelbeds API and technology to enhance your offerings
Peak holiday seasons like New Year’s Eve see last-minute bookings, price fluctuations, and limited availability, so keeping prices and campaigns in order is more important than ever. Hotelbeds’ API solutions solve this by offering seamless API integrations, to help you work, earn and manage bookings at speed, and benefit from connecting to a vast global inventory.
This connection comes with many benefits, including:
- Real-time availability: Travellers always see up-to-date room options or tour prices.
- Dynamic pricing: Rates automatically adjust to reflect any promotions or campaigns you’re running.
- Automation: Bookings, cancellations, and rate updates are processed automatically, instead of you manually updating them.
- Instant access to a broad product range: Connect to thousands of hotels, transfers, and experiences immediately.
- Up-to-date content: All images, descriptions, and accessibility information are updated automatically.
Use the Hotelbeds Booking Engine’s broad portfolio
The Hotelbeds travel booking platform connects you with a global portfolio of 250,000+ properties, 23,000+ experiences, global transfer routes, and 150+ car hire suppliers in 500+ service locations.
Increasing the scope of your offering empowers you with the trip opportunities today’s traveller is looking for, furthering your ability to meet traveller expectations, especially during peak travel selling periods like New Year’s Eve, where both demand and competition are sky-high.
Benefit from Hotelbeds campaigns and member-only offers
Hotelbeds offers year-round marketing campaigns exclusive to Hotelbeds partners. These campaigns are powered by intelligent algorithms, and benefit from specially negotiated conditions in line with each campaign’s specific goals. Plus, every deal offered is newly sourced; the in-house algorithm disregards preexisting discounts from participating hotels to ensure that you’re receiving only the most competitive and unique offers to present to your audiences.
Keep up to date with the latest opportunities and campaigns via quarterly emails to our partners, with all the necessary instructions on how to participate as well as updates on participating hotels and experiences to help you prepare your strategy. New Year Sales is one of our most popular campaigns, with many hotels offering discounted rates exclusively for our members.
Sign up to join Hotelbeds, and gain access to the wider HBX Group ecosystem of travel solutions, to ensure that you don’t miss out on this year’s New Year Sales campaign, launching on the 30th December.
Stay updated with travel trends
Every year, we publish in-depth travel trends reports, along with articles on how to use those trends to sell more experiences.
Staying up to date with industry travel trends allows you to better understand market and customer preferences, optimise revenue opportunities, and gain a competitive edge by creating relevant and in-demand products and marketing strategies. This includes adapting to new demands for immersive experiences, sustainability, and personalisation, and leveraging new technologies to operate more efficiently.
Don’t miss our 2026 Travel Trend Predictions coming soon – check back on our Resources page to be the first to receive our annual report.
Become a Hotelbeds partner to plan exclusive travel deals
By integrating Hotelbeds’ technology and booking solutions, you’ll get to access a wide range of accommodations, experiences, and transfers, automate real-time updates, and stay up-to-date with shifting traveller behaviour.
Join Hotelbeds to explore our Booking Engine and sign up for our marketing campaigns – there’s still time to join our New Year Sales campaign to start the year strong, maximise your competitive edge with thousands of in-demand hotels, and trip-enhancing experiences to position yourself as your market’s must-book distributor.
