Your Average Guest Won’t Book More Than a Week in Advance

It’s a simple question, but it’s crucial for every hotelier to understand their guests’ booking timeline. To find out, we looked at global booking lead times from 2017 and 2018. We based our analysis on 12 million reservations from 600 hotels across the world. We found that nearly half—48%—of bookings made in 2018 were last minute, meaning they were booked within seven days of check-in. While this is a significant number, it actually represents a decrease of 6.25% when compared to the number of last minute bookings in 2017.

The number of last-minute bookings also varies by region. In Europe and North America, hotels see fewer last minute bookings than the global average, 37% and 40% respectively. In general, booking windows remained consistent year-over-year. Only 13% of reservations were booked more than 60 days in advance. In 2018, European hotels saw the highest percentage of long-lead booking windows, at 16%, which remains unchanged from 2017. The US and Canada only saw 15% of reservations made 60+ days in advance, down 6.67% from 2017. Only 6% of 2018 bookings in the Middle East and Africa were made 60+ days in advance.