Sojern: 90% of US Holiday Travelers Will Drive, Not Fly

I read Sojern’s holiday travel signal at 6:42 a.m. with an espresso going cold and a notebook still open from last night’s dinner shift. The number that stopped me: 90% of US holiday travelers say they’ll drive rather than fly. Not 60. Not 70. Ninety. If you run a hotel P&L between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, that one data point should restructure your morning.

Here is the contrarian read, stated up front: most revenue managers I’ve talked to this month are still pricing the holiday corridor as if it were 2023 — long stays, mixed business-leisure overlap, a usable midweek shoulder. That posture is wrong. A drive-dominated holiday means compressed length-of-stay and a business mix that’s going to disappoint the people who built October forecasts off last year’s pace report. The pricing playbook needs to flip this week, not in November.

What 90% drive really means for the folio

A driver is a different animal than a flier. Fliers commit early because air inventory punishes lateness; drivers decide on a Thursday and leave Saturday. Fliers stretch trips to amortize the airfare; drivers shorten them because the marginal cost of a return trip is gas, not a $480 reseat fee. Fliers cluster in gateway cities; drivers fan out to whatever’s within four hours of their driveway.

That reshapes the folio in three ways, all of them painful for anyone who’s been quietly relying on December business transient to plug the holiday hole.

First, length-of-stay compresses. The Sojern release (Sojern, Oct 7 2025) frames this as “cost, comfort, and closer-to-home trips” — and Noreen Henry, the CRO, points to “more intentional choices” as the throughline. Intentional, in revenue-management terms, means shorter. A two-night stay that used to be three. A long weekend instead of a soft full week between Christmas and New Year’s. If your minimum-length-of-stay restrictions still assume a 2023 pattern, you’re going to wall off bookings you actually want.

Second, the midweek dies. Drive trips concentrate on Thursday-through-Sunday. The Tuesday and Wednesday nights you used to fill with stragglers and the rare business traveler are going to sit at 40 occupancy unless you build a deliberate offer for them. That’s where the business-mix question turns ugly: corporate negotiated isn’t coming back to save your December. The drive-trip pattern Sojern is describing actively cannibalizes the few business-adjacent nights you had penciled in, because the leisure surge crowds out the midweek pricing structure you’d normally hold corporate rate against.

Third, the booking window collapses. Drivers book inside 14 days. Some of them inside 72 hours. Your forward-pace report is going to look like a flatline through mid-November and then a wall of bookings in the final 10 days before each holiday peak. If your team is still doing weekly pricing meetings, switch to daily now. Mark this — you will not catch the December curve on a Monday cadence.

The mix problem nobody is pricing for

Here’s the part where I want to push back on the prevailing wisdom in the chain hotel comp sets. Most of the brand revenue management decks I’ve seen this fall assume a stable business-transient floor through December, with leisure layered on top during the peaks. That’s the model that lets you run rate discipline midweek and yield aggressively on weekends.

A 90% drive-trip holiday breaks that model two ways. The drive segment is almost entirely leisure, which means the leisure share of room nights goes up — and the average rate per leisure room night is typically below your business-transient floor. So your mix dilutes even when your occupancy holds. Worse, the drivers who fan out to secondary markets aren’t going to your gateway-city flagships; they’re going to the suburban select-service down the road from grandma’s house. The flagship loses both the flier (who isn’t coming) and the corporate Tuesday (which never materializes against a leisure-heavy comp set).

The technology answer everyone is going to reach for is dynamic pricing models that retrain on this kind of demand shock. Marriott’s been the most public about putting AI into the rate decision — I’ll have more on what their deployment actually looks like in a forthcoming May piece — but for the next 60 days the question isn’t model architecture, it’s whether your revenue team is allowed to override the system fast enough to react to a booking window that’s halved.

What I’d do this week: rebuild the holiday calendar with two-night minimums instead of three on the peak shoulders, kill the corporate midweek floor on the secondary properties, and authorize the on-property revenue manager to move rate twice a day instead of twice a week. Sojern’s number is a gift — it’s telling you the shape of the season before the season starts. Most operators are going to miss it because the headline reads like a leisure story. It’s a margin story.

— Luca covers restaurants for TableTransfers. Tips: [email protected].