Luxury hotels led RevPAR growth in H1 2026 as budget brands stalled

US hotel performance in the first half of 2026 split cleanly by price tier, with luxury brands driving growth while the lower end of the market stalled. Colliers describes the pattern as a "tale of two markets" reflecting a K-shaped economy, and its midyear data names the winners and losers brand by brand.

Trailing 12-month RevPAR rose 1.8% overall, its strongest reading since May 2025, according to the report. June alone produced an 8.4% year-over-year jump, split between 6.7% growth in average daily rate and a 1.6% rise in occupancy. Every chain scale grew across the first half except economy, which posted no gain.

Luxury RevPAR rose 13.3% year over year in June, the strongest reading of any segment, a gain Colliers partly credits to the FIFA World Cup drawing high-spending travellers into US markets. Lifestyle, boutique and destination-driven brands did much of that work, with guests said to be willing to pay a premium for experience-led stays.

Which brands led the gains

IHG's Atwell Suites topped every other hotel brand for RevPAR growth in the first half, up 22.7% year over year. IHG's Kimpton Hotels followed at 15%, then Hilton's LXR Hotels & Resorts at 12.9%, The Unbound Collection by Hyatt at 12%, and Marriott's W Hotels at 10.8% to round out the top five.

The pattern repeats across all four groups named in the report. Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott and IHG each saw their upper-tier brands outperform in the first half, while their mid-market brands stopped losing ground and began to stabilise, a shift Colliers treats as the more durable story of the two.

IHG's stabilisation was concentrated in its core brands. Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express and Candlewood Suites all saw occupancy level off in the first half, according to the report, even as the group's smaller luxury and lifestyle names, Atwell Suites and Kimpton, posted the steepest gains of any brands tracked.

Marriott's mid-market brands improved through the first half too, and the group said that performance contributed to 4.6% year-over-year RevPAR growth across the United States and Canada. On an earnings call last month, chief executive Anthony Capuano said that although luxury led RevPAR growth in the second quarter, "strength was pervasive across chain scales."

Marriott is the parent of brands including JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton, and it owns W Hotels, the brand that placed fifth among the report's biggest first-half gainers. Our reference guide to the world's most luxurious hotel brands lists Marriott among the large groups, alongside Accor, Hilton and Hyatt, that own several of the segment's best-known names.

Hilton's pattern ran the opposite way to Marriott's. Excluding LXR, its mid-tier brands outpaced its luxury names in the first half, according to Colliers. In April, chief executive Chris Nassetta attributed the group's stronger-than-expected first-quarter 2026 results to what he called a "C-shaped economy," with middle and lower-income households spending more.

That divergence between Marriott and Hilton, one led by its luxury brand and one by its mid-tier brands, is itself a marker of how unevenly the K-shaped recovery is landing across a single company's portfolio. Both groups still posted overall growth, but from different ends of their brand ladders.

What the groups are doing about it

Marriott has also confirmed a strategic review of its Customer Engagement Centers, with changes intended to "better reflect how our guests interact with us across channels," according to a company spokesperson. The company did not tie the review directly to the first-half results in the material Colliers cites.

We have covered the operating philosophy behind at least one Marriott luxury property directly. Alessandro Carosio, who runs JW Marriott Venice, has described running the hotel to Marriott's international standards while grounding it in Venetian identity, with limited capacities, an on-site organic garden and zero-mile dining.

That kind of quality-over-quantity positioning, built around scarcity and place-specific experience rather than volume, is precisely the model Colliers credits for luxury's outperformance across the wider market in the first half.

Our reference guide to the world's most luxurious hotel brands also profiles Ritz-Carlton, another Marriott-owned name, alongside independent ultra-luxury houses such as Aman, Cheval Blanc and Soneva that are outside the big groups' reporting entirely and were not covered in Colliers' brand-by-brand figures.

The report gives no comparable figures for those independent operators, and Colliers' brand rankings are confined to the publicly reporting groups: Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and IHG. That leaves a gap in the picture for the ultra-luxury segment that sits above even Atwell Suites' 22.7% gain.

What the report does make clear is that the divide by price tier, rather than by brand or by geography, is the defining feature of the first half. Luxury and lifestyle brands grew fastest, mid-market brands stopped shrinking, and economy hotels were the only chain scale left with no gain to show for the period.

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