This post is also available in:
From filling quieter periods to increasing F&B spend and creating demand beyond the room, events are becoming a more important part of the commercial conversation for hotels.
For years, events and entertainment have often sat on the softer side of hotel strategy. A DJ by the pool, a band in the bar or a special dinner might improve the guest experience, give the marketing team something to talk about and make a busy weekend feel more memorable, but they were rarely discussed in the same breath as occupancy, ADR or distribution.
That distinction is becoming harder to maintain.
Hotels are operating in a market where simply generating more bookings is not always the easiest route to growth. At the same time, travellers are increasingly choosing where and when to travel around experiences, events and the promise of something memorable. The result is that an event can do much more than entertain the guests who are already in the building. It can help create the demand that brings them there in the first place.
For a hotel, that changes the question from “Should we put something on?” to “Could an event help this part of the business perform better?”
The commercial focus is moving from volume to value
There is a useful shift taking place in the French hotel market. D-EDGE’s analysis of hotel distribution in France found that growth in booking volumes has slowed substantially, while the value generated from those bookings has continued to rise. Between 2024 and 2025, booking volumes increased by 2.3%, while booking revenue grew by 8.4%.
In other words, the commercial opportunity is increasingly about extracting more value from each stay rather than relying indefinitely on higher volumes.
That does not simply mean pushing room rates upwards. It also means thinking about what happens once the guest arrives and how much of the property is actually generating revenue.
A guest who checks in, leaves for dinner and spends the rest of the evening elsewhere has a very different value to a guest who has drinks at the hotel, stays for dinner and returns to the bar because something worth staying for is happening there.
The same applies to the building itself. Hotels contain restaurants, terraces, lounges, gardens, rooftops, bars and event spaces that can have audiences and revenue potential entirely separate from the bedrooms.
That makes events interesting not because every hotel needs entertainment, but because they can help activate parts of a property that already exist.
Events can create demand where demand is weak
This is perhaps the most compelling part of the argument.
Booking.com’s 2026 European Accommodation Barometer found that 50% of accommodation businesses surveyed had benefited from event-driven travel during the previous 12 months. Among those businesses, 66% reported improved revenue per room and 60% said events had helped increase bookings during periods that would normally experience lower demand. Booking News
That matters because hotels have traditionally approached weaker periods in fairly predictable ways. Drop the rate. Create a package. Increase paid media. Push an offer through the database.
Those things still have their place, but they are ultimately trying to make the existing product more attractive.
An event can do something slightly different: it can create a reason for the trip itself.
There is a significant distinction between telling someone that a room is 15% cheaper on Thursday and giving them a reason to want to be there on Thursday.
A monthly live session, chef collaboration, comedy night, wellness weekend, local food event or music residency can turn an otherwise unremarkable date into something with its own identity. In that sense, events begin to behave much more like a demand-generation tool than a traditional hotel amenity.
People are increasingly travelling because something is happening
The behaviour on the traveller side supports the same idea.
SiteMinder’s Changing Traveller Report 2026 found that 63% of travellers are more likely to travel for a special event, with event-led travellers also prepared to book earlier, travel further and pay more for those occasions. SiteMinder
Accor’s research into experiential travel goes further still. Its 2026 study found that 89% of travellers believe live events make travel worthwhile, while 72% place greater value on access to unique experiences than on traditional loyalty perks. One quarter of travellers surveyed would even like to begin searching for trips according to the mood they want rather than the destination they have chosen. group.accor.com
That last point is particularly interesting for hotels.
Hospitality marketing has traditionally revolved around destination first. A traveller decides to go to Paris, Courchevel or Provence and then searches for somewhere to stay.
Experience-led travel can reverse some of that journey. Someone may begin instead with the idea that they want a sociable weekend, a particular food experience, live music, wellness or simply somewhere with a certain atmosphere.
That gives a hotel an opportunity to become part of the reason for travelling rather than merely the place where the traveller sleeps once the destination has already been chosen.
The room is no longer the only product
This is where event strategy starts to overlap with total revenue management.
A hotel’s bar does not only have to serve residents. Its restaurant does not only have to feed room guests. A terrace can attract locals. A rooftop can have its own following. An event space can introduce people to the property long before they ever consider booking a room.
An event can therefore create value in several places at once.
Someone may attend a live night without staying at the hotel and spend in the bar or restaurant. They may return later for another event. They might enquire about a birthday, wedding or company party. They might recommend the property to visiting friends. They may eventually become a hotel guest themselves.
Equally, an existing resident might simply spend more of their evening within the property because the hotel has given them a reason not to leave.
None of those outcomes is captured particularly well by asking how much the bar made during the two hours that a band was playing.
The more useful question is: what additional commercial value did the event create across the property?
The local audience deserves more attention
One of the more interesting hospitality opportunities is also sitting outside the hotel’s resident guest list.
Mastercard’s 2026 European research, based on more than 27,000 consumers, found that 60% are prioritising offline experiences to counterbalance time spent online and 59% say they value experiences more than ever. It also found that 57% are prepared to pay more for activities that support local businesses. Mastercard
That appetite creates an obvious opportunity for hotels capable of becoming part of the social life around them.
A property with a strong bar, terrace or restaurant does not need to think of its audience only in terms of room keys. Locals can provide repeat F&B business, bring visiting friends, recommend the property and help a hotel feel connected to its destination rather than separated from it.
For resort hotels in particular, that distinction can be powerful. A hotel bar used exclusively by residents tends to feel like a hotel bar. A space used by residents, locals, chalet guests and visitors staying elsewhere starts to feel like part of the resort.
Events are one way of opening that door.
An event can also be a marketing asset
There is another commercial benefit that is easy to undervalue because it sits partly outside the P&L of the event itself.
Hotels need a constant supply of reasons to communicate.
The room can be photographed. The restaurant can be photographed. The spa can be photographed. At some point, however, the marketing team has shown people what the hotel looks like.
Events create movement and stories.
A single well-conceived event can produce the announcement, artist or partner content, email campaign, photography, video, guest-generated content, local listings, PR opportunities, social posts and follow-up material for the next edition.
That means the event is not simply an expense attached to one night. It can generate the raw material for weeks of hotel marketing.
This becomes especially useful when the event itself has an identity. A recurring Sunday session or monthly live night is much easier to market than repeatedly announcing that “something is happening in the bar tonight”. Recognition compounds over time.
It can also create something an OTA cannot
Online travel agencies remain indispensable to hotel distribution, but they also make it very easy for the customer to compare one property with the next.
A room is reduced to location, photographs, reviews, amenities and price.
Events provide hotels with something much more difficult to commoditise.
An OTA can sell your room. It cannot recreate the particular Friday night people associate with your hotel, the resident artist on your terrace, the local food festival you host every autumn or the cultural collaboration that has become part of the property’s identity.
That distinction matters because these experiences can create brand-led demand.
Someone starts searching for the property because they want what is happening there rather than discovering the property simply because it appeared between two competitors in a search result.
That does not make events a replacement for an OTA strategy, of course. It makes them one potential way of giving the hotel something distinctive enough to generate its own interest.
The most valuable event may be on your quietest night
The temptation is often to put the largest entertainment budget behind the busiest dates.
New Year’s Eve needs something special. So does Christmas. So might the busiest Saturday in August.
But commercially, those are not always the most interesting opportunities.
If the hotel would have been full anyway, the event may improve the experience without creating much incremental room demand. Likewise, if a bar is already packed on Saturday night, spending significantly more to attract additional customers may deliver limited additional value.
The greater opportunity can be somewhere else in the calendar.
Perhaps the restaurant performs brilliantly from Friday to Sunday but Thursday is consistently weak. Perhaps the terrace fills naturally during the afternoon but empties at 19:00. Perhaps occupancy drops sharply during a particular shoulder-season weekend.
Those gaps are where an event strategy can become particularly useful.
The commercial brief then becomes much clearer: we are not looking for entertainment because entertainment would be nice. We are trying to change the performance of this specific time, space or audience.
That is a far better starting point.
Not every event needs to be large
The word “event” can make this strategy sound far more expensive and complicated than it needs to be.
A revenue-generating event does not have to mean building a stage, selling 500 tickets and hiring security.
For one property, the right answer might be a weekly duo on the terrace. For another it could be a monthly chef collaboration, a jazz residency, a tasting series, a rooftop DJ session, comedy, an art partnership or a small programme tied to local culture.
The scale matters less than the purpose.
If thirty additional local customers regularly choose the hotel bar because of a recognisable Thursday concept, that may be considerably more valuable than one enormous launch party that never happens again.
The best concepts are often those that can be repeated without creating an operational headache each time.
Which brings us to the part nobody puts in the Instagram Reel
Events create work.
Artists need coordinating. Equipment needs installing. Technical riders appear. Staff schedules change. Marketing assets need producing. Neighbours and noise restrictions may need considering. Somebody has to know when the entertainment starts, where everyone loads in and what happens if something goes wrong.
That matters in an industry already under pressure from staffing and profitability.
An event might generate additional revenue and still be the wrong idea if the operational cost of delivering it is disproportionate.
For hotels, scalability therefore matters just as much as creativity. A good event concept should work with the property rather than constantly fighting its operations.
That is why repeatable formats can be so effective. Once the production, timings, artists, staffing and marketing rhythm have been established, a weekly or monthly event becomes much easier to operate than reinventing the wheel every time.
The commercial calculation has to include management time as well as artist and production costs.
Measure the whole impact, not just the bar tab
If events are going to be treated as a revenue strategy, they should be measured like one.
That does not mean every event needs an enormous dashboard. It means deciding in advance what it is supposed to accomplish.
An event designed to improve a quiet Thursday should be compared with comparable Thursdays. A weekend intended to stimulate room demand should be assessed against occupancy, rate and booking patterns. A local bar concept might be better judged through F&B revenue, non-resident customers and repeat attendance.
Depending on the objective, useful measures can include room nights, ADR or RevPAR around event dates, incremental F&B revenue, average spend, non-resident footfall, dwell time, direct website traffic, email sign-ups, social engagement, repeat customers and private-event enquiries.
The key is not to use every metric. It is to choose the ones that match the commercial problem the event was intended to solve.
A full room looks great. A full room that would have been full anyway tells you much less.
Start with the problem, not the DJ
This is probably the biggest difference between having events and having an event strategy.
If the conversation begins with “we should book a DJ”, you’ve already chosen the solution before defining the problem.
A more useful conversation sounds like this:
Thursday isn’t performing. The terrace loses customers too early. Residents leave after dinner. November occupancy is difficult. The bar has no local audience. The hotel needs more reasons to communicate directly with past guests.
Once that issue is clear, the creative solution becomes easier to design.
Sometimes the answer will be live music. Sometimes it might be food, comedy, wellness, sport, art or collaboration with another local business. Sometimes the hotel may discover that an event is not actually the most effective solution at all.
That distinction is important because successful event strategy isn’t about filling a calendar.
It is about using experiences deliberately to influence commercial performance.
From an amenity to a revenue strategy
The data increasingly supports the shift.
Half of the European accommodation businesses surveyed by Booking.com say they have already benefited from event-driven travel, and many of those businesses associate it with stronger revenue per room and improved demand during quieter periods. SiteMinder finds that almost two-thirds of travellers are increasingly willing to travel for special events, while Accor’s research points towards a much broader appetite for memorable experiences as part of the reason people travel at all. Booking News
For hotels, this does not mean every unused corner needs a DJ booth.
It means events deserve to be considered alongside the other tools used to generate demand and increase guest value.
A well-designed event can make a quiet date more desirable, activate an underused space, bring non-residents into the property, keep existing guests there for longer, create months of marketing material and give people a reason to seek out one particular hotel.
That is much more than an amenity.
It is a commercial lever.
Building events around the property, not the other way around
At Piste Productions, some of the most useful conversations we have with hotels start long before anyone talks about a particular artist or act.
They start with the property itself: which areas are performing, which aren’t, when the quieter periods occur, who the hotel wants to attract and what kind of experience fits the brand.
From there, an event can be built around an actual objective rather than simply added to the calendar.
Because the interesting question for hotels is no longer just “What entertainment should we put on?”
It is:
“What could we create here that gives people another reason to come, stay, spend and return?”
