Always On: Gen Z's Hotel Preferences

Are you finished planning your 2025 trips? We’re almost done mapping everywhere we’re going this year in my household — and that has me wondering about the travel plans of residents across the country, particularly the types of accommodations people are staying at. Luckily, we have that data at Morning Consult.

Respondents who plan to stay at short-term vacation rentals like AirBnB or VRBO in the next 3 months ended 2024 close to a series high. That’s notable, given that we typically see spikes in the months approaching and during summer time

Where does this data come from? Morning Consult's Travel & Hospitality Tracker provides pertinent data on travelers' behaviors, attitudes, and expectations. In addition to asking about accommodations, we also ask about business travel, when people’s next leisure trip is, where respondents are going and more.

Morning Consult Intelligence clients can now export this data through our Data Exports tool. You can:

• Download monthly waves of Morning Consult’s Travel & Hospitality Trend Tracker
• Choose from a list of curated audiences to slice your data exports by
• Access historical data that dates back to 2021

Go Deeper

Our industry trackers are a great way to get a pulse check on trends in industries like travel and hospitality, but we can go even deeper by looking at the key metrics for certain brands with Morning Consult Intelligence data. Last week we used the Scorecards feature to explore how Gen Zers felt about Bitcoin in major metros. This week, I want to explore what leisure travelers feel about a number of budget hotel brands. (We define leisure travelers as anyone who has traveled for leisure at least once in the last year.)

La Quinta, which has more than 900 locations across North and South America, has the highest favorability, trust and purchasing consideration amongst these more budget-friendly hotel chains. It’s the only one of these three that has a net purchasing consideration above zero. However, metrics for the others (especially Motel 6) are starting to tick up.

Let’s drill deeper into La Quinta by looking at these same metrics among various generations.

Here, we can quickly see which generations have more of an affinity towards La Quinta: older generations. The brand is currently struggling more with the youngest generation, which is not unique; Morning Consult’s other research has shown that all brands struggle a little bit to win over an infamously distrustful Gen Z.

Want to see how your own brand stacks against the different generations? Let’s talk — get in touch here.

Let’s Learn More By Asking Morning Consult AI

Now this exercise has me curious: What hotel chains are the most popular with Gen Z? I could build a custom audience, do a data export with that audience, pull up a spreadsheet and build a chart. But I’m short on time, so instead I’m going to ask Morning Consult’s AI Chat.

This query took but seconds to write, and seconds for our AI Chat to generate a response. The top 10 hotel chains by purchasing consideration amongst Gen Zers who travel for leisure at least once a year are:

• Marriott
• Hilton Hotels & Resorts
• Holiday Inn
• Hampton by Hilton
• Hilton
• Holiday Inn Express
• Hilton Garden Inn
• Courtyard by Marriott
• DoubleTree by Hilton
• Hilton Honors

Powered by over 15,000 daily interviews globally, our chatbot delivers real-time answers to even the most nuanced questions in seconds. This is a beta tool that we’re rolling out to our clients this quarter — get in touch here if you want access.