September 10, 2026
Errica Henke
2026 has been a mixed year for outdoor hospitality — but glamping and lodging-style sites have quietly found their footing, with fall bookings already pacing ahead of last year. Here's a look at what our data (and the wider industry) is showing.
If you’ve been following our Mid-Year Booking Trends, you already know the broader story from our Q2 2026 Data Dig: 2026 has been an uneven year for outdoor hospitality operators. Historic Southeast drought, a spring gas price surge, and tough year-over-year comparisons against an already-strong 2025 have hit some regions and property types much harder than others — while other parks have held steady or even grown.
One segment stands out across nearly every way we’ve sliced the data: glamping and lodging-style campsites.
For the full picture of how 2026 has played out across regions and property types, our Mid-Year Booking Trends post is the place to start. This post picks up from there and goes deep on one specific thread: how lodging-style sites in particular are performing against the broader market.
Rather than lean on a single point-in-time snapshot, we pulled a cleaner comparison: parks categorized as Glamping Resorts (50%+ of sites are glamping-style) against RV Resorts and Seasonal/Long-Term Campgrounds with no glamping inventory at all, filtered to only include parks that were active on our platform in both comparison years.
The pattern is consistent: over the past full year, glamping resorts grew on every measure we track, including a 10% year-over-year gain in revenue per available site, while RV resorts and seasonal/long-term campgrounds slipped on most of those same measures, including a 2% decline in revenue per available site. Glamping resorts also command a substantially higher average daily rate — more than four times higher than RV/seasonal parks — which goes a long way toward explaining why they’re generating more revenue per available site even without filling every one of them.
That growth held up through most of 2026 as well. Looking at site-nights booked month by month, glamping resorts outgrew traditional parks in the large majority of months we have data for so far this year, including several months of triple-digit year-over-year growth early on, with the gap especially pronounced earlier in the year before narrowing some through the summer.
Some of this comes down to how each site type interacts with this year’s specific headwinds. The historic Southeast drought triggered fire restrictions and campfire bans that hit the outdoor “curb appeal” of tent and RV sites directly — dry, brown landscapes and suppressed activities like fishing and hiking. A guest staying in a well-appointed cabin or glamping structure experiences very little of that.
The gas price story: guests booking glamping resorts travel a meaningfully shorter distance to get there — an average of 251 miles (about 4.2 hours) — compared to 386 miles (6.3 hours) for guests booking RV resorts and seasonal/long-term campgrounds. Shorter trips mean less exposure to a 38% year-over-year spike in gas prices, which likely explains at least part of why glamping demand held up better through the spring price shock.
Length of stay tells a related story. Glamping stays skew notably shorter with 64% of glamping reservations being one or two nights, compared to 48% for RV and seasonal stays. That’s consistent with glamping functioning more like a boutique hotel getaway than an extended outdoor trip, which may make it less sensitive to some of the same cost and planning pressures facing longer, more logistically involved camping trips this year.
Here’s a data point worth knowing if you’re planning fall marketing right now: aggregate forward booking pace — across all site types, platform-wide (U.S. and Canada) — is trending positive for exactly the stretch our Fall Booking Playbook targets. Looking at occupancy on the books for the next 12 months compared to the same point last year, September through December 2026 is pacing 3–4% ahead of where it was at this time last year, a meaningfully better trend than the softer pacing we’re seeing further out into the winter and spring of 2027.
Given everything above — lodging capturing more occupancy, more revenue per available site, and rising guest interest than any other category so far this year — it’s a reasonable read that lodging inventory is well positioned to capture its share of that fall demand, and likely more than its share. If your park has any lodging inventory, this fall looks like a good window to make sure it’s marketed to capture that momentum.
Regional performance for lodging sites varies widely, which is itself a useful data point — it means this isn’t a story about one hot region carrying the whole category. Sunbelt parks post the strongest lodging occupancy of any region we tracked, at 82.7%, while the Frontier, Midwest, and Northeast regions command the highest average daily rates, several exceeding $150 and Northeast topping $213.
Growth wasn’t uniform, either — and that’s worth saying plainly rather than glossing over. The Midwest posted the strongest rate growth of any region, with average daily rate up 45% year-over-year, even as its occupancy pulled back 26%. Pacific Northwest saw a milder version of the same trade-off: occupancy down a modest 5%, but rate down a steeper 30%. Frontier’s rate also declined, down 20% year-over-year. Northeast and Sunbelt were the clearest bright spots on occupancy, up 2% and 14% respectively. The takeaway: strong average performance across the category doesn’t mean every region is growing the same way, or even growing at all — some regions gained occupancy, some gained rate, and some saw both slip at once.
The takeaway: strong lodging performance shows up across a range of climates and geographies, but it isn’t universal, and a handful of regions are doing most of the heavy lifting on the growth side specifically.
External research backs up what we’re seeing on our own platform. The global glamping market is valued at roughly $4.2 billion in 2026, with most analysts projecting compound annual growth in the 9.5–10.7% range through the early 2030s — several times the growth rate of the broader hotel industry in mature markets. North America is cited as the fastest-growing region globally, even though Europe currently holds the larger revenue share.
Beyond the raw numbers, it’s worth knowing what operators and industry researchers are reporting about how glamping properties are winning guests this year. A few patterns showing up repeatedly in recent industry research and conference discussion:
Speaking of where the outdoor hospitality industry gathers to talk through these kinds of insights, our team will be at the Glamping Show Americas, September 29–30 in Aurora, Colorado. If you’re an operator seeking to learn more about the glamping market, it’s one of the best rooms in the industry to do that in, you can register here. We’d love to see you there, so please stop by booth 223 and say hello.
Our data suggests that guest appetite for unique, comfort-forward outdoor stays has held up well in a year when a lot of other segments have struggled — and it’s showing some of its strongest forward momentum in exactly the fall window many operators are planning for right now.
For operators already thinking about diversifying their site mix, that’s a useful data point to bring into the conversation. For everyone else, it’s simply good context for understanding where the broader industry is heading this fall.
Sources: Campspot platform performance analysis, 2026 (by site category, region, and forward booking pace); Fortune Business Insights, Glamping Market Size Report 2026; Glamping Show Americas, “Beyond the Data: Unlocking 2025’s Glamping Industry Insights” conference session, 2025.
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