By Joe Watkins, Head of AI at Journey
There is a point each evening when most hotel commercial teams have finished for the day, but the same cannot be said of their guests, who are still researching weekends away, comparing rooms, considering spa treatments and deciding whether to add dinner, Champagne or another extra to their stay.
The data we see at Journey suggests that this behaviour is more commercially significant than hotels may realise. In 2025, almost a quarter of spa orders made through Journey-powered ecommerce were placed outside normal working hours, yet those bookings accounted for more than a third of revenue.
That matters because it suggests after-hours demand is not simply about convenience. Guests are not only continuing to browse and buy when hotel teams are offline; they are also generating a disproportionately high share of revenue.
For hotels, that raises an important question: if guests are ready to spend at 9 p.m. or 10 p.m., is the digital experience ready to respond?
Hospitality demand does not follow a timetable
One of the most revealing things about ecommerce data is how little guest behaviour conforms to the traditional rhythms of hotel operations. People browse when they have time, make decisions when intent is highest and often complete purchases well outside the hours when a reservations, spa or commercial team would normally be available.
That demand is not confined to one time of day, or even one part of the week. Sunday was the most popular day for guests to make online table reservations, with 14,140 reservations placed, compared with 12,932 on Thursday.
The broader growth in digital transactions points in the same direction. Across Journey-powered ecommerce, revenue processed through the platform increased 16% from Q1 2025 to Q1 2026, while online orders and bookings rose 13%, from 110,315 to 125,402.
Spa bookings alone increased from 70,214 to 86,489 over the same period, a rise of roughly 23%, showing that guest appetite to research and purchase experiences online is continuing to grow.
Guests are willing to add more
The products guests add to their bookings are equally revealing because they show that the opportunity extends well beyond the initial reservation.
Guests are buying breakfast, spa access and treatments, but they are also adding Prosecco, Champagne, afternoon tea, chocolates, hampers, rose petals, robes, cocktails, spa products and treatment upgrades such as hot stones, LED masks and foot masks.
That behaviour has a measurable commercial impact. Revenue from spa and room extras increased by around 18%. In Q1 alone, extra revenue rose in 2025 by approximately 25%.
This is useful because it tells us guests are not necessarily resistant to spending more. The bigger question is whether the right option is being presented at the right moment, in a way that feels relevant to the stay they are planning.
A guest booking a spa break, for example, is likely to respond differently to a family booking during the school holidays, while someone arriving tomorrow may need very different prompts from somebody travelling in three months.
The next step is understanding intent
There is a tendency to reduce the hospitality AI conversation to chatbots or automated customer service, but the more valuable opportunity may be in helping hotels interpret behavioural signals and use them to merchandise more intelligently.
The goal should not be to place every possible extra in front of every guest. It should be to understand which products are most relevant at a particular point in the journey, based on factors such as timing, stay type, booking behaviour and the products that similar guests tend to purchase.
The data is beginning to show us not simply what guests buy, but when they are most receptive to buying it. Over time, AI can help hotels identify those patterns and move away from static lists of extras towards an ecommerce experience that responds more intelligently to intent and context.
There is still significant demand being lost
The opportunity becomes even clearer when conversion and abandonment are considered together.
In 2025, website-to-purchase conversion was 5.66%, rising to 8.72% for spa and 7.79% for rooms according to our data. At the same time, total checkout abandonment stood at 37.34%, with room checkout abandonment reaching 40%.
That gap matters. Guests are clearly willing to transact online, but a significant amount of intent still disappears before the purchase is completed.
The next phase of hotel ecommerce should therefore be less about simply putting more products online and more about understanding how people actually behave: when they buy, what they add, where they drop out and which offers are most likely to be useful at that moment.
The after-hours spa data offers a glimpse of why this matters. When almost a quarter of orders can account for more than a third of revenue, valuable demand is already arriving when many hotel teams are not available to capture it manually.
For hotels, the opportunity is to build an ecommerce experience that reflects how guests actually behave: always available, responsive to context and increasingly able to recognise when someone is most likely to buy.