Meeting professionals are heading into 2027 with unusual confidence, according to a new report from Amex GBT. The corporate travel and meetings giant finds that planners worldwide are overwhelmingly optimistic about the year ahead — even as many prepare to change how and where they book.

The sharpest practical signal in the report is behavioral: a portion of planners say they will move meetings away from traditional hotels and into alternative venues. The driver isn't preference or style. It's cost. Faced with the expectation of higher prices on the hotel side, planners are re-engineering their venue mix the way a restaurant operator re-engineers a menu — swapping in lower-cost components rather than absorbing the increase.

That shift matters for hospitality operators because meetings and events business is high-margin group demand. When a corporate booking leaves a hotel ballroom for a warehouse, a university space or an independent venue, the hotel loses not just the room rental but the catering, the audiovisual spend and the guest rooms that ride along with the program.

What does this change for hotels?

For hotel sales teams, the message is that optimism in the meetings market doesn't automatically convert to hotel revenue. Planners expect to spend more in 2027 — and they're actively looking for ways not to. Amex GBT's findings suggest the burden will fall on hotels to defend their pricing with something other than the product itself.

The report doesn't spell out which alternative venue categories planners favor, or how large the shift will be. What it does establish is direction: cost pressure is now a stated planning assumption rather than a reaction to it. Planners are building the higher-cost environment into their 2027 strategies from the start.

For independent and non-traditional venue operators, the same data point reads as an opening. If corporate planners are formally signaling willingness to look beyond hotels, venues that can handle catering, connectivity and group logistics stand to pick up demand that hotel pricing pushes out the door.

The backdrop is a meetings market that has recovered strongly since the pandemic-era collapse, with corporate group demand among the most reliable revenue streams for full-service hotels. Amex GBT's report suggests that reliability is real — planners believe in the market — but the capture point is moving.

How hotels respond over the coming procurement cycle, particularly on group rate structure and bundled packages, will help determine whether 2027's optimism lands on their books or on someone else's square footage.