Plan 2027 on guest mix, not rate: Toronto hotel prices forecast to rise as little as 0.5%

What’s happened.

American Express Global Business Travel — a corporate travel company that publishes an annual forecast of what hotel rooms will cost — expects room rates to rise by less than three per cent in 2027 in Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver. Toronto has the softest outlook of the five, at 0.5 to 1.9 per cent. That is a sharp change from the same forecaster’s numbers for recent years: 5.8 per cent for 2026, 3.1 per cent for 2025 and 6.7 per cent for 2024. Calgary and Ottawa sit at the top of the Canadian range, Montreal and Vancouver near the bottom. The reason is plain: enough rooms, steady demand, and no supply crunch or demand spike expected, as reported by Hotelier Magazine.

The one number moving the other way is what people buy once they choose a hotel. Fifty-eight per cent of travellers now pick a superior or luxury room over a standard room, up four percentage points in a year. The forecaster thinks leisure travellers may have taken that trade-up as far as it goes, but that companies are now pushing it, booking better rooms for staff as part of keeping and attracting people. Meanwhile international cities are still pricing up hard — as much as 12.2 per cent in São Paulo, 9.2 per cent in Madrid, 7.1 per cent in Mexico City and 5.4 per cent in London — which makes Canadian rooms look comparatively cheap to overseas eyes next year.