Planning & Forecasting

No one has a crystal ball and hotel budgets often drift. Why? New suppliers, new systems, new variables (everything from crazy weather to tariffs and concert announcements) create moving targets for operators throughout the year.

What the data shows

• Seasonality is real and December is a reliable spike: 

  • The geographic differences are clear. Purchasing for Florida hotels, for example, declined in the summer months while every Northeast metro grew 20–35%. We see that Sunbelt leisure properties peak in winter/spring and Northeast urban properties peak in summer.

  • The week of December 1, 2025 was the single largest week-over-week jump of the year on Folio: +75.8%, from $2.66M to $4.67M. Nothing else on the calendar comes close. 

• Category mixes are changing fast, especially in food and beverage. One interesting example: Non-dairy makes up roughly one in five milk purchases network-wide. 

• Housekeeping is about a third of spend in every region. Stable and the single biggest category at $101M. Housekeeping continues to be a baseline anchor to plan around especially as F&B prices become more slippery.

What you can do

• Flag suppliers without contracts. Pull everything you spent last year, sort by dollars, and find the biggest suppliers with no contract behind them. Folio does this automatically for you with downloadable Usage Reports that allow you to drill down to a product level. You can use that report to work with GPOs and buyers to tighten that off-plan number. 

• Give the first week of December its own line. When December budgets are averaged out over the month you could risk being under-resourced during the surge and over-resourced when things get quiet in the weeks after the holidays. 

• Re-check per-unit assumptions on shifting categories. Preference change mix over time and inflation and tariffs are compressing margins. Use Folio to help your team see changing prices in real time and how it impacts the budget line so you can make substitutions mid month instead of the end of the quarter.