What to expect at ISTRM: Revenue Management Intelligence 2026

There are a lot of short-term rental events. Panels, pitches, keynotes, networking drinks. Some are genuinely valuable. Many are variations on the same format.

ISTRM: Revenue Management Intelligence 2026 is not that.

On Friday 25 September 2026, ISTRM and Host Planet are bringing 60 of the UK's most serious short-term rental operators, revenue managers, and data professionals together at the NatWest Accelerator Hub in Leeds for a day that has been built – deliberately and specifically – to be different.

Tickets for the event, priced £100 each, are available now – click here to get yours. Here's what you can expect on the day.

You'll start the day with data, not a welcome speech

Most events begin with a host on stage doing housekeeping. ISTRM: Revenue Management Intelligence 2026 starts before anyone takes a seat.

Attendees will arrive to find a single wall covered in real, anonymised STR performance benchmarks – RevPAN, booking pace, rate capture, and seasonal revenue curves across key markets. No explanation. No session. Just coffee and data.

The conversations begin the moment you walk in.

The opening session will make you uncomfortable (in the best way)

At 9:30am, the day officially begins with something unusual: one number.

A single, never-before-published quantification of the revenue gap in UK short-term rentals.

And then, at 9:40am, every attendee in the room completes the ISTRM Revenue Management Maturity Diagnostic – 10 questions, paper-based, individual. No preparation, no Googling.

Aggregate findings are called out in real time. The room sees itself. As the agenda puts it: "the discomfort is immediate and productive."

The content is built around real decisions, not polished presentations

Session one is a live intelligence briefing from Beyond, Title Sponsors for the event, covering five data findings most operators in the room will never have seen before – booking pace curves, rate capture efficiency by market, and the specific calendar windows where operators most commonly leave money behind. After each finding, the room benchmarks itself in real time via Mentimeter.

Session two – The Decision – is where things get interesting. Three operators each present a real revenue fork-in-the-road they faced in the last 12 months. Real numbers, real stakes. The room votes on what they would have done. Then the operator reveals the actual outcome. The gap between what the room chose and what actually happened is where the learning lives.

No conflict. No debate. Three moments of genuine revelation from operators who've already lived the scenario.

There's a speaker nobody will see coming

At 11:30am, one person nobody expected takes the stage.

Not from STR. A revenue professional from a completely different industry who has solved the same fundamental problem in a different world. Their brief: three things they do at the highest level of revenue management that the room could steal today. Fifteen minutes, three ideas, one perspective nobody in the room has heard applied to their business before.

The War Room is the centrepiece of ISTRM: Revenue Management Intelligence 2026

The War Room runs for 75 minutes and will be the day's centrepiece.

Pre-assigned teams – deliberately mixed by portfolio size and background – receive the same scenario pack: a specific, pressured, real-feeling revenue crisis with actual numbers across a fictional northern England property portfolio. Forty minutes to work through it and produce three decisions with commercial reasoning.

Each team then presents their single best decision in 90 seconds. Three judges – from Beyond, senior operators, and independent revenue managers – score on commercial logic. A live leaderboard runs on screen throughout.

The winning team gets something worth winning – and worth photographing.

Before the presentations begin, every seat gets a one-page Revenue Crisis Decision Framework, built from the best decisions in the room.

There's a session on the money you're already leaving on the table

The agenda has a working session built around one uncomfortable truth: for most operators in the room, the single largest under-managed line on the P&L is not the nightly rate – it's everything else.

Late check-out. Early check-in. Mid-stay services. Pet fees. Parking. Premium add-ons. Damage waivers. Experiences. F&B partnerships. Treated as nice-to-haves at most portfolios. Treated as managed revenue streams at the operators winning right now.

The Ancillary Revenue Management session is a structured walk through of what operators in the room actually charge, what guests actually buy, and where the conversion rates sit. The room will benchmark itself in real time on the percentage of total revenue that comes from outside the nightly rate – and what tier that puts each operator in.

For most portfolios, this is the next 10%. Nobody leaves the session without one specific add-on to test in the next 30 days.

The AI agent walkthrough is not a panel about ChatGPT

One session on the agenda wouldn't have appeared at an STR event a year ago: a live walkthrough of an AI agent built specifically for revenue management.

This isn't a panel about whether AI is overhyped, and it isn't a vendor pitch. It is a real agent running real revenue tasks live in the room – pricing pulls, comp-set monitoring, booking-pace anomaly detection, demand-signal triangulation, a flagged calendar window, a one-line recommendation written straight back into the PMS.

The room sees what the agent does, what it gets right, what it gets wrong, and where a human still has to sit in the loop. Then the conversation opens: where each operator in the room would – and wouldn't – trust an agent inside their own revenue stack today.

By the time the session closes, every attendee will have a working mental model of what an AI agent can actually do inside a revenue function in 2026, and where it still falls down.

The confessional is the session you won't forget

At 1:45pm, two operators take the stage with no moderator and no slides.

One rule: they can only talk about what went wrong. The pricing decision that cost them money. The peak season mistake. The system failure they didn't catch in time.

The agenda is precise about why this session exists: "Vulnerability from credible operators in a room of peers is the rarest thing at any industry event – and when it happens, it is unforgettable."

The agenda was written by the people in the room

Session six – The Room Decides – features a panel answering questions submitted and voted on by attendees over lunch. The brief: "What is the one revenue management question you have never heard answered honestly at an industry event?"

No preparation time. No safe answers permitted.

There's a payoff most people won't see coming

Remember that diagnostic from 9:40am?

At 2:50pm, every attendee opens a sealed envelope they received at registration. Inside: their ISTRM Revenue Management Maturity Score, their tier (Reactive, Developing, or Systematic), their rank within the room, and one specific recommendation based on their diagnostic answers.

The whole room finds out simultaneously. The morning had a payoff nobody knew was coming.

The event closes with a commitment, not a thank you

The final session isn't a summary or a sponsor shout-out. Every attendee writes one specific revenue change they will make in the next 30 days, anchored to their maturity score. Cards go on the Commitment Wall – photographed and sent to every attendee after the event.

The day ends at 3:05pm. Networking will follow.

Who is this event for?

ISTRM: Revenue Management Intelligence 2026 has 60 delegate places.

The room is built for revenue managers, multi-property operators, STR data analysts, PMS and channel leaders, and AI innovators working on the next wave of STR revenue. If data and revenue are your product, this is your audience.

Delegate tickets are £100 – click here to get yours.

Sponsor and partner opportunities

Beyond has signed up as the Title Sponsor, which leaves five Strategic Partner slots remaining. Interested in joining? Email info@hostplanet.club.

Final thought

There's a moment near the end of the day's agenda that probably sums up what ISTRM: Revenue Management Intelligence 2026 is trying to be. The closing lines read: "One call-back to the opening number and one acknowledgement of what the room has built today."

Not what the speakers delivered. What the room built.

That's the point of this event. Not passive consumption of content, but 60 serious operators in a room together, doing the work, making the decisions, and leaving with something they can act on immediately.

ISTRM: Revenue Management Intelligence 2026. Leeds, 25 September 2026.