Island resorts hold the highest rates in the industry and the heaviest distribution costs

The richest markets on earth

The five highest-rate hotel markets STR tracks are all islands: St Barts at $2,518 average daily rate, then Anguilla, Turks and Caicos, Antigua and the Maldives. Hawaii banked $5.6 billion of room revenue in the year to June 2025 at a statewide rate of $367. The Maldives took a record 2.24 million visitors in 2025. Bali and Phuket are among the largest resort clusters in the world, the latter approaching 100,000 keys.

Rate is doing the work, and supply is coming

In 2025 occupancy fell in Bali, Phuket, the Cayman Islands and much of the Caribbean while rate rose. Meanwhile supply is arriving: thousands of rooms in Bali, dozens of projects in Phuket, new luxury inventory across Turks and Caicos and the Greek islands. More rooms chasing flat occupancy at $500 to $2,500 rates means the value of each incremental booking is high and the competition for it is intensifying.

Why these properties are the most intermediated

An island resort sells to source markets in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe that it has no local presence in. It cannot rely on walk-in, on local corporate accounts or on a domestic brand. Marketplaces, wholesalers and tour operators supply that reach, and the price is high: commission bands of 12 to 28 percent, plus wholesale contracts at net rates 20 to 30 percent below your best available rate, which frequently leak back onto the same marketplaces and undercut your own listing.

The result is that a resort selling a $700 room at 65 percent occupancy — roughly $166,000 per room per year — can be paying a fifth of that to the channels that filled it.

Where the money actually is

Wholesale leakage

The most common single finding in resort diagnostics is a net rate loaded years ago, resold through a chain of intermediaries, and now appearing publicly below the property's own rate. It is fixable, but only once it is traced.

The long research window

A guest booking a honeymoon nine months out reads for weeks. That window is an advantage for a property whose own pages answer the questions properly, and a liability for one that relies on a listing to do it.

Ancillary revenue

Transfers, excursions, spa and dining are usually booked after arrival at full margin. A property that captures the guest directly captures those conversations too; one that meets the guest for the first time at check-in does not.

A small, high-value guest base

Resorts have fewer guests, each worth far more. Repeat and referral are proportionally more valuable here than anywhere else in hospitality, and are usually the least worked part of the commercial model.

What we would look at first

Parity and wholesale leakage, because they leak on every booking. Then the questions your pages leave unanswered for a guest planning from six thousand kilometres away. Then measurement, because resort media budgets are large and usually flying blind through the booking-engine hop. Demand generation comes fourth, not first, which is the opposite of how most resort marketing is sold.