Travelers used to pick a destination first and treat the house as purely a place to sleep between activities. Kim Lalande, founder and CEO of vacation rental platform KEY.co, says guests are now choosing homes that keep the whole group under one roof for the length of the trip, curating their own private resort.
“Guests are investing more than ever in quality time together, and that’s influencing booking decisions just as much as the destination itself,” Lalande said. “While guests search by destination first, we’re seeing the quality and experience of the home become an increasingly important deciding factor once travelers begin comparing properties.”
Lalande has experienced this challenge herself. Inspired by her own frustration with spending hours planning family vacations, she founded KEY.co on the belief that travelers should spend less time managing logistics and more time making memories, and has since grown it from approximately 300 curated homes to more than 8,000 across more than 80 destinations in the United States, the Caribbean, Costa Rica, and Mexico.
KEY.co’s Summer 2026 Travel Trends data shows bookings for homes with five or more bedrooms have nearly doubled since 2024, jumping from 24% to 57% of all reservations, as guests trade smaller getaways for homes big enough to host a group. According to the data, they’re arriving in larger groups, staying longer, and filling more bedrooms per trip than they were two summers ago, a shift that shows up across nearly every number KEY.co tracks.
Multigenerational travel is driving most of the shift toward bigger bookings, as grandparents, adult children, and grandchildren are choosing one home instead of a block of hotel rooms. Homes with multiple primary suites, guest houses, and bunk rooms are in growing demand, delivering ample social space with the privacy of a hotel. Groups of friends are booking the same way, pursuing different activities by day and reconvening each evening for chef-prepared dinners. Rather than splitting across multiple hotel rooms or separate rentals, both kinds of groups are landing on the same answer: one larger home everyone shares.
Destinations such as 30A, Cape Cod, Isle of Palms, and San Diego continue to lead summer bookings, alongside mountain and lake destinations such as Telluride and Lake Tahoe, though location isn’t the only thing that matters now.
Asked to name her favorite KEY.co destination, Lalande pointed to Telluride, one of the season’s top-performing markets.
“You can hike during the day, head into town when you want to, and then come back to a beautiful home where everyone can be together,” she said. “Some of the best parts of the trip happen back at the house: everyone around the fire, dinner prepared in the kitchen, a glass of wine at the end of the day, and nowhere anyone needs to be.”
Getting there matters too, she says. The gondola is part of what makes Telluride so special: you can stay up in Mountain Village and use it as transportation into town for an afternoon of lunch and shopping or an evening out for cocktails and dinner. “There’s something pretty magical about riding over the mountain with those views instead of getting into a car,” Lalande said.
That same pull of staying under one roof, without the hassle, shows up in what guests are willing to pay someone else to handle. The number of guests booking add-on services jumped 64% year-over-year, led by grocery stocking before arrival and private chef experiences such as welcome-night dinners, poolside lunches, tasting menus, and mixology. In-home massages come in as the fourth most requested service, followed by beach rentals. For a business that started as a way to find a home, that services line is quietly becoming a business of its own: convenience has turned into its own selling point, something guests are paying KEY.co for that a plain listing site can’t offer.
“Nothing is more precious to our travelers than time,” Lalande said. “The greatest luxury today is having someone else handle the details, so they can spend that time together, uninterrupted. Guests turn to us for concierge-level support to find the perfect home and to remove the logistics from their vacation, from wellness experiences such as massages and yoga classes to culinary experiences ranging from a wine tasting presented by a local sommelier to a multi-course tasting menu prepared in the home.”
The pattern holds across KEY.co’s entire portfolio. From beach towns like Isle of Palms to mountain markets like Telluride, guests are booking a house built to hold an entire group for the length of the trip, not just a place near the water or the trailhead, and paying extra to make sure nobody has to leave to have a good time.
To explore KEY.co’s full collection of curated homes and book a private resort of your own, visit KEY.co.
