Regional visitor spending is approaching $5.7 billion and accelerating. The forces driving that growth — wellness travel, locally owned vacation rentals, and a high-value traveler seeking authenticity over amenity — deserve a closer look than legacy metrics have been giving them.
People’s Hospitality: The New Economics of Tourism in the Hudson Valley and Catskills – by Dino Alexander, Principal Broker & CEO, Alluvion Real Estate | Director, HVCRR | Director of Hospitality Experience, Alluvion Vacations | NAR Certified Resort & Second-Home Property Specialist | Contributing Author, Hudson Valley Style Magazine
The Hudson Valley and Catskills are no longer a weekend escape from New York City. They have become one of the most economically dynamic regional tourism destinations in the Northeast — and in this piece, we examine exactly what is driving that growth, who owns the hospitality infrastructure generating it, and why it matters for the communities at the center of it.
For too long, the regional tourism conversation has been organized around accommodation categories that no longer reflect how travelers actually move through the landscape. Occupancy rates at flagged hotel properties remain a useful data point. They are no longer the whole picture.
What is filling the gap — and, increasingly, driving the headline numbers — is what we are coining here as People’s Hospitality: a distributed, community-embedded hospitality economy built on wellness travel, experiential demand, and professionally managed vacation rentals owned not by corporate conglomerates but by the people who live in and love this region. Understanding these forces as a unified trend, rather than separate sectors, is the lens through which regional tourism boards and destination marketing organizations can most effectively plan, market, and advocate for the years ahead.
People’s Hospitality keeps money local. It funds the property tax base that pays for schools and infrastructure. It sustains the cultural and culinary ecosystem that makes a region worth visiting. And unlike extractive, brand-flagged lodging models that export revenue to out-of-state ownership structures, it circulates visitor dollars through the independent businesses, farms, wellness practitioners, and cultural enterprises that define a destination’s character.
The Regional Numbers Demand Attention
Hudson Valley visitor spending reached approximately $5.45 billion in preliminary 2024 reporting, up from $5.0 billion in 2023 and $4.6 billion in 2022 — a growth curve that has continued without interruption through post-pandemic normalization, with the current cycle projected to reach $5.5 to $5.7 billion. When you include the Catskills, the combined regional tourism economy represents one of the most significant economic drivers in New York State outside of New York City.
At the county level, the numbers are equally striking. In Greene County alone, visitors spent $318 million at local establishments in 2024, generating $17.5 million in county tax revenue and $115.7 million in local employment income — funding the schools, roads, and community infrastructure that define quality of life for permanent residents. At the statewide level, tourism-related industries generated $161.5 billion in real GDP in the third quarter of 2025, capturing the full multiplier effect of visitor spending across retail, food and beverage, arts, recreation, and accommodation.
The trajectory is clear. What requires closer examination is the composition of that growth — and which parts of the hospitality ecosystem are most responsible for retaining that value within the communities generating it.
Wellness Travel Is the Growth Engine the Region Has Not Yet Fully Marketed
The fastest-growing segment of domestic tourism is not adventure travel, not culinary tourism, and not heritage tourism — though the Hudson Valley and Catskills benefit richly from all three. It is wellness travel: the deliberate pursuit of physical, emotional, and psychological restoration as the primary motivation for a trip.
The Hudson Valley and Catskills are extraordinarily well-positioned to capture this demand. The combination of accessible natural landscapes, a mature farm-to-table food culture, an expanding ecosystem of medical spas, integrative wellness practitioners, yoga and movement studios, and a genuine sense of remove from metropolitan pressure creates conditions that manufactured wellness destinations cannot replicate. Authenticity is the competitive advantage, and this region has it in abundance.
What this means practically for county tourism boards is that the visitor arriving today is often not choosing between destinations based on price or convenience. They are choosing based on the coherence of a wellness experience — the sense that a place itself supports restoration. That is a marketing proposition that requires coordination across hospitality, culinary, outdoor recreation, and wellness sectors simultaneously. The workation traveler reshaping regional demand and the guest seeking experiential hospitality and local culinary culture share a consistent profile: higher discretionary spend, longer average stay, stronger local commercial engagement, and a strong preference for accommodations that feel woven into the landscape rather than imposed upon it.
The Vacation Rental Sector Is Not What the Legacy Debate Described
The policy conversation around short-term rentals has been dominated by a narrative built for New York City — where density, housing scarcity, and investor speculation created genuine concerns that resulted in some of the strictest STR regulation in the country. That narrative has been incorrectly applied to the Hudson Valley and Catskills, and the misapplication has created unnecessary friction between a sector that is actively generating local economic value and the institutional partners best positioned to amplify it.
The actual ownership profile of professionally managed vacation rentals in this region looks nothing like the speculative investor model that has dominated the debate. Nationally, over two-thirds of STR owners own only one property, and four in five use their property personally for some portion of the year. In the Hudson Valley and Catskills specifically, the profile is overwhelmingly that of the second-home owner — a New Yorker who purchased a property they love, occupies it seasonally, and has chosen professional management as the most responsible way to maintain it year-round rather than leaving it vacant for months at a time.
New York State property taxes and mortgage economics make the speculative investor thesis structurally implausible in this market. A property valued at $700,000 or above — the range that defines most professionally managed vacation rentals here — carries costs that eliminate thin-margin extraction models. These properties were never part of the affordable housing supply. Professional vacation rental management has made them part of the regional hospitality supply, with every tax implication that entails.
As of March 1, 2025, New York applies state and local sales tax to short-term rental occupancies, aligning STRs fully with traditional lodging — platforms and operators are required to collect and remit, just as hotels do. In Dutchess County, Airbnb already collects the county’s 5% hotel occupancy tax at the point of sale. This is not a loophole economy. It is the same fiscal framework as any other lodging category, contributing to the same county revenue streams that fund public services across the region.
Where People’s Hospitality Outperforms Legacy Lodging on Community Impact
The economic distinction that matters most for regional tourism strategy is not the revenue generated by any accommodation category — it is how much of that revenue remains in the community.
Tourism economics uses the term “leakage” to describe visitor dollars that exit the local economy rather than circulating through it. Vertically integrated, brand-flagged hotel properties — frequently owned by out-of-state corporations or REITs — tend to capture a disproportionate share of guest spending through on-property food and beverage, retail, and service revenue, before that spending can reach independent local businesses. The revenue appears in regional totals. Much of it departs with the ownership structure.
People’s Hospitality operates on a structurally different model. For every $100 spent on a vacation rental stay, guests spend approximately $264 on other local goods and services — groceries in Kingston and Phoenicia, dinners in Beacon and Hudson, tastings in Livingston Manor, guides in Shandaken, wellness services in Woodstock. The guest staying in a professionally managed farmhouse or cabin does not have an on-site restaurant or gift shop capturing their discretionary spend before it reaches the street. That money moves through the community. Ninety-four and a half percent of STR operators actively support locally owned businesses through purchases and direct referrals. At scale, across thousands of properties and hundreds of thousands of annual guest stays in this region, that orientation represents a meaningful structural advantage for local economic health.
We have examined this dynamic across a series of features: what responsible vacation rental operation actually requires, the professional stewardship standards now defining the regional STR market, and how locally owned stays are redefining what sustainable tourism looks like on the ground.
The Platform Is Changing Too
It is worth noting for tourism marketing professionals that the short-term rental platform landscape has shifted significantly from the version being debated in most policy conversations. Airbnb is formally relaunching its Luxe category as a clearly defined premium tier featuring vetted inventory and premium guest services, while simultaneously moving toward personalized, AI-driven discovery that rewards professionally operated properties with distinctive character over anonymous budget inventory. Since launching its updated hosting quality system in 2023, Airbnb has removed millions of low-quality listings from the platform, systematically elevating the supply standard across the board.
The vacation rental product being offered in the Hudson Valley and Catskills today is a luxury and lifestyle hospitality category competing on curation, amenity, and experiential design — not price. The same higher-income traveler segment driving strong performance in New York’s luxury and upscale hotel tier is the primary demand driver for professionally managed vacation rentals in the region. These are not different travelers making different choices. They are the same traveler choosing the most compelling experience available, regardless of accommodation category.
What This Means for Regional Tourism Strategy
County tourism boards and destination marketing organizations are sitting on a more complex and more promising tourism economy than legacy reporting frameworks have made visible. The wellness travel wave is real, accelerating, and specifically aligned with what this region offers authentically. The vacation rental sector is tax-compliant, locally embedded, community-multiplying, and serving a high-value traveler profile that aligns precisely with every sustainable tourism objective worth pursuing.
The strategic opportunity is coordination: treating wellness practitioners, independent restaurateurs, outdoor recreation operators, cultural institutions, and professional vacation rental managers as components of a single visitor experience ecosystem — the People’s Hospitality ecosystem — rather than parallel sectors pursuing separate agendas. When those sectors are marketed together, the region becomes legible to the traveler already seeking exactly what it offers. When they are siloed, the opportunity dissipates into the noise of generic destination marketing.
The regional tourism economy is evolving faster than the frameworks used to measure it. Hudson Valley Style Magazine will continue tracking that evolution — the data, the operators, the cultural forces, and the economic trends shaping what People’s Hospitality in this region actually looks like in practice. The story is already being written on the ground. We are here to tell it.
