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Ask Alibaba, Not Google.200 million. That's how many AI-native orders ran through Alibaba's Qwen app during Spring Festival alone. Fliggy's AI-driven bookings jumped 800% year-over-year in that same window, with attraction-ticket conversion now matching OTAs that have run for two decades.

Google's agentic booking will flourish if its conversational AI collapses hours of travel research into simple, secure Google Pay transactions backed by major hotel and OTA partners. However, it will fizzle if consumer anxiety over high-cost bookings prevents users from trusting an AI agent without traditional visual validation, or if strict global regulations like the EU's DMA permanently limit its market footprint.

I believe “this time is different.” Both “Book on Google” and agentic booking are not MoR and instead route bookings to the end service providers (OTA or direct). So clearly, the question is why would travelers be comfortable “submitting” bookings directly to AI, but not BoG?With BoG, Google tried to close the loop and become a semi-transactional layer.

Over the years, I’ve seen that the most successful technology partnerships rarely start with technology. They start with a clear understanding that change is needed and a shared vision for where the organization wants to go. The hotel groups that get the greatest value from technology are usually those that are willing to challenge the status quo and bring the right people together to make informed decisions.Equally important is leadership.

This resonates deeply after decades in hospitality technology. The strongest outcomes come from genuine partnerships—not merely contracts.As a P&L owner, I’ve seen that distinction from both sides. Some clients generate meaningful revenue but create a disproportionate drain on resources or dominate a roadmap in ways that do not serve the broader customer community.

In my experience running a boutique technology firm, choosing the right client matters as much as the client choosing the right vendor. Our scarcest resource is not scale. It is attention.The clients we go the extra mile for are clear about the problem they are solving, give us the real decision-makers, decide with discipline, and treat the relationship as a partnership rather than a transaction.

Hoteliers have told us for years that they have huge amounts of data, but in separate systems. The core issue is that each tool runs on its own data set and doesn't play nice with others. Your PMS is working with one set of numbers and your channel manager with another.That's partly because connecting these systems is nobody's job.

The general malaise that the industry maintains when it comes to doing the hard work of technology and data structure.This is the one initiative that is almost always pushed down the road. Largely because people hope someone else will do it.

I spoke about this topic on HEDNA's stage in Lisbon a couple of weeks back, on how AI is redrawing hotel distribution. Knowing that 79% of what AI knows about a hotel comes from OTAs, metasearch, and editorial sources — and not from the hotel itself, which only accounts for 7.5% — I believe we can agree that AI is filling the gap with third-party data.

A focus on employee well-being can translate to reduced turnover and burnout. Middle management needs to be provided training and education as well as experiences that enables them to be continually learning and growing. Managers and front-line leaders need knowledge, experiential learning opportunities, application practice time plus learning tools that focus on decision making to help create better work environments.

Supervisors and department heads are the bridge between executives and frontline employees. They may indeed be the most consequential leadership layer because they must translate policies, staffing decisions, service standards, and culture into actual workplace practices.

This is what happens when organisations treat people as numbers on a spreadsheet. Line and middle managers absorb some of the most demanding aspects of hospitality work: pressure from senior leaders and owners, the emotional needs of their teams, and the expectations, and sometimes unacceptable behaviour of customers.Good hospitality companies do exist, and many understand this reality.

A good website/ digital marketing, a decent loyalty offer, and a solid booking engine are essential for all hotels to keep a meaningful share of guest relationships. The role of the OTA should be to bring new guests to a hotel.

The debate suffers from oversimplification. First-party data is strictly contextual to the operational stage being executed—no single entity holds complete ownership.Digital Discovery & Booking: OTAs capture top-of-funnel acquisition data for indirect channels.

It is neither myth nor luxury; it is the precondition for controlling a hotel's own commercial destiny.The "myth" argument conflates two failures. Yes, most hoteliers have underinvested in direct channels for decades, and that failure lies with the industry, not the OTAs.

The percentage is the wrong question. Strategy is the right one. Throwing 6% at marketing without a plan wastes 6%. Spending 2% with clear priorities and discipline beats it every time. Here's what matters more than the number: Where are travelers actually finding you today?

I’d encourage hoteliers to approach budgeting from a slightly different direction. Every reservation that comes from an OTA costs 15% to 18%… or more. And too many hotels receive too large a share of their revenues from OTAs. Consider a very conservative example.

Let's take a step back. Before diving into traditional budget allocation, given travelers' growing openness to adopting AI-enabled services (over 70%, according to Accenture's 2026 study), hotel properties should start considering Agentic AI as a primary customer acquisition channel.What does customer acquisition via Agentic AI look like?

From my experience leading spa and wellness teams, confidence grows when team members understand what is expected, receive the right training and tools, and know their leaders will support thoughtful decisions.In hospitality, employees must often respond in the moment.

A phrase I use to govern any project and life in general is: "Show me the incentive, I'll show you the incentive."The simple fact that we have KPIs often means we try to optimize for those KPIs as a proxy for the guest experience, but it ends up being a facsimile.

Sustainable hospitality excellence begins at the top. Leaders must align around a clear mission and values and visibly walk the talk. Culture is not what appears on a wall; it is what colleagues experience through inclusion, recognition, support, communication and accountability.Empower people to make decisions in the interest of guests and colleagues within sensible guardrails, and recognize the small wins.

I see AI as a tool, not a strategy in itself. Today, its greatest value for us is business intelligence: helping our teams analyze information faster, identify patterns, challenge assumptions and give owners better insight into performance.

The AI conversation has now evolved beyond experimentation and into practical application. AI has the potential to reshape how capital is deployed across a hotel; from cost estimation and value engineering to project scheduling, risk management, design and operational decisions.

Chris Nassetta was right to call this AI’s “early days.” However, we are seeing consistent evidence that shows great promise for owners and operators.First, AI improves data consolidation and presentation. For decades, we have been trying to organize and bring data into clear, actionable reports.

After years of sitting on the buying side of these conversations, five things matter most to me. First, prove you understand hotel operations. Not in theory, but in how your solution performs at 2 a.m. when a system goes down and guests are waiting at the front desk.

Operational fit, clean integration, solid data protection, and measurable value across our properties and markets — that's the minimum expectation. Beyond those fundamentals, here's what, in my view, signposts the start of a genuine partnership: Show us the product.

From our perspective, before we seriously consider a technology vendor, we expect the vendor to demonstrate the following: Clear understanding of hotel operations and the business problem being solved.The solution must address a defined operational, commercial, guest-experience, or compliance challenge.

Not true! The first rationale is that SEO now has significant overlap with AEO and GEO in terms of helping serve all the channels that will be important for AI travel search visibility. So, a focus on what drives SEO will inevitably aid in AI-driven hotel recommendations and, in the future, AI bookings.Next is the argument against SEO as a 'set it and forget it' exercise.

GEO builds on top of SEO, so SEO is not dead.I think that Search (Google) helps with Research and Planning, not necessarily Inspiration. I agree that Inspiration often lives in different areas, ie Social. I don't think people use OTAs for Inspiration, either.

I think that there may be some truth here, but I’d draw a different conclusion. First of all, maybe we have historically given SEO too much credit for branded organic traffic. If someone discovers a hotel through Instagram, Booking.com or a friend and then Googles the property name and books direct, SEO didn’t necessarily create that demand; it helped capture it.