We all talk about personalization, but I worry that we lack a common and agreed definition of the term - a definition that is crucial if we are to deliver on the personalization promise.
The problem isn't that personalization fails on property. The problem starts much earlier: we still don't speak the right language of guest experience in the digital space. Take booking. A traveler may want a big bed, a walk-in shower, and a quiet location.
Online personalisation is easy, as it's mostly a pattern-matching algorithm between known guest preferences and available services. It isn't personalisation, rather just mass customisation. On property, a guest walking around is essentially anonymous, even after checking in.
This is a question at the heart of hospitality’s digital transformation. Hotels excel at digital personalisation (curated offers, smooth booking, and tailored communications) because online, data is structured, accessible, and actionable.
Millennials and Gen Z are inheriting a world where everything costs more. Housing, food, even free time come at a higher price. There's less money left for travel, so when they do travel, it has to matter. They're careful with budgets, but when they spend, they spend with purpose. They'll trade frequency for depth, choosing one meaningful trip over several forgettable ones.
Aksaya Estates Limited has signed an agreement with Marriott International to bring Courtyard by Marriott to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi. Slated to open in 2027, the Courtyard by Marriott Nairobi Airport will enhance the hospitality offerings at Kenya's key international gateway, providing guests with an elevated experience to optimise work, relax and make the most of their stay.
The end of the hyperlink economy may very well also mean the end of Google domination. Owning 92% of online searches worldwide, Google has long been in a quasi-monopoly situation, but this is shifting quickly, as people are catching on the ease of using LLM for search purposes: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Mistral, Deepseek...
The Fundamentals Stay the Same Discovery may shift from hyperlinks to AI answers, but advertising still rests on the basics: segmentation, targeting, positioning, and brand building. These don"t vanish when the funnel compresses — they adapt.
The investment won't be any less; maybe more. The search landscape, whatever its form, will inevitably migrate back to Google, a shift that the introduction of Gemini inside the browser will only accelerate. If the OTA model is truly sidelined, Google may look to take a significant portion of that revenue stream for itself.
WildPlaces Africa - renowned for its exceptional collection of camps and lodges and some of the most immersive and unique wildlife experiences in Uganda - is proud to announce the opening of Kulu Ora, its newest lodge and seventh addition to the WildPlaces portfolio, in early 2026. With Uganda Airlines' new direct international flights (London Gatwick to Entebbe), it has never been easier to experience the Pearl of Africa.
IDeaS recently held its annual client conference Converge with the theme of "Bold Moves, Big Impact: A New Era in Hospitality"
The "right time, right place" mantra has always been complete nonsense to me. It treats humans like logical machines, as if only the left side of their brain exists, ignoring emotion and gut feeling, which is what ultimately drives decisions.
If the real question is about skills, mindset, and capabilities, then here's my take: Skills: a Revenue Manager today must think strategically, not just tactically. Revenue management is about defining where the business should go in terms of product and revenue in the next 3–5 years.
A broader skill set — especially in marketing — is becoming increasingly beneficial. Since specialized tasks can now be handled perfectly by AI, commercial roles are moving closer together. This shift makes broad, cross-functional skills more important than ever.
The Revenue Manager we need today looks very different from the one many hotels still have in place. The role can no longer be defined by Excel spreadsheets and static reports. The markets move too fast, the data is too complex, and the opportunities are too big to leave in the hands of manual processes.
Great Plains, the iconic African eco-tourism organisation founded by National Geographic filmmaker-explorers Dereck and Beverly Joubert, is delighted to announce the opening of the first of two new exclusive-use villas at Mpala Jena, near Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Mpala Jena Private Villas is located five kilometers upstream from the main property, with the two new exclusive-use villas sleeping up to six adults - or four adults and three children - in three luxurious suites. The second villa will open in November.
Club Med, the pioneer of premium all-inclusive holidays, is set to make its debut in South Africa with the launch of Club Med South Africa Beach & Safari, located on the breathtaking Dolphin Coast of KwaZulu-Natal. Scheduled to open in July 2026, with sales commencing in October 2025, this project is the country's first high-end all-inclusive resort, combining the best of beachside relaxation and exclusive Big Five safari adventure.
The debate over proprietary vs. open AI is a symptom of a deeper issue: whether hospitality is willing to collaborate to truly move forward together. At Alliants, the path is open—not about building walled gardens. Distrust of tech vendors has pushed many large hotel brands to build in-house, often because people weren"t listening to one another openly. Innovation rarely happens in a closed room.
When it comes to where our Distribution landscape is headed - it's not even a question. Of course uniting our efforts is the only way to go. Otherwise we'll lose another OTA battle. But there's much more to the world of AI functionalities, it has its tenticles in every part of our tech ecosystem, not distribution alone.
I think we are in danger of running before we can walk here. MCP is Anthropic’s pitch for an open standard to let "agentic AI" bots built on next-word LLMs share data, for example, an OpenAI bot talking to a Gemini bot. Unless you are Marriott or Hilton with hundreds of in-house developers, or a big OTA like Expedia or Booking.com, this really isn’t something you need to worry about.
You could establish your own protocols instead of MCP, A2A, or other widely endorsed standards for agentic interactions. But that would be like creating your own version of HTTP. Not a great idea. The good news is I don't think companies feel the need to change that basic agent-friendly plumbing.
Renowned South African fashion designer and LVMH Prize winner Thebe Magugu is partnering with Mount Nelson, A Belmond Hotel, Cape Town, to launch the THEBE MAGUGU SUITE and MAGUGU HOUSE CAPE TOWN this December. The partnership - which marks Thebe Magugu's debut into luxury hospitality and Belmond's first Designer Residence concept - brings Thebe's distinctive Afro-modernist vision to one of Cape Town's most iconic hotels. It also underscores Mount Nelson's commitment to championing contemporary African culture while providing a space for the continent's next generation of creative visionaries.
The Tourism Investment Forum, hosted by the Government of South Africa, brought together global tourism leaders to explore investment opportunities in South Africa and across the African continent. Highlighting South Africa's vibrant tourism sector, which welcomed nearly 9 million international visitors and 47 million domestic trips last year, contributing over 12% to national GDP, the Forum underscored the country's role as a gateway for regional tourism development.
The luxury hospitality environment is dynamic and often unpredictable, requiring leaders to navigate challenges, whether it's adjusting to changing guest expectations, managing a diverse team, or responding to unforeseen circumstances.
The decisive skill I feel separates a great GM is "managing the balanced scorecard" - enlivening employee engagement, amplifying the guest experience, and ensuring financial stability. Too often, the General Manager confuses what is truly important and relevant to the hospitality business.
For me, the role of a luxury hotel GM is first and foremost that of a balancing act. Depending on the context, whether corporate or private ownership, the GM must be able to adapt and understand stakeholders' expectations. They must be able to deal with ambiguity and create added value.
Strategic foresight distinguishes outstanding luxury hotel general managers from their peers. Empathy empowers a general manager (GM) to understand and anticipate the diverse needs of guests, staff, owners, and partners. In luxury hospitality, emotional connections are crucial; guests often remember how they felt during their stay far more than the details of their accommodations.
It was inevitable that we would move to conversational AI and on-demand UI. The writing was on the wall years ago. Hotels will be caught off guard as OTA AI agents beat them without mercy at the pricing game. It’s time to build a defensive tool.
We will still need beautifully designed websites and flows — but more as validation layers and brand showcases than as discovery engines. OTAs and suppliers will increasingly serve as structured data ecosystems rather than pure UX-driven platforms.
Are we moving to a future - interesting... Though, you remove glossy images and brand (the websites of today), don't we just return to the flat green text screens of travel agents past, but this time operated by AI? Where description and detail was the important asset to capture interest and convert the booking?
Overall, there is no difference between preparing a dataset for AI and preparing a dataset for the myriads of other tech tools and business uses. By AI here, we mean Generative (Gen) AI-next-best-word, probability & correlation-based tools. Traditional analytical tools need normalised data (third normal form etc.) using Structured Query Language (SQL) with potential ambiguities removed in the design. Gen AI is useful to analyse text documents which are, by definition, unstructured, but it still acts as a glorified "word cloud" linking items together by frequency and probability. The main hospitality systems - PMS, POS, Spa, RMS, CRS, CRM - were built on normalized databases precisely to prevent mismatches, duplication, and gaps. Even then, duplicate guest profiles remain common, eg when a frequent guest changes email or surname. The better PMSes use fuzzy matching to ease de-duplication, but this remains a governance issue.
It so happens I have a deep background on this topic. Over almost a decade, I deployed enterprise-level customer data consolidation for many of the world's leading luxury brands. In this capacity, developing the methodology and guiding execution of this specific desired outcome scores of times. The process always begins with the standardization of data and the rollout of those standards, followed by the cleanup of information sets once the standards are in place. Only after that point is true consolidation a reality.