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AI in Hospitality
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The Hotel Yearbook Technology
AI Everywhere
The 2026 HOTEL Yearbook Technology Edition - AI Everywhere is fully geared towards AI and explores how hospitality technology is preparing for a decade of profound change. With a clear focus on practical impact rather than hype, this edition examines how intelligence is becoming embedded across the hotel technology stack and day-to-day workflows, reshaping operations, revenue, distribution, guest experience, and the back office.
Your rate now competes with a points price inside Google's answer
Google's AI Mode now lets US travelers book hotels and compare cash rates against loyalty points in one conversation, removing the friction that previously delayed award redemption decisions.
By Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher, hospitality.today
AI Snapshots
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Predicting AI is futile, preparing isn’t
A strategic case for why hotels should prioritize open APIs, data accessibility, and AI-ready PMS flexibility over chasing today's best AI features.
By Martin Soler, Partner, Soler & Associates
Everything the OTA sends you about your guest expires
OTA-provided guest emails, phone numbers, and virtual cards all expire within days or weeks, leaving hotels with no reachable guest list — and AI booking agents are set to repeat the same pattern.
By Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher, hospitality.today
The Hotel Industry Keeps Confusing Having AI With Having A Strategy
An opinion from the Hotel Data Conference argues that hotels are adopting AI as a buzzword rather than a solution, confusing predictive, generative, and autonomous systems with no clear operational strategy.
By Mark Charlinski, President & CCO, LodgIQ™
From Search Box to Travel Advisor: IHG’s Kim Smith on the Next Phase of AI Booking
IHG's SVP of Digital Direct Channels explains the Google-powered conversational search beta on IHG.com, its personalization roadmap, and how hotels must restructure content to remain discoverable in an AI-driven booking era.
ChatGPT starts selling ads in Europe next week, but hotels can't buy them directly yet
OpenAI's ChatGPT Ads launch across 31 European countries next week, but hotel advertisers must go through agency partners until self-serve access opens, and ads appear below AI responses without influencing them.
By Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher, hospitality.today
Tollbooths on the Token Highway
Stripe's reported $7B acquisition of OpenRouter, combined with its earlier Metronome buy, creates a vertically integrated AI billing stack that makes model routing costs opaque to operators and demands new cost-tracking disciplines for hospitality.
By Terence Ronson, Founder & Managing Director, Pertlink Limited
Supplier News
View allBirchStreet Appoints Christopher Haydon as Chief Executive Officer
Christopher Haydon, former President of SAP Procurement Solutions, takes the CEO role at BirchStreet as the hospitality procurement platform expands its AI capabilities.
BCD Travel accelerates AI strategy with strategic investment in corporate travel AI leader AMGINE
BCD Travel has made a strategic investment in AMGINE and expanded their existing partnership, targeting AI gains in group-air management, email automation, and agentic workflows across global travel programs.
Grevon joins AI Hospitality Alliance as a founding partner
Grevon joins the AI Hospitality Alliance as a founding partner, contributing to technical standards and direct-booking workstreams as AI reshapes hotel distribution and guest ownership.
How are Lighthouse's AI capabilities transforming hotel commercial strategy?
Lighthouse outlines how its AI platform moves beyond descriptive dashboards to prescriptive guidance, with Ernest and Revenue Agent turning real-time data into executable commercial decisions.
10 critical hospitality challenges AI is transforming and why hotels can no longer ignore them
RateGain's VP APAC MENA outlines 10 AI use cases for hotels, from predictive pricing to 24/7 chat, as 70% of APAC travelers already use AI across the travel journey.
Your Next Guest Is A Robot: How AI Is Rewriting The Path To Booking
As AI tools like ChatGPT increasingly influence hotel discovery and trip planning, hotels must now optimize their digital presence for both human guests and the AI agents acting on their behalf.
By Jordan Brannon, President and Co-Founder, Coalition Technologies
AI Hospitality Alliance Launches Free 8-Part Practical AI Workshop Series for Hospitality Professionals
AIHA and SDSU launch a free, eight-part live online workshop series starting September 3, 2026, covering AI fundamentals through software development for hospitality professionals.
Your Hotel Now Has Five AIs, and None of Them Have Met Each Other
Opinion arguing that siloed AI tools across pricing, messaging, and booking create contradictory guest interactions, making hotels feel less coherent than before AI adoption.
By Are Morch, Digital Transformation Coach for Hotels, Are Morch, Digital Transformation Coach
The Invisible Ink
Anthropic and other major AI providers now embed invisible watermarks in AI-generated text, per an EU transparency rule that took effect August 2, 2026, and this marking is global, not EU-only. The catch: a detected mark only shows content was processed by AI, not that AI wrote it, so a non-native speaker's human-written draft that got a grammar check can trigger the same flag as fully generated copy.
By Terence Ronson, Founder & Managing Director, Pertlink Limited
Employee Training and Development in the Age of GenAI
Explores how hospitality organizations can integrate GenAI into employee training without eroding the human judgment, empathy, and service skills that define the guest experience.
By Dr. RK Prasad, CEO and CoFounder, CommLab India
The Bridge Between Today's Hotel and Tomorrow's Hotel Starts with One Simple, Meaningful Step
A hospitality veteran argues that AI adoption succeeds only when hotels first clarify the experience they want to create, using personal stories from a hotel front desk and a New Orleans stay to illustrate the point.
By Are Morch, Digital Transformation Coach for Hotels, Are Morch, Digital Transformation Coach
Your Data Is Your Product: Why the AI Model Is Not Your Moat
As AI becomes a commodity, the true competitive advantage lies in unified, trusted guest data that most hotels still struggle to consolidate across fragmented PMS, CRM, and loyalty systems.
By Rik van Leeuwen, VP of Customer Operations, Ireckonu
Travel AI’s Trust Problem: Efficiency Is Rising, but Consumer Conversion Is Not
Experts at Phocuswright Europe 2026 warned that AI efficiency gains have not translated into consumer bookings, with chatbots failing to convert and incumbents widening their competitive moat over startups.
IHG's new AI is attribute-based selling finally finding its interface
IHG's new AI-powered natural language search makes attribute-based selling functional for guests, offering the consumer interface that a decade of back-end infrastructure could never deliver.
By Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher, hospitality.today
Who Controls the Controls? — Part Two
Following real incidents where AI agents breached containment at OpenAI and Anthropic, the author urges hoteliers to demand vendor incident-response commitments and enforce guardrails before granting broad AI permissions.
By Terence Ronson, Founder & Managing Director, Pertlink Limited
Expedia Group acquires Layla, accelerating its AI-powered trip planning and booking strategy
Expedia Group acquired Layla, an AI-native conversational travel planning platform founded in 2023, to accelerate personalized trip discovery and booking at scale.