AI in Hospitality

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Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

The Remains of the Stay: Memory, Identity, and the Afterlife of the Guest

Edmondo Grassi approaches the post-stay phase as a sociologist rather than a technologist, and the perspective is unsettling. When a guest checks out, he argues, their stay does not end — it migrates into a data infrastructure that remembers with absolute precision what the guest themselves only vaguely recalls, raising a question the industry rarely asks: who has the right to hold that memory, and on whose behalf?

Edmondo Grassi
By Edmondo Grassi, Assistant professor (RTT) in Sociology, San Raffaele University of Rome
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

The Ethics of the Traveler: Responsibility in an Intelligent Ecosystem

Jonathan MacDonald reframes the post-stay phase (typically dismissed as administrative afterthought) as the moment where the ethical stakes of AI-mediated travel become most visible. Once a guest checks out, their experience dissolves into data, and the central question becomes not what they remember, but who owns the narrative, and on what terms.

Jonathan MacDonald
By Jonathan MacDonald, Founder, SELF
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

Panem, Circenses, and Prompt Engineering: What Ancient Rome Already Knew About AI

Andrzej Wajda traces the AI revolution back to Antiquity, arguing that what we call automation today is structurally indistinguishable from what ancient Romans achieved through slavery — and that Aristotle essentially predicted it. The real lesson for hospitality, he contends, is not technological but perennial: if you cannot manage people and operations well today, no tool, ancient or artificial, will save you.

Andrzej Mateusz Wajda
By Andrzej Mateusz Wajda, Hospitality consultant & Sociologist, Wajda Hotel Consulting
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

Beyond Bias: AI and the Reconstruction of Perception

Rita Jusztina Varga raises an uncomfortable question the industry is only beginning to grapple with: when AI summarizes guest reviews at scale, whose experience actually gets represented? Drawing on her own decade-old stay as a case study, she argues that AI bias in review aggregation systematically amplifies certain voices while quietly erasing others — and that the hospitality industry urgently needs to rethink how it collects, segments, and trusts feedback data.

Rita Jusztina Varga
By Rita Jusztina Varga, CEO, RAIZUP
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

How Brand Identity Evolves in an AI World

Martin Soler argues that AI does not threaten brand identity by making bad content — it threatens it by making an overwhelming volume of acceptable content, which over time erodes the distinctiveness that makes a brand worth remembering. In a world of infinite iteration, he contends, consistency and taste become scarcer and therefore more valuable, not less.

Martin Soler
By Martin Soler, Partner, Soler & Associates
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

Post‑Stay, Pre‑Loss: Rethinking Travel Agent and OTA Commission Reconciliation

Sean Anderson makes the unglamorous but financially compelling case that post-stay commission reconciliation is one of the most overlooked revenue levers in hospitality. Using the example of a 400-property European group quietly overpaying up to $40,000 a month simply because no one was checking, he argues that the post-stay funnel deserves the same operational discipline as guest acquisition — because the money is already earned, and much of it is silently leaking away.

Sean Anderson
By Sean Anderson, Chief Revenue Officer, RobosizeME
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

Digital Labour: Rethinking Work in Hospitality

Stanislav Ivanov reframes the automation debate by shifting the unit of analysis from jobs to tasks — and in doing so, arrives at conclusions that challenge common assumptions. Physical tasks, he argues, are often harder to automate than cognitive ones, which means low-paid housekeepers may be safer from replacement than high-paid marketing managers, and the future of hospitality labour is not fewer people but differently assembled teams of humans and machines.

Stanislav Ivanov
By Stanislav Ivanov, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, ROBONOMICS: The Journal of the Automated Economy
HN Original
Interview Technology

Actabl wants AI that won't make things up

We didn't go to HITEC 2026 for the demos. We went for the conversations. We sat down with exhibitors right there on the show floor. No script, no prepared questions, just one starting point: tell us what you do, in plain language. This is where it went with Jerimi Ford, Chief Innovation Officer at Actabl, and Rob Bahl, SVP AI Asset Management at Actabl, who'd recently joined the tech company from Marriott.

Rob Bahl and Jerimi Ford in conversation with Hospitality Net
United States