Jamie Lane of AirDNA joins an STR Global Unlocked podcast episode to explore how AI-driven economic shifts, including job displacement and income redistribution, could reshape who travels, how often, and where.
Mark Fancourt delivers a blunt, experience-backed argument against the industry's growing temptation to hollow out technology leadership in the name of AI efficiency. With 37 years in hospitality and 13 as a CIO, he makes the case that adding AI on top of fragmented, underfunded, and poorly governed tech stacks does not simplify anything — it compounds the chaos, and removing the people who understand the system is precisely the wrong response.
Navan becomes the first TMC to integrate directly with Hilton's Central Reservation System via Booking and Content APIs, enabling real-time rates, rich property content, and streamlined virtual payments for corporate customers.
A strategic white paper arguing that rising labor costs will split the hotel industry into automation-enabled winners and legacy properties forced to convert to short-term rentals, with Europe leading adoption.
Davide Bernasconi reframes the AI conversation in hospitality around a problem the industry rarely names directly: operational hypercomplexity. As hotels become more digitally interconnected, the cognitive load placed on staff has quietly become unsustainable — and the most important thing AI can do is not replace people, but give them their cognitive bandwidth back.
Adam Mogelonsky makes the case that the longevity revolution is no longer a luxury niche but a structural shift in guest expectations and that the most overlooked opportunity lies not in spas or fitness centers, but in the guestroom itself. For time-poor travelers who rarely make it to hotel amenities, the room is the only wellness touchpoint that reaches everyone.
James Watson argues that AI's most promising role in hospitality design is not to generate atmospheres autonomously, but to give human designers the precision and responsiveness needed to make spaces that genuinely breathe — adapting in real time to occupancy, mood, and moment. The risk, he warns, is not that AI replaces designers, but that without strong human vision guiding it, it flattens the industry into an algorithmically pleasant, characterless sameness.
A panel discussion with four industry executives on where hotel robotics is generating real ROI, barriers to wider adoption, workforce implications, and what lies ahead.
Drawing on Horst Schulze's service philosophy at Ritz-Carlton and Capella, the piece argues hotels abandon AI too early by measuring the wrong outcomes on the wrong timeline.
Major hotel loyalty programs, with hundreds of millions of members, may become the critical data asset that AI booking agents depend on, giving chains structural leverage in the agentic travel era.
Survey of 100 AIHA members finds hoteliers prioritize practical AI guidance, shared standards, and benchmarking over generic AI commentary, with 78% citing trend leadership as their top engagement driver.
RobosizeME CRO Sean Anderson explains why the company uses RPA over AI for defined hotel workflows, citing cost, reliability, and compliance as key factors over AI-first approaches.
Alan Young argues that voice recognition technology at the front desk is not a cost-cutting measure but a means of restoring something the industry has been quietly losing: the agent's attention. By offloading administrative commands to speech, the technology frees staff to do what no system can replicate — make a guest feel genuinely seen upon arrival.
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 Natalie Kimball, VP of Strategic Account Management for Horizon Distribution and Iceportal Content at Shiji.
Terence Ronson looks ahead to 2031, when frictionless automation will have made most hotels equally smart, equally efficient, and equally forgettable — and argues that the competitive differentiator will be a new role he calls the Human Experience Orchestrator. Part behavioral psychologist, part operational commander, the HXO is the person who reads the AI's outputs and then decides, with genuine human judgment, what to actually do with them.
The author argues that HITEC 2026 overlooked a key market gap: back-office AI that reduces overhead and drives margins, while vendors focused almost entirely on guest-facing tools.
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 Cendyn's CEO Michael Bennett, Chief Marketing Officer Nicki Graham, and EVP of Product Kevin Duncan.
Catherine Donaldson takes a decidedly practical approach, moving past the philosophical debates about AI in hospitality to focus on where it is already delivering measurable results today. From AI voice agents answering calls around the clock to agentic workflows that coordinate operations without manual handoffs, she maps five proven use cases and makes the case that the performance gap between adopters and laggards is already widening.