AI-powered group quoting agents and commercial strategy tools can unify hotel sales, revenue, and marketing teams on a single data view, cutting RFP response times from days to minutes.
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 Frank Pitsikalis, SVP of Product Strategy and CMO at Agilysys.
George Roukas identifies the layer most hotel AI strategies are skipping entirely: execution. Brands can build sophisticated loyalty programs and accept intent-rich bookings from AI agents, but if the operational infrastructure cannot reliably deliver what was promised — the right room, the right amenities, the right moment — none of it compounds into loyalty. His argument is that an ontology-based digital twin of hotel operations is what closes that gap, and that now is the time to build it.
Radisson Hotel Group's AI system automatically detects and matches lower OTA rates on RadissonHotels.com in real time, replacing the manual Best Online Rate Guarantee claims process across all properties worldwide.
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 Ricky Daniels, Co-Founder of Trybe.
Stephan Wiesener argues that the hospitality AI conversation has moved past experimentation into a harder question: what infrastructure actually allows AI agents to take reliable action across real hotel operations? Through concrete case studies from citizenM, THE FLAG Zürich, and Cocoon & Eckelmann Hotels, he makes the case that open, API-first architecture is the unglamorous foundation on which everything else depends.
UBTech's consumer humanoid robot launch signals a shift in guest expectations that hospitality must address, as home companion AI sets a new relational benchmark hotels are unprepared to meet.
Choice Hotels appoints CVS Health's Ali Keshavarz, a data and AI expert with McKinsey and Aetna backgrounds, to its board to support AI-driven growth across its franchise portfolio.
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 Tanya Pratt, Global Vice President of Strategy and Product Management at Oracle Hospitality.
Vassilis Syropoulos argues that before hospitality can benefit from agentic AI, it needs to solve a problem most organizations are actively avoiding: the data foundation underneath it. Using the Prometheus metaphor to frame both the promise and the danger, he maps a four-quadrant framework that shows why clean data without hospitality context is still dangerous, and why trust — earned incrementally, proven on the record — is the only legitimate path to autonomous action.
A practical guide for independent hoteliers explaining AI booking discovery, hallucination risks, GEO, and how connectivity to AI platforms determines whether bookings land direct or via OTAs.
Major chains have built AI tools to defend direct booking conversions, but the discovery journey now starts on ChatGPT and Google AI, platforms brands cannot see, measure, or control.
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 Andrew Pirret, Senior Vice President of Product at Alliants.
Drawing on a background in filmmaking, Kristian Lupinski offers a candid, first-person account of experimenting with AI video generation for hospitality marketing and quickly discovering that creative vision and machine output are far from the same thing. The piece raises an unsettling question for the industry: in a race toward synthetic perfection, are hotels optimizing themselves out of the very authenticity that makes a stay worth remembering?
Hospitality Daily and Destination AI launch a live survey to benchmark real AI usage across hotel organizations, covering investment priorities, measurable outcomes, and frontline employee sentiment.
Stefano Pinci writes from the photographer's perspective on what AI actually does — and does not do — to hotel imagery. The technology has become a genuine problem-solver in post-production, he argues, but its greatest risk is not bad output: it is the seductive pull toward a frictionless, anonymous visual average that makes every property look the same and none of them look real.
The author argues that true AI-native hotel distribution requires live pull architecture and settlement layers, a gap Google won't fill due to its ad-auction model, leaving an opening for a new entrant.
Markus Mueller argues that hospitality's real distribution problem has nothing to do with AI or personalization technology — it lies in an inventory model designed in the 1970s that collapses thirty or forty genuinely distinct room products into five website categories. Until hotels start selling real products instead of generic containers, he contends, no amount of sophisticated technology layered on top will deliver the experience guests actually want.