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AI in Hospitality
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The Hotel Identity You Chose to Protect May Be the One AI Cannot See
AI travel assistants interpret hotel identity rather than match keywords, putting soft-brand affiliates at risk of being deprioritized when their boutique and chain signals conflict.
By Are Morch, Digital Transformation Coach for Hotels, Are Morch, AI Champion
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?
By Edmondo Grassi, Assistant professor (RTT) in Sociology, San Raffaele University of Rome
Canary Technologies built its software around the guest, not the property
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 SJ Sawhney, Co-Founder and President of Canary Technologies.
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.
By Jonathan MacDonald, Founder, SELF
Now Live: The First Industry-Wide Crowdsourcing Initiative
The AI Hospitality Alliance and HEDNA launch an open, crowdsourced catalogue of real-world hospitality AI use cases, inviting all industry professionals to contribute in 60 seconds.
AI is confidently wrong about your hotel, and the guest arrives believing it
AI tools confidently describe hotels based on outdated sources, leaving front desk staff to manage guest disappointment when closures, renovations, or changes don't match expectations.
By Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher, hospitality.today
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.
By Andrzej Mateusz Wajda, Hospitality consultant & Sociologist, Wajda Hotel Consulting
HotelKey is picky about what counts as AI
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 HotelKey's two co-founders, CEO Fareed Ahmad and President Aditya Thyagarajan.
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.
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.
By Martin Soler, Partner, Soler & Associates
Hotel Robots: Integrating Automation in Hospitality
The hotel robotics market, valued at $0.76B in 2026, is expanding rapidly as labor costs hit 33% of revenue and turnover stays 76% above pre-pandemic levels, driving adoption of delivery, housekeeping, and concierge robots.
By Emma Näpänkangas, Hospitality Strategy Writer, EHL
Lighthouse's AI is built to be hired, not installed
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 Brett Kohn, Chief Marketing Officer at Lighthouse.
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.
By Sean Anderson, Chief Revenue Officer, RobosizeME
Build Big, Build Small, or Not at All
A Pertlink white paper translates eight AI engineering signals from MIT Technology Review into property-level implications, with a 12-month readiness roadmap for hoteliers navigating chip costs, agent orchestration, open-source models, and AI-enabled fraud.
By Terence Ronson, Founder & Managing Director, Pertlink Limited
Beyond Tokenomics: The Threat of the Invisible Hotel
The author argues that AI citation share, not just AI query costs, is the next major distribution battleground, with data showing visibility concentrating among a small group of hotel brands across AI platforms.
By Patrick Burkhardt, Senior Director, Sales, Curacity
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.
By Stanislav Ivanov, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, ROBONOMICS: The Journal of the Automated Economy
How AI builds a predictive operational backbone for hotels: Front desk, housekeeping, and maintenance
An explainer on how AI co-pilots, dynamic housekeeping routing, and IoT-based predictive maintenance can shift hotel operations from reactive firefighting to proactive service delivery.
By Alan Young, VP, Strategy | Hospitality, Infor