The AI Shift: Rethinking Digital Ads in Hospitality’s F&B Sector
Kalani Bandaranayake, Ex-Cluster Assistant Director Digital & E-Commerce at Raffles Doha and Fairmont Doha, explains how AI is turning F&B marketing from guesswork into a living, adaptive system that listens, learns, and reacts in real time. She shows how unified data, weather and event-based personalization, and smarter, more responsive campaigns can lift performance, but insists that the real advantage will belong to teams who pair...
Hospitality, at its heart, has always been about being one step ahead reading a guest before they even say a word. That used to come down to instinct and experience. These days, it’s something more. We’re surrounded by data, and with AI coming into the picture, that “sixth sense” is getting smarter and faster. In food and beverage especially, the way we market and connect is starting to change and it’s only going to accelerate over the next few years.
Historically, marketing in hospitality leaned more on creativity than analysis. Campaigns were shaped by intuition, timing, and experience a kind of culinary instinct for what might resonate. Today, every click, search, and review leaves a trail of data that reveals what guests want. The next wave of marketing belongs to those who can turn that signal into strategy.
The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Annual Edition
The hotel industry in 2026 finds itself at the meeting point of powerful, converging forces: rapid technological progress, climate urgency, shifting guest expectations, labour market disruption and economic realignment. This edition of The HOTEL Yearbook looks at how hotel organisations respond, not by choosing one direction over another, but by designing integrated strategies that combine digital and human, global and local, automation and empathy. A large share of this year’s contributions focuses in particular on artificial intelligence and its growing influence across almost every segment of hospitality, confirming AI as one of the defining themes of this moment. Bringing together expert voices from around the world, the publication explores strategy, technology, sustainability, finance, asset management, food and beverage, human resources, design and more, all through the lens of intentional hybridity in an age of convergence. The message is clear: in 2026, hybridity is no longer optional; it is strategic, and it will be the leaders who approach it with real intention who shape the future of our industry.