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Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

The Future of Distribution Isn’t Passive Connectivity. It’s Agentic Execution.

Sankar Narayan argues that connectivity alone is no longer enough to solve hospitality's revenue problem. The real gap, he says, is execution. With 45% of hoteliers identifying revenue opportunities every week they cannot act on in time, and nearly four in five spending over 11 hours on manual tasks that should be automated, he makes the case that the industry's next competitive frontier is not smarter insights, but faster action.

Sankar Narayan
By Sankar Narayan, CEO and Managing Director, SiteMinder
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

The 30% Distribution Tax: Market Power in Agentic Commerce

Fredrik Sjoberg draws a sharp historical line from the 10% commission of the travel agent era to the 15–25% of OTAs, and asks whether the AI agent era will push that number to 30% — the rate Apple held in the App Store for over a decade simply because it controlled the front door. The industry, he argues, is making the same structural mistakes it made with OTAs, and has a narrow window to act before the terms are set for good.

Fredrik Sjoberg
By Fredrik Sjoberg, Adjunct Professor at New York University Tisch Center of Hospitality. Founder & CEO, Maison Labs
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

When AI Becomes the Travel Agent

Pablo Delgado argues that AI assistants are not simply adding another channel to hotel distribution — they are compressing the entire travel funnel into a single conversation, potentially owning discovery, consideration, and transaction in one pass. The hotels that wait for certainty before adapting, he warns, risk repeating the same mistake they made when OTAs arrived.

Pablo Delgado
By Pablo Delgado, Managing Partner & CEO America, Mirai
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

Do You Think You’re Ready for A2A Commerce?

Ira Vouk challenges the industry's comfortable assumption that agentic AI is still a distant, chatbot-adjacent phenomenon. The real disruption, she argues, is not travelers talking to AI assistants, it is machines negotiating directly with machines, and a hospitality infrastructure built entirely around human browsing behavior that is nowhere near ready for it.

Ira Vouk
By Ira Vouk, Hospitality Tech and AI Consultant, Hospitality 2.0 Consulting
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

The Signal Was Always There. We Just Had No Way to Capture It.

Drawing on a career that moved from reservation phones to housekeeping supervision to manager on duty, Are Morch argues that the real pre-stay challenge has never been technological — it has always been a signal problem. The guest intent is there, the data exists across departments, but without a system to capture and connect it, every interaction starts from scratch and the intelligence is lost.

Are Morch
By Are Morch, Digital Transformation Coach for Hotels, Are Morch, Digital Transformation Coach
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Radical Innovation Hospitality TECHNOLOGY

Radical Innovation is an initiative that challenges creative thinkers and visionaries in hospitality TECH to pioneer compelling innovations that fuel the future of the hospitality and travel industries.  
Radical Innovation
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

Synthetic Persuasion: AI and the Evolution of Marketing

Neil Foster maps the collision between hospitality's two tectonic forces — human connection and operational optimization — and argues that AI has become the primary mechanism through which synthetic persuasion now operates: shaping discovery, engineering desire, and guiding decisions through systems so seamlessly embedded that they no longer feel like persuasion at all. The critical question he leaves open is whether that same technology can amplify genuine care rather than replace it.

Neil Foster
By Neil Foster, Hospitality Technology Advisor, Techtonic Hospitality Services
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Development Renovation

Angsana Velavaru refreshes its villas with a new sense of colour, craft, and character

Angsana Velavaru has refreshed three of its most beloved villa categories: the Beach Infinity Pool Villa, the Velavaru  Two-Bedroom Pool Villa, and the Angsana Three-Bedroom Pool Villa. Updated furnishings, reimagined living spaces, and a bolder embrace of  the island's vibrant spirit invite you to experience the resort in a distinctly new light. 

Angsana Hotels & Resorts
Male, Maldives
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

Data Isolation Is AI's Biggest Obstacle in Hospitality

Frank Trampert argues that the hospitality industry's AI ambitions are being held back not by a lack of technology, but by a data architecture problem it has largely refused to confront. Using the recurring archetype of a loyal guest who remains a stranger across ten properties of the same group, he makes the case that cross-property behavioral intelligence is the real prize — and that data discipline, not more tools, is what stands between the industry and it.

Frank Trampert
By Frank Trampert, CRO, Revinate, Inc.
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

Poor Hotel Data Is Killing Direct Bookings. C.U.P.S. Can Fix It

Daniel Doppler opens with a simple experiment — ask an AI to recommend a hotel in your city — and uses the almost universally disappointing results to make a pointed argument: most hotels are invisible to AI not because of anything the technology does wrong, but because their own data is too fragmented, inconsistent, and unstructured for a machine to trust. His four-step CUPS framework offers a practical starting point for fixing that before the window closes.

Daniel C. Doppler
By Daniel C. Doppler, President, Quinta
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

The Distribution Layer in the AI-First Era

Max Starkov argues that the rise of AI platforms as travel discovery tools is reshaping hotel distribution faster than most properties are prepared to handle but that chasing AI visibility without fixing the fundamentals of guest retention is a strategic mistake. The hotels most at risk, he contends, are independents that have neither invested in the tech stack needed to feed AI systems nor built the first-party data infrastructure to keep guests coming back. 

Max Starkov
By Max Starkov, Hospitality & travel technologist and digital strategist, Hospitality Net
Development Pipeline

IHG Hotels & Resorts signs Holiday Inn Mathura, tapping demand in a key spiritual tourism market

IHG® Hotels & Resorts, one of the world’s leading hospitality companies, has signed a management agreement with Embrassio Hotels & Resorts Private Limited, the hospitality arm of Vrindara Group, to develop Holiday Inn Mathura. Scheduled to open in early 2030, the signing reinforces IHG's commitment to expanding its presence across high-potential travel markets in India and driving growth in demand-led destinations across the country.

Holiday Inn
Mathura, India