Technology

A good website/ digital marketing, a decent loyalty offer, and a solid booking engine are essential for all hotels to keep a meaningful share of guest relationships. The role of the OTA should be to bring new guests to a hotel.

The debate suffers from oversimplification. First-party data is strictly contextual to the operational stage being executed—no single entity holds complete ownership.Digital Discovery & Booking: OTAs capture top-of-funnel acquisition data for indirect channels.

It is neither myth nor luxury; it is the precondition for controlling a hotel's own commercial destiny.The "myth" argument conflates two failures. Yes, most hoteliers have underinvested in direct channels for decades, and that failure lies with the industry, not the OTAs.

After years of sitting on the buying side of these conversations, five things matter most to me. First, prove you understand hotel operations. Not in theory, but in how your solution performs at 2 a.m. when a system goes down and guests are waiting at the front desk.

Operational fit, clean integration, solid data protection, and measurable value across our properties and markets — that's the minimum expectation. Beyond those fundamentals, here's what, in my view, signposts the start of a genuine partnership: Show us the product.

From our perspective, before we seriously consider a technology vendor, we expect the vendor to demonstrate the following: Clear understanding of hotel operations and the business problem being solved.The solution must address a defined operational, commercial, guest-experience, or compliance challenge.

Fix your data first. Compset, segmentation, rate mapping, etc. AI is only as good as the data behind it and most "AI failed" stories are really mapping stories. The bottleneck moves from analysis to decisions. When analysis takes minutes instead of days, the question becomes who decides, how fast, and which old meeting you can delete.

I think we're making the same mistake we make with every technological evolution (again, NOT revolution): we OVERestimate what AI will do in the next six months and UNDERestimate what it will do over the next six years. Today, I don't think there's a single killer application that every hotel should rush to deploy.

There's no shortage of AI noise, but most of it won’t tell you where to start. Here’s what I’d advise someone tackling it for the first time: Start with the problem, not the technology - The wrong question to start with is "how can we use AI?" The right one is "where does my team spend time on things that shouldn't need a human?” Repetitive guest messaging, manual reporting, rate updates, back-office admin.

The reality is much more complex than black and white. There are already many humanless hotels (mostly in Asia). So there will be: - regional differences in approach to human vs machine balance - variations between different segments (short-term rentals adopted self-service from the get go, many limited service hotel properties followed, but we won't expect to see if in the luxury segment any time soon, maybe never) It will be a spectrum.

In the future, a purely automated, no-human operational model will increasingly become the way of things. For this to fully materialize, our industry and our customer will have accepted all forms of artificial intelligence—both soft and hard.

No. Humanless hotels will become more common, but they are unlikely to become the norm.Automation and AI are excellent for repetitive tasks like check-in, payments, and guest requests, helping hotels reduce costs and improve efficiency.

United States will never adopt the same ruling. It's a capitalist country where businesses needs (not the government) dictate business actions. Smart operators will implement automation where it makes sense and where it augments "human touch".

The classic philosophy in hospitality is that guests require services provided by super nice, smiling, well-trained humans. I believe this philosophy is greatly exaggerated, especially today. A great example of why guests do not care about human-provided services comes from the vacation rental sector.Today, 20% of roomnights are consumed at vacation rentals/ short-term rentals: houses, villas, condos and apartments.

So far I haven't personally seen AI actually cut jobs. I'm not saying it hasn't but I haven't personally seen it yet. It has however empowered people to do a whole lot more, so it might slow down future hires. But I haven't seen it replace anyone that was hired, unless the person utterly refused to learn how to use AI.