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Imagine climate change as a cost. Currently, this cost is about $200 per ton of CO2. As we know, the cost is not internalised - as society, we subsidise the polluters; and the more you pollute, the more you free ride on society.

Yes, climate damage has a cost and someone is paying for it — just not the ones causing it. But as an industry, we need to be honest about what we are and what we do well: we care about guests. We make people feel welcome. Adding a line item to the bill that guests do not fully understand, or that creates a sense of guilt, is not aligned with what hospitality stands for.That does not mean we should avoid financial accountability.

Emissions costs should be visible and become payable over time, but accountability must begin before guests check in.By the time someone books a room, decisions about a hotel’s energy systems and resource consumption have been made.

For me, value is about more than the room rate—it’s about whether guests leave feeling they were part of something uniquely Hard Rock. When I see guests energized by the music, the atmosphere, and the genuine connections our team creates, I know we delivered an experience worth the investment.

Luxury hospitality is not defined by extravagance, expensive interiors, or an abundance of amenities. True luxury lies in the quality of the experience and the value it creates for every guest.Guests choosing a luxury stay expect more than beautiful surroundings.

I fully agree with Barbara’s perspective (as ex-Kempinski too). In luxury hospitality, more does not necessarily mean better. True luxury is not defined by the number of amenities or services we offer, but by how well we understand what each guest values and how naturally we deliver it.

If you are a revenue manager, your morning routine is a good place to start. Every revenue manager has one that sets up the week ahead: On Monday you open the usual reports and check how the hotel is pacing, how pickup compares with last year, where the forecast sits against budget and how your rates look against the market. Immediately you can see the problem, and the opportunity.

Improve guest communication What goes in: Ask the AI to read your entire website, your concierge mailbox (for tone of voice and context), and supplement it with additional information that only lives onsite (like your Wi-Fi password).

What goes in:The reservations or sales inbox, plus live rates and availability from the PMS and the hotel's own meeting-room PDF and website.What comes out:For every group or meeting request that arrived after the front desk closed, a drafted quote sits in the reservations inbox.

Short answer: In many hotels, yes. We ask teams to think like owners, then reward them like department managers.My position is clear: the whole leadership team should share one final objective, and that objective is GOP. What the hotel actually keeps after operating costs.

This is a topic that is coming up with increasing frequency in my conversations with hotel leadership teams and asset managers. And the reality is that far too often, departmental goals are disconnected from one another and, more importantly, from the financial objectives of ownership.One thing I advocate for passionately is the implementation of a balanced scorecard that aligns every department, every leader, and ultimately every individual with the overarching objectives of the asset.

If we want teams to optimize profit, we have to stop paying them to optimize something else.Owners and operators will always struggle with paying a sales manager more for a lower-rated piece of business. But if that business fills a need period, costs less to service, or has big ancillary revenue contribution, that may be exactly what they should do.

Beyond Pampering: Hotels Must Become Partners in the Guest's Wellbeing JourneyI believe the future of hospitality wellness lies in conscious restoration—the “Golden Glue.” Hotels must move beyond traditional pampering and purely clinical approaches to become partners in their guests’ lifelong wellbeing journeys.Throughout three decades in spa and wellness, I have witnessed evolving expectations.

The introduction makes a very strong case for The Golden Glue as being the Golden Mean or Goldilocks Zone of taking guests where they are in their individual wellness journeys then giving them the right mix of well-serviced programming along with those activities that will inspire guests to be more resilient.

The most effective role sits between hospitality and wellbeing. Hotels can offer everything from restorative experiences and relaxation to fitness, movement, nutrition, and performance-focused programmes. The key is recognising that wellbeing looks different for every guest and providing a range of experiences that allow individuals to engage in the way that best suits their needs and goals.The real opportunity is to create environments that help people feel their best.

Hotel websites are not becoming unimportant, but they have shifted from being a competitive differentiator to essential digital infrastructure.A beautiful website will rarely win a guest if the price parity is poor, the online reputation is mediocre, or the property is invisible on AI discovery platforms.

If argue that websites are more important than ever because that's how assistants like Muse, Dit, Grok Bot and Instinct find and book hotels (not via API or MCP). We're just optimizing for bots now, not humans.

Having spent nearly two decades helping owners define their marketing strategy, the real answer to this is nuanced; it depends on the type of hotel. Now with agentic commerce, a schism is happening as follows:(1) Heads in beds hotels / "lodging" = no need for website, only plumbing + AI agents(2) Luxury, boutique, resorts etc / "hospitality" = website VERY importantThe first camp is simpler to understand.

Yes, the existing piping is not ideal. Remember, a bunch of hotels in Europe still use Booking.com as their booking engine, because there's no piping at all (no booking engine of their own, or their PMS is premise-based and lacks APIs).

Yes, outdated ARI plumbing is a huge immediate obstacle, but it isn't the only one.Legacy hotel systems rely on slow, cached data and one-way connections that frequently crash when AI agents try to make real-time bookings. However, even if the technology is fixed, bigger business problems remain: hotels fear losing customer relationships and revenue margins to AI intermediaries, and payment liability for AI errors remains unclear.In short, while the technical pipes are broken, the deeper issue is a lack of trust, clear business models, and secure payment systems for autonomous bookings.

The main impediment isn’t tech plumbing; it is inherent in the concept of “agentic AI” itself. It is based on Gen AI LLMs, which are probabilistic, next-best-word engines. They have no “real-world” models, eg understanding higher / lower, before / after, logic, distance, numbers. They mimic very well. Super for wordsmithing and unstructured data / document analysis, poor for most everything else.

Having a human at the helm, not just in the loop, is key to setting AI agents' goals, limits, and escalation triggers, and then to being able to watch the audit trail for anomalies.First, delegate commercial tasks that already operate on written rules, reserving human judgment for those that don't.These tasks go first because the limits are already written.

Hotels have increasingly adopted AI for data analysis and recommendations, yet decision-making and execution remain largely manual. The next leap is moving from AI-powered insights to autonomous action, with humans focusing on governance, strategy and exceptions.In Revenue Management, agents can monitor demand and adjust rates, inventory and restrictions autonomously.

We've seen that significant revenue opportunities, both from groups and leisure guests, exist inside reservation teams' Outlook inboxes, but they often lack the time and capacity to systematically manage them.I think one of the first things hotels should delegate to AI agents is managing these opportunities from the initial inquiry all the way to a booking, although that is very hard to do correctly and responsibly.AI agents should be able to understand guest requests, check availability and rates, prepare relevant offers, and proactively follow up if the guest, travel agent, or whoever made the inquiry doesn't respond.