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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.

Not true! The first rationale is that SEO now has significant overlap with AEO and GEO in terms of helping serve all the channels that will be important for AI travel search visibility. So, a focus on what drives SEO will inevitably aid in AI-driven hotel recommendations and, in the future, AI bookings.Next is the argument against SEO as a 'set it and forget it' exercise.

GEO builds on top of SEO, so SEO is not dead.I think that Search (Google) helps with Research and Planning, not necessarily Inspiration. I agree that Inspiration often lives in different areas, ie Social. I don't think people use OTAs for Inspiration, either.

I think that there may be some truth here, but I’d draw a different conclusion. First of all, maybe we have historically given SEO too much credit for branded organic traffic. If someone discovers a hotel through Instagram, Booking.com or a friend and then Googles the property name and books direct, SEO didn’t necessarily create that demand; it helped capture it.

I've long been a believer in the model - Happy Staff-Happy Guest- Profitable Business.My personal view is that this is where the real solution lies. As an industry we are reasonably good at measuring things. Although I don't believe we are as good as measuring the right things together.

Improving retention is certainly good news, but retention alone does not tell us whether employees are committed to their organizations. During economic uncertainty, some employees may practice “job-hugging,” staying primarily because changing jobs feels risky.

Building a hospitality business team means to create community not just jobs. Business and employee performance needs to focus on the delivery of great service and support the establishment of sustainable hospitality environments (good for the environment, good for the community and good for business).

A fully automated hotel is not the future of hospitality. It is a different product category entirely and comparing the two does a disservice to both. The self checkout analogy is bit construed in my opinion. Self-checkout did not evolve retail.

As a hotel General Manager, I see the human-free hotel as an evolution in efficiency, but not a replacement for hospitality. Automation can significantly improve the guest journey by streamlining check-in, room access, payments, and routine service requests.

I have no problem with hotels using more technology. Guest apps, keyless entry and digital check-in can make things easier for guests and save my team a lot of repetitive work.But a hotel with no people involved in the guest journey is different.

Thank you, Simone, for raising a critical question about marketers’ essential role as AI reshapes the workplace. I see broader applications of this question across job functions beyond marketing.Specialization remains important in hotel marketing.

Are we over-specializing in hospitality digital marketing? The well-known idiomatic proverb “Jack of all trades, master of none" provides the answer to this question. Twenty years ago, a hospitality digital marketer could become a Jack of all trades.

LLMs are changing where value sits. In the past, deep knowledge of how to execute a specific task created an advantage. Today, I can use an LLM to understand the mechanics, explore options and complete work that once required a narrow specialist.This makes the big picture more important, not less.

As a former PT and pre-med, I can tell you confidently that 99.9% of people don’t exercise properly. So, yeah fitness definitely has a place at hotels, both for allowing people to stay active while traveling but also in teaching them how to move properly.

Is fitness over? It was never the destination. It was always about wellness, and wellness has two dimensions, not just one. Wellness is that of an individual's mind, body, spirit, soul. Sustainability is wellness of a people, a place, and the planet.

An important aspect to consider is that people vary widely in their interest level when it comes to fitness. While physical movement is a fundamental part of well-being, not everyone is interested in making strides in fitness or recreational activities.

The booking itself isn't the important part—it's the fact that it can be fully tracked from an AI conversation to a completed reservation.Right now, AI advertising generates very little volume, but every new channel starts small.Hotel metasearch followed a similar path before becoming a major source of direct bookings.AI could go even further because it helps travellers discover hotels, not just compare prices.Instead of searching, clicking and comparing multiple websites, people may eventually book through one conversation.If that happens, AI will become both a discovery tool and a booking channel.Hotels will need to make their prices, availability and hotel information easy for AI to understand.It's too early to draw conclusions from one booking, but it's an interesting sign of where hotel distribution could be heading.The real milestone isn't the ROAS—it's proving that an AI conversation can lead directly to a measurable booking.

The initial response—cool! How gratifying to witness this given all your years in this space. I was at Google last week hearing firsthand how digital advertising is evolving in this new search era.By comparison, Metasearch aggregated rates and redirected intent.

Booking.com just recently shared that only 1% of their revenue is presently generated via AI traffic. Doesn't seem like much, and at first glance this low figure seems to corroborate the view that AI is primarily a top- and mid-funnel channel.

1. More than a great idea, an imperative but still some years away to mainstream adoption as no widespread/recognised framework exists for triple materiality, yet.2. If it can be proven to increase future asset value, possibly meet/exceed local planning requirements and to offer a more relatable and reassuring sustainability alignment message to guests' own narratives.3.

Under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), companies are expected to disclose how their climate targets align with the global goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C. While the CSRD does not require organisations to obtain approval from the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), it does require transparency about whether their emissions-reduction targets are science-based and consistent with climate science.

Double materiality is an important step forward, but on its own it does not yet tell us whether hospitality is moving fast enough - or in the right direction - relative to planetary and social thresholds. That is why the idea of triple materiality is so compelling.In principle, it is exactly the challenge our sector now needs.

Hotels should continue reducing unnecessary rate leakage because it protects pricing integrity, strengthens partner relationships and improves profitability. But pursuing absolute zero leakage is increasingly unrealistic in a fragmented global distribution ecosystem.

Zero rate leakage is a bit of a fantasy: a room that never appears cheaper elsewhere.Distribution is a network. A room moves from hotel to wholesaler to bedbank to affiliate to OTA, and every layer that is added also removes visibility.

Asking whether hoteliers should stop chasing rate leakage suggests accepting contract breaches as a routine cost of doing business. The issue isn't technological complexity or API caching—it is a direct breach of written commercial agreements.Historically, wholesale rates resided in printed brochures as opaque, bundled packages—a volume trade-off generating incremental demand without exposing room pricing.What changed?