Two-Thirds of Travelers Now Use AI Instead of Hotel Websites, U.S. March RevPAR Up 5.9%, Inn-Flow Acquires Lilo to Unify Hotel Back Office
An opinion piece reports more than two-thirds of travelers now use AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to research hotels, with many booking directly through these platforms and bypassing hotel websites entirely. STR data for March 2026 shows U.S. hotels gained 5.9% RevPAR year on year, with San Francisco leading at +38.8% on major conference demand.
Monday picks up where last week left off: AI now bypasses the hotel website for most travelers, U.S. March performance held strong, and Inn-Flow's Lilo deal unifies the back office.
Two-Thirds of Travelers Now Research and Book Hotels Through AI Instead of Websites
An opinion piece reports that more than two-thirds of travelers now use AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to research hotels, with a meaningful share booking directly through these platforms rather than visiting a hotel website at all. The argument extends what Hospitality Net has been tracking for the past two weeks: AI Engine Optimization, Uber's Expedia integration, agentic booking infrastructure, and now a behavioral data point that says the shift has already happened on the demand side.
The implication for hotels is structural rather than tactical. If AI assistants are now the primary research channel, the hotel website is being repositioned as a secondary asset, useful for closing the booking after the AI has done the discovery work, but no longer the place where the choice is made. Operators who treated AI search as a 2027 problem are now late. Read the analysis →
U.S. Hotels Gained 5.9% RevPAR in March, San Francisco Led at +38.8% on Conference Demand
STR data for March 2026 shows U.S. hotels gained 5.9% RevPAR year on year, with San Francisco posting the strongest growth at +38.8% on major conference activity. The breadth of the gains across markets matters more than the headline: March is now the second consecutive month of broad-based U.S. RevPAR growth, alongside HVS data showing 4.5% YTD through April and last week's STR week ending April 25 at +8.5%. The U.S. demand picture for early 2026 is consistently stronger than the supply growth forecast suggests.
The data lines up with separate Q1 pipeline figures from Latin America, where the construction pipeline grew 6% year on year with early planning projects up 12%. Mexico leads the LatAm pipeline at 247 projects, and the luxury segment is showing the strongest growth at 142 projects. Together with Friday's CoStar finding that Asia Pacific now leads the global pipeline, the picture is clearer: U.S. demand is healthy, but supply growth is happening elsewhere. Read the data →
Inn-Flow Acquires AI Procurement Platform Lilo to Unify Hotel Accounting, Labor, and Purchasing
Inn-Flow acquired Lilo to build what the company is calling the first unified system connecting hotel accounting, labor, and purchasing operations under one platform. The acquisition matters because the back office has been one of the most fragmented parts of the hotel tech stack, with separate systems for procurement, accounting, and workforce that rarely talk to each other. Inn-Flow is betting that AI is the integration layer that finally makes a unified back office work.
The framing connects to a wider tech pattern this week. The argument from earlier coverage that hotels need clean unified data to compete in AI distribution applies just as forcefully on the operational side: AI agents that take work off staff, as the digital-employees thread argued last Wednesday, only work if the underlying systems share a coherent view of the property. Inn-Flow buying a procurement platform is the back-office version of that same logic. Read the announcement →
Signals
New Orleans hotels generated nearly $9 billion in 2025 economic impact and 51,000 jobs. An Oxford Economics study commissioned by the local industry shows the city's hotels supported more than 51,000 Louisiana jobs and contributed $1.2 billion in taxes. The data follows last week's STR week showing New Orleans RevPAR up 34.3% on Jazz Fest demand, and gives operators in the city a quantified position to argue from in upcoming policy and tax conversations.
An operator pushed back hard on Skift's "The Squeeze" framing. The piece argues Skift's portrayal of hotel brands as villains misses where the real cost pressure is coming from: software stacks, OTA commissions, and uncontrollable operating expenses that sit well outside franchise fees. The pushback is worth reading because it reframes a debate that has been running one-sided in trade press for the past quarter and gives owners a sharper vocabulary for the actual margin problem.
Salamander Collection added four senior sales leaders in a single day. Erich Hosbach, Elena Peroulakis, and Jennifer Tacey joined as Directors covering Sales and Marketing and National Accounts, and Sheraine Reid was named Director of Leisure Sales. A four-director hire across one luxury collection on the same day is unusual and points to either a sales infrastructure rebuild or a meaningful expansion in pipeline that needed coverage now rather than later.
The Cost of Shorter Tenure: GM cycles are creating service friction in luxury hotels. An opinion piece argues that short General Manager tenure cycles, increasingly common across the major luxury brands, create operational friction with long-tenured hourly staff and lead to measurable service degradation. The argument matters because the GM rotation pattern is driven by group-level career planning rather than property-level performance logic, and the cost is showing up in guest-facing service metrics.
SuitePad room service benchmark: top performers earn €257 per room versus €99 median. The free benchmarking tool, backed by data from 200,000-plus orders across 500-plus hotels, shows menu design choices drive a 2.6x revenue gap between top and median performers. The numbers are concrete enough to give F&B teams a defensible case for menu redesign budget that does not depend on guest survey data.
Properties
RIU rebranded the former Riu Jalisco in Riviera Nayarit as Hotel Riu Flamingos following an upgrade of the offering across the resort. The Related Group, Merrimac Ventures, and Hilton marked a milestone at Waldorf Astoria Residences Pompano Beach as the project moves through its development pipeline. Signia by Hilton Diplomat Beach Resort officially debuted on the South Florida beachfront under the new brand. The Inn at Hancock, billed as New Hampshire's oldest inn, announced its next chapter following a renovation.