Finding Your Guests in the ChatGPT Data, Most Hotel Budgets Are Agreed but Few Are Owned, The HR Playbook for Competing with Alternative Stays

Friday closes the week on three practical questions for the year ahead: who is actually in the ChatGPT audience hotels might pay to reach, whether the 2027 budget is something a team owns or merely signed, and whether the workforce is ready to compete with the alternative stays that have been multiplying around the industry.

Finding Your Guests in the ChatGPT Data

Martin Soler of Soler & Associates analyzes OpenAI's Signals data to show which markets and age groups use ChatGPT for information-seeking, and what that means for hotels considering ChatGPT ad placements.

The piece gives the ChatGPT Ads discussion an audience view to sit beside the cost view. Cogwheel's beta results in August put hotel CPCs at $3 to $3.50, hospitality.today reported the European launch with agency-only access, and Sébastien Felix of Influence Society argued earlier this month that the ads suit lifestyle and luxury independents as a pre-search discovery channel. Soler's contribution is the question of whether a hotel's guests are in the audience at all. Read the analysis →

Most Hotel Budgets Are Agreed. Few Are Owned.

Muhammad Tanveer of The Sales Leadership Brief argues that most hotel revenue budgets are agreed but not owned. He introduces a Revenue Provenance Ladder that classifies each line of the budget by certainty, exposing how often growth targets are speculative wishes.

The piece lands as 2027 budgets are set against an elevated 2026 base, the warning HVS's Lodging Tax Report raised on Tuesday. Tanveer's test is about certainty rather than size: which lines are committed and which are hoped for. A companion argument from Shiji's Chan Wai Sun, in Signals below, makes the case for measuring budgets beyond RevPAR. Read the argument →

The Human Resource Playbook for Competing With Alternative Stays

Merrick P. Dresnin of Cote Hospitality lays out a structured HR playbook built on the argument that a hotel's best defense against Airbnb is a purpose-built workforce: recruiting for empathy, rigorous onboarding, strong managers, and metrics tied to guest outcomes.

The competitive backdrop has been building: Tripadvisor and Airbnb partnered on experiences in August, Pavilion launched as a national vacation rental company this month, and Choice Hotels moved into RV travel with Harvest Hosts. Dresnin's answer is that the workforce is the defense, and that it has to be built into hiring, onboarding, and management. Read the playbook →

Signals

Chan Wai Sun of Shiji argues hotel budgets must move beyond RevPAR to Flow Through and Flex metrics. Flow Through shows whether revenue growth converts to profit, and Flex shows how well costs can be managed in a downturn. Chan writes for Shiji, a hotel technology vendor.

Emma Näpänkangas of The Philosophy of Hospitality asks how broke Gen Z is always traveling. She argues financial disillusionment is driving doom spending on travel over retirement savings, with hospitality brands positioned to serve a generation seeking meaning and identity through experience, adding a motive to the Gen Z discovery data from August.

Charalampos Giousmpasoglou, Evangelia Marinakou, and Peter Jones of Bournemouth University argue standard recruitment and management practices create unnecessary barriers for neurodivergent workers. Their report-based piece calls for practical adjustments without lowering operational standards.

Christopher Boinet and Anne Epinat of In Extenso Avocats report that France's 2026 Simplification Act caps tenant guarantees at three months' rent. The change threatens the viability of built-to-suit hotel lease structures, making the reform a mixed outcome for the hotel sector.

WTTC forecasts 3.1% growth for Europe's travel sector in 2026. Ahead of WTM, it cited London's Oxford Street pedestrianisation as a model for government-backed tourism investment.

People

Randy Regan was appointed General Manager at Hotel Kinsley in Kingston's historic Stockade District. Anuj Agrawal was appointed Director of Finance at The Ritz-Carlton, Pune.

Properties

HOTEL THE MITSUI HAKONE announced a December 2026 opening, and amã Stays & Trails opened its 200th bungalow, Villa Maya in Alibaug. RIU bought its first hotel in Barcelona, and JOIA Rose Hall is undergoing a full renovation in Montego Bay. Four Seasons announced its first standalone Private Residences in Colorado, and Raffles chose Miami's Coconut Grove for its first standalone branded residences. Atari Hotels broke ground in Phoenix on a gaming-inspired hotel and entertainment complex.