Technology

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.