This dedicated AI in Hospitality section explores how AI is reshaping the industry, from guest communication and marketing personalisation to revenue management, operations, staffing, cybersecurity, and the evolving role of data and automation across the hotel and travel ecosystem. It brings together practical use cases, expert insights, product and partnership news, leadership viewpoints, and real world lessons from properties and brands of all sizes, helping hospitality professionals separate substance from hype and make informed decisions about where AI delivers value today and what to prepare for next.
We didn't go to HITEC 2026 for the demos. We went for the conversations. We sat down with exhibitors right there on the show floor. No script, no prepared questions, just one starting point: tell us what you do, in plain language. This is where it went with Josh Graham, Head of Market Development for North America at Cloudbeds.
A luxury hotel GM with 20+ years of experience argues AI amplifies rather than replaces hospitality professionals, citing Hilton's AI Planner, Be My Eyes partnership, and operational forecasting as real-world examples.
An operator-turned-founder argues that hotel groups have optimized individual functions at the expense of cross-functional rhythm, and introduces PHAL OS, an AI leadership layer targeting top-10 hotel groups.
We didn't go to HITEC 2026 for the demos. We went for the conversations. We sat down with exhibitors right there on the show floor. No script, no prepared questions, just one starting point: tell us what you do, in plain language. This is where it went with Frank Trampert, Chief Revenue Officer at Revinate.
The author argues that AI should handle back-office tasks to free hotel staff for authentic guest interactions, positioning human connection as the hardest-to-replicate competitive differentiator.
The Sunshine Protection Act, passed by the House in July 2026, would make DST permanent, shifting winter sunrises an hour later and disrupting morning operations, early staffing, and cross-state scheduling for multi-property groups.
HSMAI Europe's AI Advisory Board whitepaper examines how autonomous AI agents will reshape hotel discovery, booking, and communication, and what hotels must do to become "AI-bookable."
There is a tendency, whenever a new technology emerges, to describe it using the language of those that came before it. The automobile was initially called a horseless carriage, early cinema was dismissed as photographed theatre, and the internet was variously described as a global library, a digital encyclopedia, an electronic newspaper, or, in one now-famous 1995 Bill Gates television appearance, something that even David Letterman struggled to distinguish from a particularly sophisticated radio.
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.
AI travel assistants interpret hotel identity rather than match keywords, putting soft-brand affiliates at risk of being deprioritized when their boutique and chain signals conflict.
Grevon joins the AI Hospitality Alliance as a founding partner, contributing to technical standards and direct-booking workstreams as AI reshapes hotel distribution and guest ownership.
Edmondo Grassi approaches the post-stay phase as a sociologist rather than a technologist, and the perspective is unsettling. When a guest checks out, he argues, their stay does not end — it migrates into a data infrastructure that remembers with absolute precision what the guest themselves only vaguely recalls, raising a question the industry rarely asks: who has the right to hold that memory, and on whose behalf?
We didn't go to HITEC 2026 for the demos. We went for the conversations. We sat down with exhibitors right there on the show floor. No script, no prepared questions, just one starting point: tell us what you do, in plain language. This is where it went with SJ Sawhney, Co-Founder and President of Canary Technologies.
Jonathan MacDonald reframes the post-stay phase (typically dismissed as administrative afterthought) as the moment where the ethical stakes of AI-mediated travel become most visible. Once a guest checks out, their experience dissolves into data, and the central question becomes not what they remember, but who owns the narrative, and on what terms.
The AI Hospitality Alliance and HEDNA launch an open, crowdsourced catalogue of real-world hospitality AI use cases, inviting all industry professionals to contribute in 60 seconds.
AI tools confidently describe hotels based on outdated sources, leaving front desk staff to manage guest disappointment when closures, renovations, or changes don't match expectations.
Andrzej Wajda traces the AI revolution back to Antiquity, arguing that what we call automation today is structurally indistinguishable from what ancient Romans achieved through slavery — and that Aristotle essentially predicted it. The real lesson for hospitality, he contends, is not technological but perennial: if you cannot manage people and operations well today, no tool, ancient or artificial, will save you.
We didn't go to HITEC 2026 for the demos. We went for the conversations. We sat down with exhibitors right there on the show floor. No script, no prepared questions, just one starting point: tell us what you do, in plain language. This is where it went with HotelKey's two co-founders, CEO Fareed Ahmad and President Aditya Thyagarajan.
Rita Jusztina Varga raises an uncomfortable question the industry is only beginning to grapple with: when AI summarizes guest reviews at scale, whose experience actually gets represented? Drawing on her own decade-old stay as a case study, she argues that AI bias in review aggregation systematically amplifies certain voices while quietly erasing others — and that the hospitality industry urgently needs to rethink how it collects, segments, and trusts feedback data.
Martin Soler argues that AI does not threaten brand identity by making bad content — it threatens it by making an overwhelming volume of acceptable content, which over time erodes the distinctiveness that makes a brand worth remembering. In a world of infinite iteration, he contends, consistency and taste become scarcer and therefore more valuable, not less.