AI in Hospitality

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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.

Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

AI Adoption Is Accelerating. Here’s How Hotels Are Keeping Pace

Catherine Donaldson takes a decidedly practical approach, moving past the philosophical debates about AI in hospitality to focus on where it is already delivering measurable results today. From AI voice agents answering calls around the clock to agentic workflows that coordinate operations without manual handoffs, she maps five proven use cases and makes the case that the performance gap between adopters and laggards is already widening.

Catherine Donaldson
By Catherine Donaldson, Director of Marketing, Canary Technologies
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

The Execution Layer Hotels Are Missing, and Why It Matters Before Agents Arrive

George Roukas identifies the layer most hotel AI strategies are skipping entirely: execution. Brands can build sophisticated loyalty programs and accept intent-rich bookings from AI agents, but if the operational infrastructure cannot reliably deliver what was promised — the right room, the right amenities, the right moment — none of it compounds into loyalty. His argument is that an ontology-based digital twin of hotel operations is what closes that gap, and that now is the time to build it.

George Roukas
By George Roukas, President, GAIPAN
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

The Agentic Hotel: How Open Infrastructure Turns AI Into Operational Performance

Stephan Wiesener argues that the hospitality AI conversation has moved past experimentation into a harder question: what infrastructure actually allows AI agents to take reliable action across real hotel operations? Through concrete case studies from citizenM, THE FLAG Zürich, and Cocoon & Eckelmann Hotels, he makes the case that open, API-first architecture is the unglamorous foundation on which everything else depends.

Stephan Wiesener
By Stephan Wiesener, Founder & CTO, Apaleo GmbH
HN Original
Interview Technology

Oracle's Tanya Pratt: Cloud was the foundation, AI is the decoration

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 Tanya Pratt, Global Vice President of Strategy and Product Management at Oracle Hospitality.

Tanya Pratt in conversation with Hospitality Net
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

The Data Foundation of Agentic Hospitality

Vassilis Syropoulos argues that before hospitality can benefit from agentic AI, it needs to solve a problem most organizations are actively avoiding: the data foundation underneath it. Using the Prometheus metaphor to frame both the promise and the danger, he maps a four-quadrant framework that shows why clean data without hospitality context is still dangerous, and why trust — earned incrementally, proven on the record — is the only legitimate path to autonomous action.

Vassilis Syropoulos
By Vassilis Syropoulos, Founder & CEO, Juyo
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

The Synthetic Gaze: AI Video Advertising and the Cost of Getting It Wrong

Drawing on a background in filmmaking, Kristian Lupinski offers a candid, first-person account of experimenting with AI video generation for hospitality marketing and quickly discovering that creative vision and machine output are far from the same thing. The piece raises an unsettling question for the industry: in a race toward synthetic perfection, are hotels optimizing themselves out of the very authenticity that makes a stay worth remembering?

Kristian Lupinski
By Kristian Lupinski, Content Producer, Kastian Media
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

After the AI Hangover: What Happens to Hotel Photography?

Stefano Pinci writes from the photographer's perspective on what AI actually does — and does not do — to hotel imagery. The technology has become a genuine problem-solver in post-production, he argues, but its greatest risk is not bad output: it is the seductive pull toward a frictionless, anonymous visual average that makes every property look the same and none of them look real.

Stefano Pinci
By Stefano Pinci, Professional Photographer, Stefano Pinci Photographer
Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Technology Edition

Your Hotel Has Forty Products. The Website Sells Five.

Markus Mueller argues that hospitality's real distribution problem has nothing to do with AI or personalization technology — it lies in an inventory model designed in the 1970s that collapses thirty or forty genuinely distinct room products into five website categories. Until hotels start selling real products instead of generic containers, he contends, no amount of sophisticated technology layered on top will deliver the experience guests actually want.

Markus Mueller
By Markus Mueller, Managing Director, GauVendi