Revinate thinks the AI trusts your guests more than your brand

Frank Trampert had been at Revinate nine weeks when we sat down. He came from Sabre, where he spent years in distribution before the business was sold off and went out on its own. He had six months to think about what came next, spent it talking to people across the industry, and kept coming to the same conclusion: distribution and connectivity are shifting fast, and most people haven't grasped what that means for where a booking actually happens.

What drew him to Revinate was one thing: over 17 years the company has built a data moat, and the thing every large language model is hungry for now is exactly that, structured guest data. Revinate sits on those data points and can serve them up to the models, which is where the relevance and the conversion come from. For someone who's spent a career in distribution, it is, in his words, a beautiful place to be: a company that already owns the data the whole shift is about.

Nobody's arguing about whether it changes

We asked if the industry actually knows where it's going. Frank said he has a fair idea. What his peers are debating isn't whether things change fundamentally, that's settled, but who ends up winning. Do the OTAs pull off another 1995 and dig themselves back in, does a different aggregator do something new, or does something entirely new arrive. He doesn't read OpenAI stepping back from the booking funnel as a retreat; he thinks it's temporary and they'll come back at it hard once they see the opportunity. He brought up Google to make the point. Google launched with no business model either, just an attempt to organise the world and get interested parties together, and the advertising money came later. Eight months ago people were calling Google dead in this race, he said, and now they're right back in it, because they're too big and have too many resources not to be.

Starting inside the building

When we asked where AI helps Revinate's customers most, Revinate Chat is the example he gave: it resolves close to 80 percent of customer queries on its own, because it draws on their store of property data, with somewhere around 1.1 billion guest profiles behind it. The more relevant the answer when someone searches, the higher the hit rate, and the higher the satisfaction, because people get things resolved faster.

The bigger move Revinate is building toward is automation that's proactive rather than manual. Revinate ingests a hotel's data, spots the behavioural patterns across separate profiles, and builds what he calls a golden profile. The difference from a loyalty programme is what happens next: the intelligence layer can ping a hotel to act on a signal it would otherwise miss. If occupancy is lower next week, it nudges you to reach out to past guests and bring them back. If a guest who loves the beach has a birthday coming up, it prompts the birthday campaign. The aim is to get closer to set-and-forget, where the system learns the patterns on its own and starts making the suggestions for you, instead of someone having to remember each one. He said the suggestion part isn't live yet; it's what they're building toward.

Reaching guests a hotel never had

The conversation currently is around traveler intent data. The idea is to take what Revinate understands about behaviour and apply it to people a hotel has never reached. Frank's example: he's already booked his vacation, so a hotel shouldn't waste targeting him, but it could reach all the people who haven't booked yet and match a resort to a traveler whose patterns fit, or whose birthday is coming up. Right now a hotel feeds its own guest data into Revinate and pays nothing for it. What he's building toward is that the hotel starts getting something back for it: the ability to put its offer in front of travelers it could never have found on its own, people who were invisible to it before because it simply didn't have the technology to identify them. The data the hotel already contributes opens up an audience it never had access to.

We brought up data privacy, and Frank was glad we did, he'd been hoping we would. Revinate just launched a site, trust.revinate.com, to post its data practices, privacy approach, and certifications in the open, which he claims nobody else in hospitality does. He mentioned a Chief Data Officer based in Atlanta and pointed at GDPR and the EU's moves on how AI handles data as the reason to build to the highest standard now, on the logic that if you clear the toughest bar everyone else is covered.

Show me what it delivers

Asked what's different a year from now, Frank gave a test for vendors rather than a prediction. Any player can say they put an AI layer in their platform. The real question is what it delivers. Does it cut time to market, get you to a different customer base, help you attract the right guest at the right moment, stop a manager sitting in the back office every night working out the next move. Most AI talk right now, he said, can't show the proof points, partly because it's early and partly because people over-promise and under-deliver. He says he's a hotelier by trade, not a technologist, and his test comes from that side: can the system proactively reduce the dependencies that are a risk today. Not about firing people, he said, about making them more effective.

Take a hotel spending $110,000 a month on marketing, much of it spread across the wrong people at the wrong time. He says Revinate can deliver the right audience at the exact point the hotel needs it, matched to where demand and occupancy are soft. The hotel spends the same $110,000, but gets roughly double the return on it, because the money is now hitting people who are actually likely to book, at the moment that fills the gap. That's the conversation he wants to have, a data intelligence company delivering a specific, measurable outcome a hotel can trust.

The OTAs aren't the enemy

He wanted to push back on the reflex that OTAs are the enemy. He says an OTA is a fine stream of business; an independent hotel can't reach all those audiences on its own. What matters is what happens after: once that guest is in the building, Revinate gives the hotel the intelligence and the systems to bring them back direct next time. So let the OTAs bring the hotel more customers, he said, that's a beautiful thing. The future he's interested in is the connections, partnerships a hotel never considered because it couldn't see them, payments being one, where pulling restaurant, spa, and activity spend into the guest profile lets him spot bigger patterns and hand them back to the hotel. With 1.1 billion profiles and 12,500+ customers, he says the architecture's there; the work now is in the ingestion, the messy business of making all those different data points line up.

Launching Ivy

Revinate has since put a name on that direction, introducing Ivy, its AI decision intelligence layer built across its platform. The company is clear that Ivy is not a chatbot, it is the intelligence underneath the platform, drawing on the same foundation Frank had already pointed to when we spoke: 17 years of hospitality data and more than a billion guest profiles. Today that shows up in things like Revinate Chat's resolution rate and, per the launch, in scoring reservation agent calls, both surfaces powered by Ivy rather than being Ivy itself. It fits with what Frank told us before Ivy had a name: a system that spots the pattern first, whether that is a guest's birthday coming up or a week of soft occupancy, and nudges the hotel to act rather than waiting to be asked.