The luxury hospitality environment is dynamic and often unpredictable, requiring leaders to navigate challenges, whether it's adjusting to changing guest expectations, managing a diverse team, or responding to unforeseen circumstances.
Held at the UN Tourism Regional Office for the Middle East in Riyadh, the two-day event (9–10 September) brought together representatives from National Tourism Administrations and Organizations (NTAs/NTOs) from 12 Middle East Member States, with more than 30 participants in total, alongside industry experts and key stakeholders from across the region. The workshop explored the growing potential of wellness tourism as a driver of economic growth, tourism diversification, and sustainability for the Middle East.
The decisive skill I feel separates a great GM is "managing the balanced scorecard" - enlivening employee engagement, amplifying the guest experience, and ensuring financial stability. Too often, the General Manager confuses what is truly important and relevant to the hospitality business.
For me, the role of a luxury hotel GM is first and foremost that of a balancing act. Depending on the context, whether corporate or private ownership, the GM must be able to adapt and understand stakeholders' expectations. They must be able to deal with ambiguity and create added value.
Strategic foresight distinguishes outstanding luxury hotel general managers from their peers. Empathy empowers a general manager (GM) to understand and anticipate the diverse needs of guests, staff, owners, and partners. In luxury hospitality, emotional connections are crucial; guests often remember how they felt during their stay far more than the details of their accommodations.
Helped by a Limp Bizkit concert, Abu Dhabi’s hotel industry posted its highest August occupancy on record, according to preliminary data from CoStar. CoStar is a leading provider of online real estate marketplaces, information, and analytics in the property markets.
Today marks a defining moment in Middle East hospitality as Kimpton KAFD Riyadh officially opens its doors in the iconic King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD). As the first-ever Kimpton in the region, the 212-room luxury lifestyle hotel brings the brand's sophisticated yet playful approach, refined design, socially engaging spaces and human-centered hospitality, to the heart of Riyadh's most dynamic neighborhood.
It was inevitable that we would move to conversational AI and on-demand UI. The writing was on the wall years ago. Hotels will be caught off guard as OTA AI agents beat them without mercy at the pricing game. It’s time to build a defensive tool.
We will still need beautifully designed websites and flows — but more as validation layers and brand showcases than as discovery engines. OTAs and suppliers will increasingly serve as structured data ecosystems rather than pure UX-driven platforms.
Are we moving to a future - interesting... Though, you remove glossy images and brand (the websites of today), don't we just return to the flat green text screens of travel agents past, but this time operated by AI? Where description and detail was the important asset to capture interest and convert the booking?
Overall, there is no difference between preparing a dataset for AI and preparing a dataset for the myriads of other tech tools and business uses. By AI here, we mean Generative (Gen) AI-next-best-word, probability & correlation-based tools. Traditional analytical tools need normalised data (third normal form etc.) using Structured Query Language (SQL) with potential ambiguities removed in the design. Gen AI is useful to analyse text documents which are, by definition, unstructured, but it still acts as a glorified "word cloud" linking items together by frequency and probability. The main hospitality systems - PMS, POS, Spa, RMS, CRS, CRM - were built on normalized databases precisely to prevent mismatches, duplication, and gaps. Even then, duplicate guest profiles remain common, eg when a frequent guest changes email or surname. The better PMSes use fuzzy matching to ease de-duplication, but this remains a governance issue.
It so happens I have a deep background on this topic. Over almost a decade, I deployed enterprise-level customer data consolidation for many of the world's leading luxury brands. In this capacity, developing the methodology and guiding execution of this specific desired outcome scores of times. The process always begins with the standardization of data and the rollout of those standards, followed by the cleanup of information sets once the standards are in place. Only after that point is true consolidation a reality.
I believe priority #1 for independent hoteliers, midsize and smaller hotel brands is to create true two-way APIs among three crucial technology pieces: PMS-CRS-CRM. This is the only way to prepare the property for the agentic AI, expected to take over hotel bookings, guest relationships and personalization over the next years.
I’ve probably been asked about a hundred times in the last two years to list the “main” use cases of AI in our industry. And while I understand what drives this request (we’re all just trying to wrap our heads around AI while drinking from the firehose of unlimited possibilities it presents), I’m not a big fan of boxing people in with a static list of examples.
There is really no difference between preparing data for Gen AI and for other tech tools: structured data must be normalised, deduplicated, and governed, while Gen AI is best applied to unstructured sources like reviews, transcripts, or free-text notes.
AI in hospitality cannot be reduced to a fixed list of use cases, because the technology and its applications evolve too quickly and vary too widely across companies. Each organisation runs on its own mix of operations, tech stacks, data flows, and structures, which means their AI opportunities will always be unique to their context and business challenges.
This is part of a bigger question, I think. As a marketing guy, let me explain it through distribution, using Booking.com as the example. Booking spends billions on advertising, dominates search, builds the user experience that has become the industry template, and runs a multilingual customer service that often outperforms independent hotels.
Yes. It's not limited to franchises and is a pretty long standing clause in agreements. There largely because it was not as prominent a consideration back in the day from a data and technology perspective - harder to get data out of a peice of on premise technology that the owner paid for.
Accor has expanded its regional midscale portfolio with the opening of Mercure Hotel Abu Dhabi Downtown, a 156-key property located on Saeed Bin Ahmed Al Otaiba Street in the heart of the capital.
Aleph Hospitality has entered the Makkah market by signing a hotel management agreement with Diyar Al Khalidiyah Hotel Services Company for the Diyar Al Khalidiya hotel. The hotel, located on Ibrahim Khalil Street near the Great Mosque of Makkah and the Abraj Al-Bait Towers, comprises 338 rooms. This agreement marks Aleph Hospitality's second operational hotel in Saudi Arabia, following the Four Points by Sheraton Jeddah.
As a seasoned Revenue and Profit Optimization professional I would like to reitarate (which I have already expressed in my book Hospitality 2.0 and other publications): travel demand has always been uncertain, and history never repeats itself. Recent events just highlighted this fact for all of us (again), just like COVID did, and many events before that.
Now that the industry has come to this understanding, it's time to build a better "model of our reality" that can incorporate the uncertainty in a more optimal manner. It's time to rebuild our forecasting methods. Again, I describe this in detail in a separate chapter of my book.
"Velocity analytics" and "Anomaly detection" sound like cutting-edge tech, but these are just fancy names for basic common sense: watching your booking pace and noticing when something's off. The bigger issue is our industry's obsession with historical forecasting.
This is one of the greatest opportunities the hotel industry has ever faced. Forecasting should no longer be treated as a static spreadsheet, it's more like a live stock market dashboard, where dozens of variables are in motion and projections shift by the hour.
As a seasoned Revenue and Profit Optimization professional I would like to reitarate (which I have already expressed in my book Hospitality 2.0 and other publications): travel demand has always been uncertain, and history never repeats itself.
Having spent over 25 years at the intersection of hospitality operations and technology—most recently as Founder of EIP MGT GmbH, a vendor-neutral consultancy—I have seen the conversation around guest data shift from “what can we collect?” to “how do we use it to create real value?” The promise of a centralised, real-time guest profile is compelling, but only if it is leveraged to enhance—not replace—the human touch that defines our industry.
Hilton today announces the opening of DoubleTree by Hilton Nathiagali, marking the company's first hotel in Pakistan. Nestled in the heart of the scenic Galiyat region - one of Pakistan's most iconic hill stations and just 85 kilometers from Islamabad - the newly opened property blends DoubleTree by Hilton's signature warm hospitality with the area's natural alpine landscapes, offering unforgettable stays for business and leisure travelers alike. The hotel is owned and managed by The Baron Pakistan (Pvt) Limited.
On the outer edge of Saudi Arabia's west coast, a quiet architectural story is unfolding. Set on Ummahat Island, a protected stretch of sand and sea only accessible by private boat or seaplane, Nujuma, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve Residence, introduces a rare new standard for coastal living in the region.
In the past, legacy technologies in hospitality used to be closed systems, reluctant to open up to third-party integrations, applications and solutions. This type of technology prevented property and its guests from adopting some very innovative and much-needed applications and services.