Experiences Are Inventory, Not a Feeling: A Conversation with Journey at ITB Berlin

Simone Puorto squeezed onto a bench at ITB Berlin to speak with Simon Bullingham, CEO of Journey, and Andrew Metcalfe, CTPO of Journey, about why hotels leave so much revenue on the table, what it actually takes to retail a full stay, and how AI fits into operations when the foundations are solid. Journey is more than a technology provider. They work as a performance partner for hospitality, built to help hotels turn commercial insight into timely action.

"Ancillary" is the wrong word

The conversation opened with a question about room obsession, and Simon went straight to the language problem. The word ancillary implies something secondary, an add-on to the real product. Journey talks about experiences as inventory instead. The distinction matters. Inventory gets managed, distributed and optimised. Feelings do not.

Some of the hotels Journey works with generate 50 percent of their revenue from non-room sources. That is not a niche outcome. It is what happens when a hotel treats experiences the same way it treats room nights: bookable, visible, actively merchandised. The hotels that have not made that shift are leaving significant revenue on the table, and a Knight Frank study cited in the conversation suggested the next few years will be particularly challenging for luxury properties that do not diversify.

Why rooms got all the attention

Andrew offered some context on how the industry got here. Hospitality tech was actually early to build sophisticated room distribution infrastructure. OTAs and channel management emerged quickly and worked well enough that everything else stayed underdeveloped by comparison. The operational complexity of running a hotel did not help. A general manager is not a technologist. A hotel owner running a restaurant, a spa and a wedding business is not looking for a SaaS product manual. They need a partner who will sit with them, work through the data and help them understand what to do next.

Andrew's view on the technology industry was candid: the push for volume and licences has devalued service, and service is exactly what complex, enterprise-grade hospitality operations need most. Journey's approach goes the other way.

People silos, not just tech silos

The conversation moved to a point that does not come up enough when the industry talks about fragmentation. Tech silos are well understood. People silos are just as real and just as costly. Revenue managers and marketing managers often operate with no shared visibility, which means a marketing team can spend budget driving traffic to a hotel that is already close to full. The money is wasted not because the systems failed, but because the teams were not talking.

Revenue management systems are starting to think beyond rooms, looking to yield the full stay rather than just the room night. That requires an experience management system and a revenue system to actually communicate. The technology challenge is solvable. The organisational one takes longer.

Get the foundations right before chasing AI

Both Simon and Andrew were measured about AI. Walking the ITB floor, every product has AI in its headline. Andrew's point was grounded: hotels that do not yet fully use the PMS they already have are not ready to extract value from AI. The ones that will win are the ones building solid data foundations now, so that when AI tools mature further, there is something real to accelerate on top of.

Simon framed it as a performance question. AI's real value in hospitality is turning commercial insight into timely action. That only works if the data underneath it is clean, connected and trusted. Build that first.