HN Originals

Ask Alibaba, Not Google.200 million. That's how many AI-native orders ran through Alibaba's Qwen app during Spring Festival alone. Fliggy's AI-driven bookings jumped 800% year-over-year in that same window, with attraction-ticket conversion now matching OTAs that have run for two decades.

Google's agentic booking will flourish if its conversational AI collapses hours of travel research into simple, secure Google Pay transactions backed by major hotel and OTA partners. However, it will fizzle if consumer anxiety over high-cost bookings prevents users from trusting an AI agent without traditional visual validation, or if strict global regulations like the EU's DMA permanently limit its market footprint.

I believe “this time is different.” Both “Book on Google” and agentic booking are not MoR and instead route bookings to the end service providers (OTA or direct). So clearly, the question is why would travelers be comfortable “submitting” bookings directly to AI, but not BoG?With BoG, Google tried to close the loop and become a semi-transactional layer.

Over the years, I’ve seen that the most successful technology partnerships rarely start with technology. They start with a clear understanding that change is needed and a shared vision for where the organization wants to go. The hotel groups that get the greatest value from technology are usually those that are willing to challenge the status quo and bring the right people together to make informed decisions.Equally important is leadership.

This resonates deeply after decades in hospitality technology. The strongest outcomes come from genuine partnerships—not merely contracts.As a P&L owner, I’ve seen that distinction from both sides. Some clients generate meaningful revenue but create a disproportionate drain on resources or dominate a roadmap in ways that do not serve the broader customer community.

In my experience running a boutique technology firm, choosing the right client matters as much as the client choosing the right vendor. Our scarcest resource is not scale. It is attention.The clients we go the extra mile for are clear about the problem they are solving, give us the real decision-makers, decide with discipline, and treat the relationship as a partnership rather than a transaction.

Hoteliers have told us for years that they have huge amounts of data, but in separate systems. The core issue is that each tool runs on its own data set and doesn't play nice with others. Your PMS is working with one set of numbers and your channel manager with another.That's partly because connecting these systems is nobody's job.

The general malaise that the industry maintains when it comes to doing the hard work of technology and data structure.This is the one initiative that is almost always pushed down the road. Largely because people hope someone else will do it.

I spoke about this topic on HEDNA's stage in Lisbon a couple of weeks back, on how AI is redrawing hotel distribution. Knowing that 79% of what AI knows about a hotel comes from OTAs, metasearch, and editorial sources — and not from the hotel itself, which only accounts for 7.5% — I believe we can agree that AI is filling the gap with third-party data.

A focus on employee well-being can translate to reduced turnover and burnout. Middle management needs to be provided training and education as well as experiences that enables them to be continually learning and growing. Managers and front-line leaders need knowledge, experiential learning opportunities, application practice time plus learning tools that focus on decision making to help create better work environments.

Supervisors and department heads are the bridge between executives and frontline employees. They may indeed be the most consequential leadership layer because they must translate policies, staffing decisions, service standards, and culture into actual workplace practices.

This is what happens when organisations treat people as numbers on a spreadsheet. Line and middle managers absorb some of the most demanding aspects of hospitality work: pressure from senior leaders and owners, the emotional needs of their teams, and the expectations, and sometimes unacceptable behaviour of customers.Good hospitality companies do exist, and many understand this reality.