Let’s face it: our industry has never been famous for being data-driven. We’ve been running on gut feeling, Excel spreadsheets, and the shape of the moon. But the future doesn’t care about gut feelings. The future runs on data. And not just any data – connected data.
There is nothing cheap about loyalty. I wrote those words years ago while evoking Ryan Bingham and his manic pilgrimage through miles and tiers, and I still believe them today. Because the true loyalty currency is not plastic or points. Loyalty is, instead, measured in attention, presence, memory, and the feeling of being recognized.
This article concludes Hospitality Net’s Thematics campaign with Shiji Group on Single Provider for Seamless Data. Throughout the series we have examined how integrated systems can transform hotel operations and the guest journey. For this final edition, the focus turns to one of the most pressing questions facing the industry today: how to build clean, connected datasets that can support useful applications of artificial intelligence.
Two guests book the same property. Same city. Same age. Same check-in date.
I hate to generalize about generations (yup, pun intended!), yet it is difficult to ignore that a crack has opened within the old catechism of hospitality, that choreography of handshakes and ritualized greetings passed from Jedi to padawan as if it carried the weight of eternal midichlorian truth (sorry, I spent the weekend in Disneyland Paris with my son, so my cultural references are slightly skewed), but which today feels less like continuity than the fading echo of a ritual whose spell has been (partially) broken.
Cybersecurity in 2025 for hotels is a game of Russian roulette. Odds are you’ll be safe most of the time, but then there’s the outside chance that it’s game over. The risks are far too great, and this is a topic that deserves constant and close study.
For centuries, Colossus has embodied the fragility of empires erected upon symbols, those immense figures that appear eternal until a single fracture reveals their emptiness. Nero’s bronze giant once loomed beside the Flavian Amphitheater, so imposing that its shadow gave the building its very name, the Colosseum. In time, the statue was dismantled, its metal melted, its memory fading into whispers. The prophecy that tied its fall to the fall of Rome became less prediction than retrospective allegory, a myth read backwards onto ruins. The statue was gone, the empire decayed, and people saw in one absence the mirror of the other (and sorry for the history lesson but My “Roman Empire” is THE ACTUAL Roman Empire…).
The post-pandemic “revenge travel” surge has cooled, but demand hasn’t disappeared. It has simply shifted. Today’s guests are more deliberate. They still spend and explore, but many now travel to recharge, extend a business trip into leisure, or set up a temporary remote office.
All it takes is one breach. Cybersecurity represents a clear and present threat for every hotel, and the topic deserves every kilobyte of attention that it gets. But this topic, and the related one of ‘Data Sovereignty’ are often framed as defensive, trepidation-filled subject matters where hotels must act now…or else…
With the 2026 budgeting season around the corner, the question of marketing investment has once again become front and centre. In a recent Hospitality Net Viewpoint, Max Starkov set the stage by highlighting a striking imbalance: while U.S. hotels typically spend less than 2.5% of room revenue on marketing (including payroll), OTAs invest billions — Expedia alone allocated 54% of its 2024 revenue, or $6.9 billion, to marketing. Collectively, major OTAs spent $17.8 billion in a single year, dwarfing the combined marketing budgets of hoteliers worldwide.
The moment AI agents can plug into the systems your hotel already runs on (PMS, POS, RMS, CRM, etc.), they stop being expensive toys with fancy language models and start behaving like digital coworkers. And let’s be clear on the semantics here: not “assistants.” Real (well, kinda) colleagues, capable of executing actual operational work: updating bookings, managing inventory, triggering maintenance, orchestrating systems and processes. This is the fundamental shift we’ll be witnessing over the next few months/years: the move from artificial intelligence as an interface to artificial intelligence as an infrastructure. Until now, most so-called “AI” in hospitality has been confined to shallow use cases, like chatbots, recommendation engines, and flashy BI dashboards. Useful? Sometimes. Transformational? Nah… And the reason is simple: intelligence, whether human or artificial, without access is just performance. You can have the most advanced system in the world, but if it can’t interact with your day-to-day ops (pull a reservation, update a status, execute a workflow), then it’s just another layer of abstraction. Another system to manage, rather than a system that manages for you. This is where the Model Context Protocol (MCP, for short) comes in. MCP is a protocol. A shared language. A neutral standard that can (finally) give AI systems the ability to operate inside your tech stack, and not around it. And when that happens, everything changes.
As part of our Thematics campaign with Shiji Group on Single Provider for Seamless Data, this article looks at one of the most transformative ideas in hotel technology today: the centralized, real-time guest profile. Integrated systems hold the promise of unlocking new guest experiences and streamlining operations, but the real challenge lies in turning that promise into everyday reality.
Some industry experts claim that hotel guests are inherently disloyal, are interested only in the best deal, and, inevitably, end up booking with the OTAs — where they find the lowest rates.
A guest walks up to the front desk. The receptionist glances at the screen and already knows the guest prefers feather pillows, skipped housekeeping during their last three stays, and charged over $600 in spa and F&B services the last time they were here. Housekeeping’s mobile device pings with an early arrival request. Meanwhile, the marketing team receives a real-time trigger to offer the guest a spa voucher tailored to their usual treatment. All of this happens without a single email, phone call, or Slack message.
It usually starts with a simple fix. One team wants better upsell options, so a new CRM is added. Another needs richer analytics, so in comes a reporting tool. The spa needs its own booking interface. The restaurant team demands a POS that talks to the kitchen the way they like. All good intentions.
True hotel customer loyalty reveals itself in moments like this: A guest walks into your lobby after a long day of travel, and your front desk agent greets him by name, Welcome, Mr. Johnson! It’s so nice to have you back for a third visit with us. Would you like me to send up a late-night snack? Maybe a slice of that chocolate cake you loved last time?
Those who know me know that I relish in the technical details of how specific features on software systems work, how integrations are built and how relational databases can be linked to integrate fields or perform valuable queries.
Email fatigue is a clear and present problem for practically everyone under the sun who isn’t a monk abstaining from the temptations of the internet. All of us are opted in to blanket, impersonal newsletters that pile up in our inboxes, with this digital noise only further compounded by junk texts, social media direct messages, and telemarketers.
AI isn’t magic. Rather, it’s pattern recognition at scale. And like any pattern recognition system, its output is only as good as its input. Which is why AI’s promise of personalized experiences, automated service flows, real-time recommendations often fall flat in fragmented tech environments. If your PMS, POS, CRM, and housekeeping tools aren’t talking to each other, then your AI is only guessing.
It happened again: A potential guest landed on your hotel’s website, spent time browsing your room options, checked availability, and even clicked through to your booking engine. But then they left without completing their reservation.
