AI Everywhere (4)

Fix your data first. Compset, segmentation, rate mapping, etc. AI is only as good as the data behind it and most "AI failed" stories are really mapping stories. The bottleneck moves from analysis to decisions. When analysis takes minutes instead of days, the question becomes who decides, how fast, and which old meeting you can delete.

I think we're making the same mistake we make with every technological evolution (again, NOT revolution): we OVERestimate what AI will do in the next six months and UNDERestimate what it will do over the next six years. Today, I don't think there's a single killer application that every hotel should rush to deploy.

There's no shortage of AI noise, but most of it won’t tell you where to start. Here’s what I’d advise someone tackling it for the first time: Start with the problem, not the technology - The wrong question to start with is "how can we use AI?" The right one is "where does my team spend time on things that shouldn't need a human?” Repetitive guest messaging, manual reporting, rate updates, back-office admin.

Generally, more people with access to AI will not mean better solutions, it will mean more noise in the market, more fragmented and badly deployed technology - just like the last decades, but at a bigger scale, and the people who suffer are hotel employees and guests. I do believe that to stand out from the pack and deliver something truly remarkable, you need genuine innovators to bring all these solutions together in a coherent ecosystem that is open, collaborative, and truly end-to-end in how we serve guests. The best technology partners will build closer partnerships at the backend layer, while hoteliers can build complete AI workflows on the frontend.

By HITEC 2030, AI will not have eaten established hospitality tech. It will have eaten the repetitive workflow layer around it. Hotels will still rely on PMS, CRS, RMS, payments, distribution, and other systems of record. Those systems are too operationally critical to disappear quickly.

2030 is a long time from now, especially in AI-years, which are only about 60 days long!If I think about the current trajectories and strategies of the bigger companies that will lead this movement, I see larger travel enterprises implementing foundational agentic backbones like Frontier from OpenAI or Claude Enterprise from Anthropic.

Hotels are better positioned for the AI era than most people think. They own something no LLM can replicate: years of proprietary guest data and a direct relationship with the customer. That's a genuine competitive moat, and agentic AI is finally what turns it into action.

The takeaway that stays with me isn't about any single technology. It's about what AI can actually do to change the way we experience travel.An example of this was the live demo I gave on stage to change my own flight home - not by calling a helpdesk, not by navigating an app - but by having a natural conversation with an AI agent that handled everything live: rebooking, seat, baggage, transfer all in one simple phone call.The audience went quiet for a moment.

What stood out to me most at ITB Berlin this year was how much the conversation around AI has shifted from theory to real, everyday use. Hoteliers and operators are no longer asking whether AI matters, but where it can make the biggest difference for guests and teams right now.

While a ton can be said about the various ways that AI will affect travel, one specific behavioral adjustment we will see is the resurgence of voice-based interactions. After all, what's easier to do: talk or type? For most, we can speak a lot faster than we can plug information into a computer or phone.

The big OTAs like Expedia/Bing and Booking are already using gen AI tools to expand searches to trip itineraries, eg Bing's Copilot. It's still early days as the Bing tool clearly just does keyword searches and then uses OpenAI to write a (good) narrative based on the results.

Google's AI-organized search results will become the norm. Despite a bumpy rollout with the infamous glue-on-pizza incident, the generative web is already reshaping the travel UI. This shift holds promising implications for hotels and media outlets.