Wholesale contracts now route hotel rooms through bank rewards portals and airline loyalty sites, stripping hotels of guest data, direct relationships, and future bookings while the rate discount remains.
Cvent CONNECT 2027 will be held April 5–8 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, announced at the 2026 edition in Nashville, which drew nearly 5,000 in-person attendees.
AI assistants now synthesize reviews and web content into hotel summaries that travelers see before visiting any owned channel, reshaping how first impressions are formed.
A Club Quarters executive argues hotels should treat distribution as a strategic ecosystem, prioritizing data connectivity, direct booking conversion, and guest lifetime value over raw channel volume.
Lodging Interactive's Celebrations Hub connects social media content to dedicated landing pages and lead capture forms, targeting smaller milestone events like reunions, showers, and parties that hotels often overlook.
Expedia Group and RateHawk published research the same week recasting hotel connectivity from neutral infrastructure into the entry condition for AI-driven, platform-controlled distribution.
Cvent CEO Reggie Agarwal argues that AI-driven content saturation makes in-person presence the highest-trust signal in modern marketing, with implications for event strategy.
As guests increasingly use AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini to research stays, hotels risk losing bookings to OTAs if they lack visibility or accuracy in AI-generated recommendations.
As AI tools increasingly shape traveler decisions before they visit a hotel website, brand consistency across reviews, listings, and third-party sources has become a critical marketing priority.
Dream Inn Santa Cruz's Director of Sales and Marketing shares how human-led reservations, pre-arrival outreach, and storytelling convert OTA visitors into direct bookers and build multi-generational guest loyalty.
Hotels chasing AI visibility should first fix digital fundamentals: quality content, reviews, social presence, and accurate listings before optimizing for ChatGPT or LLM-based discovery.
Namastay founder Frédéric Robles argues that friction at checkout, not pricing or loyalty, is the primary reason hotel direct booking rates remain stuck at 5–15%, while digital wallets have doubled mobile bookings on some properties.
Hyatt's Vows Venues study of 2,000 UK adults finds 83% want to marry abroad, with Italy topping destination choices and couples budgeting £36,579 on average for the event.
HSMAI opens entries for the 2026 Adrian Awards, celebrating the competition's 70th anniversary with 34 categories and new Best-of segments; deadline is September 15, 2026.
The global leisure economy is projected to grow from $5.5T to $9.57T, but operators face structural sales challenges rooted in consumer psychology, optional spending, and infinite competition.
Booking Holdings is unifying Booking.com, Agoda, and Priceline under a single B2B wholesale operation, giving it the ability to resell hotel net-rate inventory across bank apps, airline checkouts, and loyalty portals at scale.
A Hemingway-inspired perspective on Generative Engine Optimization and what hospitality brands can learn about visibility in AI-driven search.
Gen Z is reshaping luxury by prioritizing experiences, authenticity, and resale over logos, with major implications for hospitality operators and goods brands competing for younger consumers.
Independent hotels can capture growing unmanaged corporate travel by loading rates into the GDS, bypassing RFPs entirely and appearing in corporate booking tools where off-channel spend is being corralled.
Hotels can reduce OTA commissions by making their websites more convenient than third parties and using CRM data to send personalized, trust-building emails rather than generic promotional offers.