Central & South America - Latest

From my experience leading spa and wellness teams, confidence grows when team members understand what is expected, receive the right training and tools, and know their leaders will support thoughtful decisions.In hospitality, employees must often respond in the moment.

A phrase I use to govern any project and life in general is: "Show me the incentive, I'll show you the incentive."The simple fact that we have KPIs often means we try to optimize for those KPIs as a proxy for the guest experience, but it ends up being a facsimile.

Sustainable hospitality excellence begins at the top. Leaders must align around a clear mission and values and visibly walk the talk. Culture is not what appears on a wall; it is what colleagues experience through inclusion, recognition, support, communication and accountability.Empower people to make decisions in the interest of guests and colleagues within sensible guardrails, and recognize the small wins.

I see AI as a tool, not a strategy in itself. Today, its greatest value for us is business intelligence: helping our teams analyze information faster, identify patterns, challenge assumptions and give owners better insight into performance.

The AI conversation has now evolved beyond experimentation and into practical application. AI has the potential to reshape how capital is deployed across a hotel; from cost estimation and value engineering to project scheduling, risk management, design and operational decisions.

Chris Nassetta was right to call this AI’s “early days.” However, we are seeing consistent evidence that shows great promise for owners and operators.First, AI improves data consolidation and presentation. For decades, we have been trying to organize and bring data into clear, actionable reports.

After years of sitting on the buying side of these conversations, five things matter most to me. First, prove you understand hotel operations. Not in theory, but in how your solution performs at 2 a.m. when a system goes down and guests are waiting at the front desk.

Operational fit, clean integration, solid data protection, and measurable value across our properties and markets — that's the minimum expectation. Beyond those fundamentals, here's what, in my view, signposts the start of a genuine partnership: Show us the product.

From our perspective, before we seriously consider a technology vendor, we expect the vendor to demonstrate the following: Clear understanding of hotel operations and the business problem being solved.The solution must address a defined operational, commercial, guest-experience, or compliance challenge.

Not true! The first rationale is that SEO now has significant overlap with AEO and GEO in terms of helping serve all the channels that will be important for AI travel search visibility. So, a focus on what drives SEO will inevitably aid in AI-driven hotel recommendations and, in the future, AI bookings.Next is the argument against SEO as a 'set it and forget it' exercise.

GEO builds on top of SEO, so SEO is not dead.I think that Search (Google) helps with Research and Planning, not necessarily Inspiration. I agree that Inspiration often lives in different areas, ie Social. I don't think people use OTAs for Inspiration, either.

I think that there may be some truth here, but I’d draw a different conclusion. First of all, maybe we have historically given SEO too much credit for branded organic traffic. If someone discovers a hotel through Instagram, Booking.com or a friend and then Googles the property name and books direct, SEO didn’t necessarily create that demand; it helped capture it.

I've long been a believer in the model - Happy Staff-Happy Guest- Profitable Business.My personal view is that this is where the real solution lies. As an industry we are reasonably good at measuring things. Although I don't believe we are as good as measuring the right things together.

Improving retention is certainly good news, but retention alone does not tell us whether employees are committed to their organizations. During economic uncertainty, some employees may practice “job-hugging,” staying primarily because changing jobs feels risky.

Building a hospitality business team means to create community not just jobs. Business and employee performance needs to focus on the delivery of great service and support the establishment of sustainable hospitality environments (good for the environment, good for the community and good for business).

A fully automated hotel is not the future of hospitality. It is a different product category entirely and comparing the two does a disservice to both. The self checkout analogy is bit construed in my opinion. Self-checkout did not evolve retail.

As a hotel General Manager, I see the human-free hotel as an evolution in efficiency, but not a replacement for hospitality. Automation can significantly improve the guest journey by streamlining check-in, room access, payments, and routine service requests.

I have no problem with hotels using more technology. Guest apps, keyless entry and digital check-in can make things easier for guests and save my team a lot of repetitive work.But a hotel with no people involved in the guest journey is different.

Thank you, Simone, for raising a critical question about marketers’ essential role as AI reshapes the workplace. I see broader applications of this question across job functions beyond marketing.Specialization remains important in hotel marketing.

Are we over-specializing in hospitality digital marketing? The well-known idiomatic proverb “Jack of all trades, master of none" provides the answer to this question. Twenty years ago, a hospitality digital marketer could become a Jack of all trades.

LLMs are changing where value sits. In the past, deep knowledge of how to execute a specific task created an advantage. Today, I can use an LLM to understand the mechanics, explore options and complete work that once required a narrow specialist.This makes the big picture more important, not less.