Central & South America - Latest

In the future, brands and OTAs will need to: Reduce their inventory and storytelling — so it's portable, embeddable, and instantly bookable anywhere. Invest in API-first distribution — enabling social, AI, and agent ecosystems to transact on their behalf.

That's an interesting question. However, I don't believe social media will become transactional when it comes to travel and hospitality. That doesn't mean it can't and won't become so for other industries - I can see this already happening for everyday purchases: apparel, jewelry, consumer goods, clothings, etc.

Good one! 💡 I definitely get a lot of product and service inspiration through my social media feeds. Entertainment is a big factor, but as someone tied into the hospitality sector, I particularly enjoy seeing industry offerings—whether that's cutting-edge technology or tangible experiences like hotels, resorts, and restaurants.

The shift toward experience-based booking is absolutely transforming the game. AI can finally solve the paradox of choice. Hotels can now showcase everything they offer but in a way that's targeted and relevant. Don't sell me a romantic getaway when I'm traveling alone.

There is a massive industry gap here. Full stop. Discussion about this capability in the industry is topical. Those in a position to enable it are few, if even thinking about it. Packages are a clumsy solution to the underlying problem of being able to successfully deliver rooms digitally.

If the game has shifted...so must our KPIs. Today's revenue leaders must zoom out and focus on TRevPAR, capturing not just what happens in the room, but around it. Whether you're luxury or budget, you can take advantage of experiential revenue, something that thanks to digitalization, every hotel can play (and not only ultra-luxury resorts).

The problem isn't that personalization fails on property. The problem starts much earlier: we still don't speak the right language of guest experience in the digital space. Take booking. A traveler may want a big bed, a walk-in shower, and a quiet location.

Online personalisation is easy, as it's mostly a pattern-matching algorithm between known guest preferences and available services. It isn't personalisation, rather just mass customisation. On property, a guest walking around is essentially anonymous, even after checking in.

This is a question at the heart of hospitality’s digital transformation. Hotels excel at digital personalisation (curated offers, smooth booking, and tailored communications) because online, data is structured, accessible, and actionable.

The end of the hyperlink economy may very well also mean the end of Google domination. Owning 92% of online searches worldwide, Google has long been in a quasi-monopoly situation, but this is shifting quickly, as people are catching on the ease of using LLM for search purposes: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Mistral, Deepseek...

The Fundamentals Stay the Same Discovery may shift from hyperlinks to AI answers, but advertising still rests on the basics: segmentation, targeting, positioning, and brand building. These don"t vanish when the funnel compresses — they adapt.

The investment won't be any less; maybe more. The search landscape, whatever its form, will inevitably migrate back to Google, a shift that the introduction of Gemini inside the browser will only accelerate. If the OTA model is truly sidelined, Google may look to take a significant portion of that revenue stream for itself.