The luxury hospitality environment is dynamic and often unpredictable, requiring leaders to navigate challenges, whether it's adjusting to changing guest expectations, managing a diverse team, or responding to unforeseen circumstances.
The decisive skill I feel separates a great GM is "managing the balanced scorecard" - enlivening employee engagement, amplifying the guest experience, and ensuring financial stability. Too often, the General Manager confuses what is truly important and relevant to the hospitality business.
For me, the role of a luxury hotel GM is first and foremost that of a balancing act. Depending on the context, whether corporate or private ownership, the GM must be able to adapt and understand stakeholders' expectations. They must be able to deal with ambiguity and create added value.
Strategic foresight distinguishes outstanding luxury hotel general managers from their peers. Empathy empowers a general manager (GM) to understand and anticipate the diverse needs of guests, staff, owners, and partners. In luxury hospitality, emotional connections are crucial; guests often remember how they felt during their stay far more than the details of their accommodations.
Sat amongst dense flora, XELA Tulum cultivates the feeling of a private beachside residence. The palapa roof rises like a sculptural tribute to tradition, while the 12 individually designed rooms and suites feature custom pieces that reflect the local craft heritage. A roof terrace boasts 360-degree views of the surrounding sea and jungle, and an infinity pool leads the way to 50 meters of secluded beachfront.
IHG Hotels & Resorts (IHG), one of the world’s leading hotel companies, celebrates the signing of six Mexico hotels for the premium voco hotels brand, in partnership with Alliance Hotels. The conversions will expand IHG’s upscale offering in Mexico, providing owners with a stylish, welcoming and distinctive brand that elevates their existing properties, optimizes returns and attracts new guests.
Sonesta International Hotels Corporation (Sonesta) today announced the first two properties under its strategic alliance with AKEN Hotels & Resorts. This initial phase of the relationship includes two hotels in Argentina, marking a significant step in Sonesta’s core LATAM market expansion goals.
It was inevitable that we would move to conversational AI and on-demand UI. The writing was on the wall years ago. Hotels will be caught off guard as OTA AI agents beat them without mercy at the pricing game. It’s time to build a defensive tool.
We will still need beautifully designed websites and flows — but more as validation layers and brand showcases than as discovery engines. OTAs and suppliers will increasingly serve as structured data ecosystems rather than pure UX-driven platforms.
Are we moving to a future - interesting... Though, you remove glossy images and brand (the websites of today), don't we just return to the flat green text screens of travel agents past, but this time operated by AI? Where description and detail was the important asset to capture interest and convert the booking?
The recently formed Royalton Hotels & Resorts announced today that it will officially take over the management of Royalton Riviera Cancun, An Autograph Collection All-Inclusive Resort & Casino, and Royalton Hideaway Riviera Cancun, An Autograph Collection All-Inclusive Resort – Adults Only, beginning December 7, 2025.
Overall, there is no difference between preparing a dataset for AI and preparing a dataset for the myriads of other tech tools and business uses. By AI here, we mean Generative (Gen) AI-next-best-word, probability & correlation-based tools. Traditional analytical tools need normalised data (third normal form etc.) using Structured Query Language (SQL) with potential ambiguities removed in the design. Gen AI is useful to analyse text documents which are, by definition, unstructured, but it still acts as a glorified "word cloud" linking items together by frequency and probability. The main hospitality systems - PMS, POS, Spa, RMS, CRS, CRM - were built on normalized databases precisely to prevent mismatches, duplication, and gaps. Even then, duplicate guest profiles remain common, eg when a frequent guest changes email or surname. The better PMSes use fuzzy matching to ease de-duplication, but this remains a governance issue.
Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE: CHH), one of the world's largest lodging franchisors, has opened the Radisson Blu Bariloche, a modern retreat designed for travelers seeking an elevated experience with access to stunning natural scenery and year-round outdoor adventures. Set along the crystal waters of Lake Nahuel Huapi and among the breathtaking peaks of the Andes Mountains, the property offers a gateway to one of Argentina's most famed destinations.
It so happens I have a deep background on this topic. Over almost a decade, I deployed enterprise-level customer data consolidation for many of the world's leading luxury brands. In this capacity, developing the methodology and guiding execution of this specific desired outcome scores of times. The process always begins with the standardization of data and the rollout of those standards, followed by the cleanup of information sets once the standards are in place. Only after that point is true consolidation a reality.
I believe priority #1 for independent hoteliers, midsize and smaller hotel brands is to create true two-way APIs among three crucial technology pieces: PMS-CRS-CRM. This is the only way to prepare the property for the agentic AI, expected to take over hotel bookings, guest relationships and personalization over the next years.
Today, Hilton announces the debut of Tru by Hilton and Homewood Suites by Hilton in Saltillo, the capital of Coahuila de Zaragoza state and one of the fastest-growing industrial hubs in the country. Owned by American Hotels Group, the dual-branded hotel provides business and leisure travelers a comfortable and reliable stay, whether traveling for short or extended visits. These openings reinforce Hilton's growth momentum in Mexico, where the company currently has more than 110 open hotels welcoming guests and more than 40 hotels in various stages of development.
Sandos Hotels & Resorts has announced the transition of its signature 955-room Playa del Carmen eco all-inclusive resort to the new name Sandos Caracol Nature Resort & Water Park, formerly known as Sandos Caracol Eco Resort. Following the multi-staged, multi-million-dollar renovation of several of its dining outlets, common areas, amenities, and room categories, along with the addition of new cenotes, an adults-only beach club, and more, the brand believes this new name change will usher the property into a new era of prosperity.
The Westin Resort & Spa Puerto Vallarta is thrilled to announce its forthcoming transformation into an all-inclusive beach resort, marking a new chapter in its commitment to providing elevated hospitality and wholesome immersive experiences. Set to be completed by May 2026, the resort will be rebranded as The Westin Playa Vallarta, an All-Inclusive Resort to debut as the first Westin all-inclusive in Mexico.
I’ve probably been asked about a hundred times in the last two years to list the “main” use cases of AI in our industry. And while I understand what drives this request (we’re all just trying to wrap our heads around AI while drinking from the firehose of unlimited possibilities it presents), I’m not a big fan of boxing people in with a static list of examples.
There is really no difference between preparing data for Gen AI and for other tech tools: structured data must be normalised, deduplicated, and governed, while Gen AI is best applied to unstructured sources like reviews, transcripts, or free-text notes.
AI in hospitality cannot be reduced to a fixed list of use cases, because the technology and its applications evolve too quickly and vary too widely across companies. Each organisation runs on its own mix of operations, tech stacks, data flows, and structures, which means their AI opportunities will always be unique to their context and business challenges.
This is part of a bigger question, I think. As a marketing guy, let me explain it through distribution, using Booking.com as the example. Booking spends billions on advertising, dominates search, builds the user experience that has become the industry template, and runs a multilingual customer service that often outperforms independent hotels.
Yes. It's not limited to franchises and is a pretty long standing clause in agreements. There largely because it was not as prominent a consideration back in the day from a data and technology perspective - harder to get data out of a peice of on premise technology that the owner paid for.
In the heart of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, that question has already been answered. Ibiti Projeto stands as living proof that regenerative hospitality is not a far-off dream but a reality. Over 40 years, it has transformed once-degraded land into a thriving biodiversity refuge, while creating opportunities for local people to become entrepreneurs and stewards of their own future.My recent immersion there was a reminder that regeneration is not an abstract ideal - it’s a tangible force that can transform landscapes, economies and mindsets all at once.
As a seasoned Revenue and Profit Optimization professional I would like to reitarate (which I have already expressed in my book Hospitality 2.0 and other publications): travel demand has always been uncertain, and history never repeats itself. Recent events just highlighted this fact for all of us (again), just like COVID did, and many events before that.
Now that the industry has come to this understanding, it's time to build a better "model of our reality" that can incorporate the uncertainty in a more optimal manner. It's time to rebuild our forecasting methods. Again, I describe this in detail in a separate chapter of my book.
"Velocity analytics" and "Anomaly detection" sound like cutting-edge tech, but these are just fancy names for basic common sense: watching your booking pace and noticing when something's off. The bigger issue is our industry's obsession with historical forecasting.
This is one of the greatest opportunities the hotel industry has ever faced. Forecasting should no longer be treated as a static spreadsheet, it's more like a live stock market dashboard, where dozens of variables are in motion and projections shift by the hour.
As a seasoned Revenue and Profit Optimization professional I would like to reitarate (which I have already expressed in my book Hospitality 2.0 and other publications): travel demand has always been uncertain, and history never repeats itself.