Because modern AI systems excel at narrow, specialized tasks rather than general intelligence, hotels will increasingly deploy a collection of ANI systems — each designed to perform extremely specific guest-facing functions.
Earlier this month, ChatGPT launched Apps, a new way for brands to show up in AI conversations. And I mean show up everywhere. When the iPhone App Store launched in 2008, it reached 6 million users. ChatGPT Apps launched to 800 million users. That's 133 times larger, on day one.
In the hotel business, a guest’s experience begins long before they step into the lobby. From the moment they make a booking online, they place their trust in the property’s ability to safeguard their personal and payment information.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been significantly reshaping the hospitality industry over the past decade. From luxury hotels to fast food joints, AI tools are affecting how services are delivered and how operations are run, ultimately having an enormous impact on the customer experience overall. But what does this digital transformation really look like?
Every industry has its golden moment of obsession, that period when a single innovation promises to rewrite every rule we’ve ever lived by. For hotels, we’ve lived through many. Online travel agencies were going to make our own websites obsolete. Review platforms were going to destroy reputation management. Social media was going to replace loyalty. And yet, through every so-called revolution, the heartbeat of hospitality never stopped.
Hotel brands are currently struggling in the battle for guest loyalty, not because of poor service, but because of poor data visibility. Guests expect the same seamless, personalized experiences they receive from Amazon or Uber, yet most hotels aren’t able to consistently deliver this level of service due to lack of data visibility across their portfolios.
The hospitality industry is entering a defining moment. After years of steady digital adoption, hotel leaders are shifting their focus from incremental efficiency to systemic innovation that connects technology, data, and human experience into a unified strategy for growth.
Hotels have entered a new operational era. Costs continue to rise across energy, labour, and distribution while expectations for speed and personalization grow sharper with every guest interaction. To sustain profitability, operations must evolve from manually driven routines to connected, automated systems that execute repetitive tasks with precision and reliability.
In the latest episode of Matt Talks, Mews CEO Matt Welle spoke with Jason Noronha, co-founder of D3x – an AI company built by hoteliers, for hoteliers. What began as a solution to a single operational pain point has evolved into a technology that promises to change how hotels operate.
If you’ve been anywhere near LinkedIn lately (including my profile), you’ve probably been hit by an alphabet soup of acronyms: AI, GenAI, AEO, GEO, MCP, A2A, and maybe even a mysterious “agentic something”.
Seven tectonic shifts that will redefine hospitality and how leaders can ride the change instead of reacting to it.
Just days into OpenAI’s new app marketplace, Booking.com and Expedia have seized a commanding lead. They’re not just experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI). They’re embedding themselves directly into the core of how travelers search, discover and book stays at your hotels. And because they’ve moved first—with no safeguards to stop them—they are about to become the default middlemen of the AI age. If that happens, hoteliers will spend the next decade paying for access to their own guests.
Over the past year, we’ve all been talking (and hearing) a lot about MCP, the Model Context Protocol. It’s the new standard introduced by Anthropic and now being adopted by OpenAI and Google — essentially a new, more intelligent way for AI models to connect to real-world data and tools.
“Experience” is everywhere. It’s one of the most wildly overused terms in modern hospitality, used to describe everything from hair salons to hotel bedrooms. As a result, it’s easy for executives to feel lost when guests ask for “experience-led” travel – and, to cope, many default to renovation, restaurants, and retail makeovers in an attempt to match the demand.
Sometimes it’s useful to look to other industries to get inspiration for how to improve efficiency and experiences. Sometimes you don’t need to look so far.
Among friends, we joke that WIHP (now part of Cendyn) was the PayPal Mafia of hotel marketing. It sparked more entrepreneurs than any other hotel tech startup I know of (Design Hotels did quite good too). It wasn’t planned that way, of course. But for a few years, there was this unique cluster of talent, energy, creativity, and sheer determination that somehow all landed in one place - and which then went off to create even more hotel marketing technology and agencies.
There remains an uncomfortable truth about technology investment – rigidity costs more than it saves. All-in-one systems, long-term vendor dependencies and software lock-ins are giving way to a new reality where success rests on how rapidly an organisation can move, connect and adapt to changes and disruptions in the market. Digital transformation is estimated at $30.24 billion in 2025 and expected to reach $63.31 billion by 2030, but for Mandla Mbonambi, CEO of Africonology, while the conversation around digital transformation is still highly relevant and ongoing, it is now also shifting to incorporate digital composition[1].
Standing at a hotel reception desk, tired from travel, only to be told the system won’t let us into our room? In hospitality, technology is meant to streamline and elevate the guest experience, but what happens when it does the opposite? This article dives into the hidden emotional cost of tech failures in hotels, revealing how even the sleekest systems can backfire and why the human touch still matters more than ever.
To write about the future is, inevitably, to be wrong about the future. I have repeated this for years, and yet, it remains the truest sentence I know. The mistake, however, is not a failure of prediction but a form of knowledge. We now inhabit a “post-postmodern”, almost “post-futurist” condition, a time in which tomorrow no longer stretches ahead as a horizon but hovers above us like a permanent update, endlessly refreshing itself. And although the Singularity that Kurzweil foresaw two decades ago has not yet fully arrived, his law of accelerating returns already permeates the present, altering our perception of time and possibility. Within this landscape, those of us who attempt to understand technology are no longer prophets, but rather cartographers of the impermanent, tracing transient patterns across the shifting topography of innovation. What follows, therefore, are not laws but coordinates, ten mutable constellations, ten subtle tremors that delineate the tectonic rewriting of business, technology, and meaning itself. Because the future, in the end, is no longer what it used to be.
Over the summer, a pink yacht docked off Marassi Marina in Egypt’s North Coast offering on-board beauty services by the Egyptian brand, Beauty 911 had appeared on my Instagram feed. I had no plans of going to Egypt but within minutes of seeing this Instagram reel, my August plans became experiencing the pink yacht with my girlfriends before the summer ended. What I felt in those moments, unfolding a scenario I hadn’t planned, is today’s traveler letting curiosity, preferences, and desire drive every decision. One captivating idea, one scroll-stopping image, can completely rewrite their travel.