The author argues hotels must unite to build industry-owned AI infrastructure before tech giants and OTAs dominate the new AI-powered travel search landscape.
RobosizeME case studies show hotels saving 200,000+ hours annually through AI automation of rate management, OTA reconciliation, and guest identification tasks.
Guests used to tell us when something went wrong. They complained at the desk. They called from the room. They filled out comment cards with neat handwriting and detailed grievances. Even if the stay was less than perfect, they gave the hotel a fair chance to fix it before passing judgment. That era is over. Something fundamental has shifted not loudly, but silently, and most hotels still haven’t caught up.
In the dynamic world of hospitality, the oft heard cry of “new technology” often rings loud and clear. Companies eagerly invest, chasing the promise of innovation, efficiency, and a competitive edge. Yet, all too often, these ambitious tech programs falter, leading to squandered investments, internal chaos, and frustrated stakeholders. From three decades navigating the intricate intersection of operations and technology, TRAVHOTECH observed a pervasive, yet frequently overlooked, culprit: a profound lack of hospitality tech strategy discipline.
HITEC is the largest hospitality technology show in the world. I began attending the show when I was an undergraduate student majoring in hospitality. The size and scope of the HITEC show, with more than 6,000 annual attendees, was impressive. Perhaps my favorite piece of the show was Guestroom 20x.
As we move toward 2026, the conversation around property-management systems (PMS) has evolved from functionality to philosophy. No longer is it enough for a PMS to handle check-ins, manage housekeeping, or reconcile payments. Today, the system at the heart of a hotel must serve as the operational nucleus connecting every touchpoint of the guest journey and every department behind it. The hotels leading the charge are those that have embraced the all-in-one PMS model, a unified platform built to empower efficiency, enhance revenue, and future-proof operations.
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.