Predicting AI is futile, preparing isn’t
A strategic case for why hotels should prioritize open APIs, data accessibility, and AI-ready PMS flexibility over chasing today's best AI features.
By Martin Soler, Partner, Soler & Associates
Opinion Articles
Google just put agentic hotel booking into testing
Google's live agentic hotel booking test includes Booking, Expedia, Marriott, Wyndham, and IHG, with Amadeus confirmed as the first GDS infrastructure partner, leaving independents reliant on OTA or GDS pipes.
By Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher, hospitality.today
The Terminal Is the New Homepage
Shanghai's 100 AI-powered tourist terminals, built on 84,000+ content entries and 14,000 booking links, are presented as a reference model for destinations like the Philippines to build a unified data layer first, before any interface.
By Terence Ronson, Founder & Managing Director, Pertlink Limited
Hotels don't need more data, they need direction
Cendyn argues hotels are drowning in data but lack direction, and positions AI-enabled actionable intelligence as the shift from reporting to decision support across its CRM, Knowland, and Wayfinder products.
By Nicola Graham, Chief Marketing Officer, Cendyn™
Homo Hackabilis: Why Hack a Server When You Can Just Call a Human?
A hospitality consultant recounts four near-identical cyberattacks on clients, all exploiting staff via phone-based impersonation rather than technical exploits.
Tollbooths on the Token Highway
Stripe's reported $7B acquisition of OpenRouter, combined with its earlier Metronome buy, creates a vertically integrated AI billing stack that makes model routing costs opaque to operators and demands new cost-tracking disciplines for hospitality.
By Terence Ronson, Founder & Managing Director, Pertlink Limited
Chat, Workflow, Agent or Orchestration: What Does Your Hotel Actually Need?
A practical framework for hotel leaders to distinguish between chat, workflow, agent, and orchestration AI modes, with a decision matrix to avoid over-buying autonomy for problems that are simply workflows.
By Darko Bosancic, SVP, Sirma
Your Next Guest Is A Robot: How AI Is Rewriting The Path To Booking
As AI tools like ChatGPT increasingly influence hotel discovery and trip planning, hotels must now optimize their digital presence for both human guests and the AI agents acting on their behalf.
By Jordan Brannon, President and Co-Founder, Coalition Technologies
Your Hotel Now Has Five AIs, and None of Them Have Met Each Other
Opinion arguing that siloed AI tools across pricing, messaging, and booking create contradictory guest interactions, making hotels feel less coherent than before AI adoption.
By Are Morch, Digital Transformation Coach for Hotels, Are Morch, AI Champion
How Hotels Get Recommended by AI Agents before Their Competitors Do
Hotels risk being invisible to AI booking agents unless they address five readiness layers: machine-legible data, rate parity, reputation signals, specific positioning, and protocol presence.
By Muhammad Tanveer, Author & Founder, The Sales Leadership Brief
5 Things Every Hotelier Should Know About PMS Data Protection
Hoteliers are urged to treat PMS outages as operational crises, with practical guidance on backup validation, offsite redundancy, and recovery drills to minimize downtime.
By Doug Wagner, Manager, Technical Services, Maestro
Here’s What Happens When AI Starts Making Decisions and Bookings for Hotel and Travel Guests
Agentic AI is shifting travel from search-and-select to ask-and-act, but nearly 70% of travelers still prefer to complete bookings via trusted brands rather than AI agents, signaling the need for appropriate, not maximum, automation.
By Ivana Johnston, Co-Founder and CEO, Puzzle Partner
Beyond the Rooms View: Deconstructing the Great PMS Debate from the Inside
A closed-door HITEC San Antonio debate between PMS CEOs and hotel CIOs exposes structural gaps in hospitality tech, from labor-cost bias to the myth of seamless cloud integration.
By Mark Fancourt, Co-Founder & Principal Consultant, TRAVHOTECH
Winning the AI Decision Layer in Hospitality: From AI Discovery to Agentic Booking
AI engines now decide which hotels get recommended, trusted, and booked. Here are the six stages that determine whether yours is the one they choose.
By John Jimenez, Head of Enterprise Commercial Strategy, Milestone Inc.
Your Data Is Your Product: Why the AI Model Is Not Your Moat
As AI becomes a commodity, the true competitive advantage lies in unified, trusted guest data that most hotels still struggle to consolidate across fragmented PMS, CRM, and loyalty systems.
By Rik van Leeuwen, VP of Customer Operations, Ireckonu
Why a lack of AI readiness could be holding your hotel back, and how to fix it
Access Hospitality warns that despite 53% of hoteliers finding AI useful, poor AI readiness is limiting its potential, and shares three tips to address it.
By Champa Magesh, Managing Director, The Access Group, Access Hospitality
IHG's new AI is attribute-based selling finally finding its interface
IHG's new AI-powered natural language search makes attribute-based selling functional for guests, offering the consumer interface that a decade of back-end infrastructure could never deliver.
By Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher, hospitality.today
Who Controls the Controls? — Part Two
Following real incidents where AI agents breached containment at OpenAI and Anthropic, the author urges hoteliers to demand vendor incident-response commitments and enforce guardrails before granting broad AI permissions.
By Terence Ronson, Founder & Managing Director, Pertlink Limited
One Year On: The Sorcery Holds
One year after launch, South Palms Resort and Spa Panglao's 20,000-device IoT infrastructure has run without guest-facing failures, validating the invisible-by-design technology approach.
By Terence Ronson, Founder & Managing Director, Pertlink Limited
Hotelogix sees instant adoption of BIR compliance among Philippine hotels
Hotelogix, a BIR-certified cloud PMS, reports that ~75% of 3–5 star hotels in the Philippines have adopted certified systems as tax compliance becomes a deal-breaker in tech procurement.
By Sivaprasad Gangadharan, Chief Sales Officer, Hotelogix