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Hotels should continue reducing unnecessary rate leakage because it protects pricing integrity, strengthens partner relationships and improves profitability. But pursuing absolute zero leakage is increasingly unrealistic in a fragmented global distribution ecosystem.

Zero rate leakage is a bit of a fantasy: a room that never appears cheaper elsewhere.Distribution is a network. A room moves from hotel to wholesaler to bedbank to affiliate to OTA, and every layer that is added also removes visibility.

Asking whether hoteliers should stop chasing rate leakage suggests accepting contract breaches as a routine cost of doing business. The issue isn't technological complexity or API caching—it is a direct breach of written commercial agreements.Historically, wholesale rates resided in printed brochures as opaque, bundled packages—a volume trade-off generating incremental demand without exposing room pricing.What changed?

After more than 35 years in hotel leadership, I've seen our industry evolve through major technological shifts. I began my career as one of the youngest leaders in the hotel, and today I'm often the person with the deepest institutional knowledge and operational experience.

My first honest lesson with AI was this: the technology was never the hard part. The people were. Our earliest AI applications were practical — sentiment analysis and review response support, demand forecasting tools, and pre-arrival personalization.

As a General Manager, my biggest learning has been that AI is not a replacement for hospitality—it is an enabler of better hospitality.Our first steps with AI focused on improving productivity rather than replacing people. We have used AI to support content creation, communication, brainstorming, data analysis, guest feedback summarisation and operational planning.