Technology

In my previous airline and telcoms world, we used service buses like TIBCO to sit on top of enterprise systems. The upside was the potential of plug and play (although we never actually changed back end ERPs). The downside was extra latency and cost.

The integration hub solution is different for every hotel. The easiest answer starts with new brands or independents. Heading into 2026, there are several great PMS and GEMS players that can fulfill a variety of central operations so that one-off integrations amongst disparate, single-use services aren't as necessary as they were a few years ago.

In practice, it's not that simple. A hub always depends on common integration standards — yet many systems still lack proper REST APIs to communicate effectively. For example, we dynamically manage room assignments and reassignments based on guest fit and preferences, but not all PMSs even offer APIs that allow us to do this.

The problem isn't that personalization fails on property. The problem starts much earlier: we still don't speak the right language of guest experience in the digital space. Take booking. A traveler may want a big bed, a walk-in shower, and a quiet location.

Online personalisation is easy, as it's mostly a pattern-matching algorithm between known guest preferences and available services. It isn't personalisation, rather just mass customisation. On property, a guest walking around is essentially anonymous, even after checking in.

This is a question at the heart of hospitality’s digital transformation. Hotels excel at digital personalisation (curated offers, smooth booking, and tailored communications) because online, data is structured, accessible, and actionable.

When it comes to where our Distribution landscape is headed - it's not even a question. Of course uniting our efforts is the only way to go. Otherwise we'll lose another OTA battle. But there's much more to the world of AI functionalities, it has its tenticles in every part of our tech ecosystem, not distribution alone.

I think we are in danger of running before we can walk here. MCP is Anthropic’s pitch for an open standard to let "agentic AI" bots built on next-word LLMs share data, for example, an OpenAI bot talking to a Gemini bot. Unless you are Marriott or Hilton with hundreds of in-house developers, or a big OTA like Expedia or Booking.com, this really isn’t something you need to worry about.

You could establish your own protocols instead of MCP, A2A, or other widely endorsed standards for agentic interactions. But that would be like creating your own version of HTTP. Not a great idea. The good news is I don't think companies feel the need to change that basic agent-friendly plumbing.

Everyone wants the hotel tech stack to be more guest-centric and hopes AI will help to deliver a more personalized experience. This future will be centered around the PMS as the hub for rooms-centric operations and the CRM/CDP for repeat-visit-oriented relationships with guests.A strong connection between these two systems is vital to have the CRM/CDP ingest the most information about guests so that ML has big and accurate data sets by which to recommend segments, retool rates, create suggested packages, A/B upselling offers and so on.But both of these systems are back-of-house.

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.

The age of the hotel brand is ending. For decades, franchises have scaled by selling sameness, consistency over individuality. AI breaks that logic. AI reshapes the vectors of discovery. Instead of guests defaulting to familiar logos or loyalty programs, intelligent systems surface the properties that best match a traveler's needs, preferences, and context.

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.