145 - Booking’s vision and the OTA repricing

Bookings travel orchestration vision is great, but can they build it? What to learn from Ralph Lauren. Airbnb is rebuilding the company to AI first. APIs are the moat in hotel tech.

Hello,

Somehow it seems a lot of people suddenly considered that travel and tech’s future is uncertain and many stocks took a hit. It was bound to happen, we don’t now where the AI cards will land. A lot of things will get shifted around. But fundamentals such as great service are likely to stay.

Looking forward to ITB, hopefully a lot of new inspiration there.

Best, Martin

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Things to learn from Ralph Lauren

There’s a really interesting analysis of Ralph Lauren and how they’re navigating the current retail uncertainties. How they’ve positioned their brand and managed their distribution. First point was to make the brand safe. Then tackle distribution while keeping rates healthy. Maybe some inspiration for hotel brands.

SELLING THROUGH CHAOS

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies helping turn them into industry leaders. I'm also the co-founder of 10minutes.news a hotel news media that is unsensational, factual and keeps hoteliers updated on the industry.  

Smart Money Shifting to Hospitality

An interesting take, but I wouldn’t jump to conclusions just yet. The theory is that for fifteen years, investors chased software, but AI flattens digital differentiation, thus “smart money” is moving into physical hospitality. This is a possibility, but I wouldn’t discount software because of the current uncertainty.

HOSPITALITY INVESTMENT TRENDS

Writing was sacred at Amazon is AI breaking that?

I’ve always loved Amazon’s memo culture worked because it forced clarity. People I work with probably get annoyed with the fact that I write more than I do meetings, Writing helps condense, it also help ensure things don’t get forgotten. If AI makes it too easy to produce beautiful words the danger is volume replacing thinking. Does AI actually make the concept clearer or just fluff it up?

AI WRITING

The End of Airbnb Search Box Era

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky predicts that apps won’t even have search boxes in three years. Instead of browsing lists, travelers will describe an intent, and AI will build the journey. For hoteliers, this means your data must be structured perfectly for AI to “find” you without a human typing your name. For some time now there’s been discussions about attribute selling. OTAs never really got on board, maybe this is where they get leap-frogged? (they’ll probably adapt).

AGENTIC TRAVEL FUTURE + ATTRIBUTE BASED SELLING

Asset light, Accor analysis

Accor was the latest chain to move away from real-estate to services. This analysis is short and interesting on what it meant financially. As mentioned below about brands and hotels feeling like cutting rooms. I wonder the impact that asset light may/may not have on hotel brands. Could be positive as more freedom to ensure hotels meet standards, but I wonder.

7-YEAR PLAN

OTAs, GDS - valuations

I’m not a financial analyst. But we don’t need to be to see that OTAs and the main GDS players stock market prices are having a rough time. Is it a correction or is it just temporary market uncertainty? A lot of saas are getting hit with the “is SaaS dead” narrative, most of that narrative is useless hype, as Ben Affleck said - it mostly serves the AI companies who can use it to fundraise. Excel, Zapier, Shortcuts didn’t kill travel.

SABRE STOCK PRICE

In Hotel Tech, integrations are the moat

A lot of “hotel tech innovation” dies before it gets a chance to really go to market. While there are issues with CRS and PMS who gatekeep and profit from their positions. There’s also the very little understood fact that the moat of any tech product in the hotel industry is the number of integrations. You may have the best product but in the hugely fragmented hotel tech space, if you can’t connect you dont matter.

TECH INTEGRATION

Travel Agents vs Operators

There’s an argument for executive travel to “stop booking trips and start owning outcomes.” Premium service can still be genuinely premium, even in an era of self-serve everything. But will people pay for it enough to make it worth it? I think there’s a model where less premium service works for a broader amount of people, the travel assistant.

EXECUTIVE TRAVEL

Hospitality Shouldn’t Feel Like a “Cutting Room”

Brand storytelling is great, but the real test is whether the guest actually feels the story in the moments that matter, arrival, service recovery, little surprises. This article is a useful reminder that “experience” can’t be a slide deck concept; it has to show up in operations, training, and decision-making. But it takes time and work to get all these elements aligned.

BRAND EXPERIENCE

Opinion

Maurice Obeid and Glenn Fogel in conversation. Source: McKinsey

Bookings’ AI orchestration vision

OTA and GDS stocks have dipped, AI might take over trip planning, and suddenly the future doesn’t look as guaranteed as it did six months ago. We’re seeing this in software as well. New uncertainties, and investors begin to ask: what is the real moat here?

I’m not a financial analyst, so take this as industry observation.

A few weeks ago, I argued that for OTAs to win in this next phase and remain more than pipes, they would need to deliver a substantially better experience than what exists today. In their current form, their future added value is relatively small. Aggregation, filtering, checkout. AI will be doing that better.

However, and this is where I think Booking.com’s CEO is correct, the real opportunity is not search. It’s orchestration. That would be a substantially better experience than what the AI platforms can deliver.

Owning the complete, journey in real time: flights, hotels, payments, changes, cancellations, disruptions, would be quite amazing. Well basically what a great travel agent does. If you miss your flight, your hotel adjusts. If plans shift, the system recalculates. That requires infrastructure, connectivity, payments, customer service, and a willingness to handle upset customers at 2am.

My theory is that this would be better managed as a gig-economy thing. But Booking seems to think they can build that as a tech product.

AI platforms will not want to refund disputes, fraud management, relocation logistics, rainy weather, over-bookings, and angry calls. I think whoever is willing to own the entire complexity of travel, not just the inspiration phase, still has a real role to play. And that is where most of the travel experience happens. At the end of the day, inspiration generates bookings but it is a tiny part of the experience.

In summary, their vision makes sense - but then as we know, ideas aren’t the hard part.

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• Harvard Dropped a Free AI & Prompting Course - Link

• The inspiration guide for hospitality - Link⁺

• Maybe AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It - Link

• Who is Peter Saville - Link

• Hospitality is Eating Luxury’s Lunch - Link

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Orchestration: Definition 3. The automated arrangement, coordination, and management of complex computer systems, software, or services. Defined using Lomar Dictionary⁺

⁺ Note, articles that are published by companies or people I work with are tagged with the ⁺ symbol or Partner word. I’m adding this as a transparency. Previously I avoiding sharing content from partners to remain objective, but sometimes they have excellent articles that deserves being shared so to remain transparent, I’ll tag them.