147 - Can we please make hotel tech vanish?
Tech isn't the center of the hospitality world. AI skunkworks in real hotel life. Websites for AI agents? $20,000 Airfrance First class and hotels ideas.
Hello,
Less news this week, probably because I’m not a political commentator. One thing I did want to comment on was how technology needs to become a utility in the hospitality industry. Be less present. See my column on why.
Best, Martin
Klairhaus, the perfect employee and customer gifts. Quality, crafted, every day items for the office. Find out more ➛
Real Hotel AI Skunkworks
A great example of a hotel finding a way to start a skunkworks project with AI. There are a lot of things in AI that dont work. Try building a cool website with Claude, it works really well - then try to correct a typo - it’s painful. There are many things that are science projects. But getting someone to start improving workflows is a great way to get started. Start skunkworks projects. Find local enthusiasts who can help you try stuff out. I don’t think anyone can “teach” AI. You need to try it.
AI OPERATIONS
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. Google testing new Hotel Search
With the Digital Markets Act forcing fairness, Google is reportedly changing search results even more. While this is making for a awkward and archaic user experience in Europe (plenty of features just don’t make it here) it is interesting for hotel direct revenue to not rely on just one channel. Google, thanks to excellent execution (and a bit more advantages) had managed to own the majority of direct revenue channels. For hotels, this could mean a shift in traffic sources, and possibly less dependence on Google over time. It’s a regulatory move, so I’m cautious about my expectations, so far most regulatory moves only drove more consolidation of power.
GOOGLE SEARCH
Bleisure Booming
Bleisure travel is no longer a niche, it is becoming standard behavior. Travelers are extending trips and spending more on experiences. For hotels, this is a clear opportunity to rethink packages, pricing, and services around longer stays. The line between business and leisure is fading fast. Will that become a hotel category? Concepts like Zoku have a clear advantage here.
BLEISURE TRAVEL
Luxury Investment Keeps Growing
Performance of luxury hotels was never the big pull, yet luxury hotels continue to attract strong investor interest. The segment remains one of the most resilient and desirable asset classes. It is a great asset and a fantastic vanity project for those who can afford it. Most the best hotels I have stayed at were not great on balance sheet, but someone with enough resources kept it going. The real-estate asset and brand becomes the investment in many cases.
LUXURY INVESTMENT
Travel Tech’s Adoption Problem
Interesting discussion about travel tech’s invested $700M and only 2% adoption. Everyone knows change is coming, but we don’t know where it is going exactly. The irony is that once adoption tips, it will likely happen very fast and there will be winners and loosers. So do companies go the Meta route of investing billions into the metaverse and then shutting it down. Or wait it out. I think there’s a middle ground. Also tech isn’t the biggest problem hotels face (see column).
TECH ADOPTION
The Website Is Splitting?
There’s an idea that hotel websites will split, one for humans, one for AI agents. Discovery is moving upstream into AI interfaces, while websites may become transactional backends. It would be a fundamental shift in how digital presence works. But website for AI agents are wholly inefficient, agents prefer an API or MCP connection. Discovery is moving to the AI chatbot layer, it seems inevitable. But how does one get the “vibe” of the hotel? Will AI generate a video for the user?
AI INTERFACES
What Hotels Can Learn from First Class
Every excellent hotelier knows this. It isn’t luxury fixtures that make the Air France La Première shows how far hospitality can go when every detail is intentional. It is not just luxury, it is orchestration of experience. Hotels can learn a lot here, especially around personalization and emotional impact. At that level, guests don’t remember features, they remember how it felt.
LUXURY EXPERIENCE
Everyone wants to be an ad platform
Marriott and United are pushing a simple idea: travelers spend more while traveling, so that’s when you should target them. Some years ago, when it became obvious how much money Amazon was making on ads, the writing was on the wall. Everyone wants to become an ad platform and start printing money. Today most of Amazon’s profits are from ads. They are pivoting from a logistics company to an ad company. And hotel brands are doing the same. If the ads are relevant, why not. But the risk is we turn into some level of Idiocracy.
TRAVEL ADVERTISING
Opinion
In hotels, tech should be a utility
There is sometimes a misconception in the hotel technology vendor world: that technology sits at the center of hospitality operations. From the perspective of a technology vendor, that assumption feels natural. After all, the industry is full of systems: PMS, POS, payment, channel managers, RMS, booking engines promising to optimize everything.
From inside the tech ecosystem, it can look as if the hotel runs on software.
But from inside the hotel, much less so.
For many owners, a hotel is primarily a real estate investment that should grow in value over time. Profitability matters, of course, but it isn’t the only metric. The building, the location, the brand positioning, and the experience of the space matter enormously.
And unfortunately technology does not move the building to a better location and it does not suddenly turn an average property into an iconic one.
When a great designer creates an iconic hotel, technology rarely plays a role reality is almost all iconic hotels had non-iconic or even legacy tech. I do believe designers should expand to include tech in their designs. The savvy hoteliers think that way.
On the operations side, the daily concerns of a general manager are not centered around technology. Training new employees has a massive impact on guest satisfaction. Things like managing housekeeping quality, making sure linen arrives on time, ensuring rooms are ready when guests check in, dealing with guest complaints, coordinating maintenance issues, running food and beverage operations. All these consume more bandwidth than tech.
These are messy, human, logistical challenges.
Technology can help at the margins. It might improve efficiency by ten percent, perhaps twenty percent in some areas if implemented well (RFID linen is amazing, but is the improvement always worth the cost?). Very few of the real operational headaches in a hotel can simply be “solved” by a piece of software. And for those who haven’t managed a hotel, I often characterize being a hotel GM (of smaller hotels) as the most random job I have ever done. It is essentially firefighting all the time.
That is where the tech narrative sometimes disconnects from reality.
There are areas where technology truly is essential. Distribution is the obvious one. Revenue management, channel management, websites, booking engines, payment infrastructure, these systems are critical. Hotels absolutely need a property management system. They need reliable financial systems. They need connectivity with the broader travel ecosystem.
But from the hotel’s perspective, these systems should behave like utilities. They should work reliably, quietly, and largely stay out of the way.
No general manager wakes up planning to sit in front of their PMS to manage their hotel.
The best hotel technology should behave like utilities. It is essential, but it is not something anyone wants to think about. When it works well, nobody notices. When it fails, everybody notices.
And perhaps that is the uncomfortable truth for many technology providers. Hospitality revolves around people delivering experiences inside physical spaces and tech is like water, it should be there when you need it and not when you don’t.
Sometimes the best innovation is simply getting out of the way.
As a tech industry we need to do better as helping hotels need to do less with our products and more with the guests.
• How social media stopped being social - Link
• The inspiration Benchmark for hospitality - Link⁺
• Why brands go bad - Link
• Apple adapting their marketing to their neo audience - Link
• Should a brand pick a side? I think not - Link
Did you know: The word "Hospitality" comes from the Latin word "hospitalitas," meaning "friendliness to guests," which is formed from “hospes” meaning “guest” or “host.” Over time, the word came into Old French as "hospitalité" before entering English. Defined using Lomar Dictionary⁺