Hello,

There’s really a sea change happening with AI and it only becomes real when you try it. Autonomous agents change work, it’s like everyone suddenly has to learn to manage a team.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Generate 50-200+ enriched MQLs
every month.
Download the brochure ➛

I think I was wrong about Agents

AI Agents are to AI what GPT was to the world before AI. But it takes experiencing them to understand that. Openclaw was cool if you liked to tinker with software tools. But for the rest of us, it was a weird science project.

After using Bots / Agents for a few weeks, I realize it will change how we work - completely. Think of them as expert team members that do complete work, very patient, and very willing to do the boring work nobody wants to do. They work until the task is complete. They are purpose driven and find solutions which they suggest if the first option didn’t work.

Today we can ask an AI to analyse our ads. But with Agents you tell it to run your ad campaign with the goal of increasing sales. And the bot logs in to the necessary places, tells you what data it needs, and then starts. Sending you a daily update with suggested changes in order to achieve the goals. Once you approve it implements them. If it has no API? no problem, it logs in and manages through the screen.

It is a totally different category of software. Generating text, images, HTML, and code is impressive, but giving twenty small autonomous workers actual goals and letting them figure out their way, that is something else.

I looked at some less obvious examples of what it could do for a hotel. Disclaimer, none of these are great ideas in terms of security and privacy. They’re here to illustrate what could be done.

Room assignments. Today, this is often done inside the PMS with limited logic, a lot of manual adjustment, and usually a front office team trying to remember who likes what. An agent could review arrivals every night, look at stay history, preferences, past complaints, room moves, loyalty status, housekeeping constraints, maintenance blocks, and even patterns the PMS does not really understand. It could then suggest room assignments and if you agree, it implements them on-screen. The PMS stores data. The agent could reason across it.

The night audit. Your PMS should already be doing this, but in case it doesn’t. An agent could run through the audit checklist at 2 a.m., compare payments against reservations, flag suspicious balances, identify failed charges, prepare manager notes, draft the morning report, and only escalate the unclear cases. Have it ready for the morning. Ask you a few questions, you answer and it completes.

Profile deduplication, nobody has time for this. You could ask an agent to analyze 300 possible duplicate profiles every night between 4 a.m. and morning. It would log in, compare names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, stays, transactions, notes, and loyalty data. If it is confident, it tags or merges according to rules, using the profile with the most stays or transactions as the master. If it is uncertain, it creates a review queue. You do not need to explain every rule or exception. It will figure them out and ask if unclear. Like a person would.

Guest Invoice requests, an agent could monitor the inbox for requests, identify the guest, search the PMS, find the stay, generate or retrieve the invoice, and draft or send the reply. If it cannot find the booking, it can ask the guest for the email they booked with or reservation details.

These are some ideas. As I said they’re not necessarily good one (privacy issues being what they are). Marketing has much safer use cases. But I wanted to take this out of the usual “generate a lot of ads for me” discussion to something more productive for hotels.

I don’t think this will replace people, I think this gives everyone super-powers that will make the whole team exponentially faster and more capable. It still requires humans to supervise the bots. But everyone has unlimited assistants now. It opens the question how much software do we need, if we can just get a bot to do the task? I’ll leave that one here.

So why was I wrong, because they’re incredibly competent. And it is possible they could solve problems when things go wrong on a trip.

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com.  

Research With AI, Book With OTA

Booking.com’s Asia-Pacific chief told Skift she is fine with travelers starting in a chatbot as long as the booking closes on Booking.com. Their survey found 64% of travelers in the region use AI to plan, but traffic from AI is under 1% of room nights. Her explanation is that people hop between AIs before coming to Booking directly. Possibly true, and also a comfortable story for the company that sells the last step, and as the saying goes, slowly and then all of a sudden.

AI AND OTAS

Stop Saying Performance Marketing

Thomas Barta argues that both “performance marketing” and “brand marketing” are bad terms. The first implies other marketing doesn’t perform, the second that other marketing doesn’t build the brand. His fix is to call the first one direct response and accept that all marketing builds the brand and all of it has to perform. I need to update my scale of marketing.

BRAND VS PERFORMANCE + SCALE OF MARKETING

This is brilliant: Brand Is Arbitrage

Revolut CEO’s view that brand marketing is arbitrage i.e. the CPM online versus an airport billboard “CMP”. Performance clicks are measurable and therefore well priced, and arguably expensive, while logos in airports reach a lot of travellers for less. So one could technically do the math. What would it cost to reach them on Meta or Linkedin vs an out of home campaign. If the audience is somewhat relevant, the latter might be cheaper. But a lot less measurable…

BRAND AS ARBITRAGE

45 Minutes Per Room

The industry average for housekeeping is 22 minutes a room, and according to this article at Orient Express she watched a housekeeper take 45. Speed isn’t everything, in hotels and in any quality industry. Taking the time to care is underrated. Of course then there are those who “care” so much they never get anything done. But what if we looked at house-keeping as craftsmanship.

LUXURY HOUSEKEEPING

The growth of chains in Europe

Chains held more than 41% of Europe’s 6.5 million hotel rooms (not hotels) in August, up from 36% in 2020, according to CoStar. Marriott says hotels changing their sign were more than a third of its first-half signings, and Hilton and IHG have launched new collections that can capture European style boutique hotels. More distribution but cheaper?

EUROPEAN HOTEL BRANDS + GLOBAL HOTEL MARKET

Walmart Wants Your TV Budget

Walmart bought Vizio (low-cost TV brand) and Vibe.co (to run ads). At an event in New York, the head of Walmart Connect said these deals already give it “thousands” of relationships with brands that don’t sell anything at Walmart. Ads are big business. Hotel groups and OTAs are embedding this in their offering. How far until it is too far?

RETAIL MEDIA

Invisible to AI Agents

At the WTTC summit, Google’s Christie Travers-Smith warned that hotels risk becoming invisible to AI booking agents if they can’t give accurate information on amenities, prices and cancellation terms. The post adds that Wyndham’s CEO calls agents “a new type of guest” and feeds them rates and availability directly. None of this is new to you, but it counts for more when Google says it on a stage. But ARI is really the smallest problem. Ontologies are next.

AI VISIBILITY + HOTEL ONTOLOGY + AI HOTEL RECOMMENDATIONS

Your Regular Looks Like a New Guest

Booking.com’s top two Genius levels are just over 30% of its active customers and a high-50% share of its room nights. Every booking reaches the hotel under a new Guest email address, and since 28 September without a phone number, so a system that matches on email can file a returning regular as a first-time guest. Markus Busch suggests counting repeat guests by name and asking for the real email at the desk. Or you could launch a bot that de-duplicates at night.

OTA GUEST DATA

I would worry more if I was an OTA

Apparently Marriott’s CEO recently said he would worry more about AI if he were an OTA, because Marriott controls the stay. Very true. People still need to sleep in a bed. AI will not remove that. But will AI replace OTAs or just become another layer. I think it is more the latter. The OTA value will be in the data and AI planners can just plug into them. So more distribution? But is there more demand.

AI DISTRIBUTION + OTAS IRRELEVANT

Trip Planning Is a Feature

Interesting take on the AI Trip Planning market from Petr Syme. He argues it is just a feature and the OTAs will add it soon. Possibly. Or as I wrote above, do they just deliver the supply and let others take care of the rest. Hard to say today.

TRIP PLANNING IS A FEATURE + AI TRAVEL PLANNER LIST⁺

Reddit Loses Its Search Traffic

Reddit’s says search referral traffic fell meaningfully in the quarter, with the decline accelerating late on. They said if that continues the company’s total daily users could fall by a low double-digit percentage in Q4. It is one of the clearest company statements I have seen of what AI answers do to a site that lived on search. It isn’t time to panic, but it is time to take action.

AI SEARCH TRAFFIC

Instagram Wants the Living Room

Instagram is testing “Features”, horizontal videos of up to 90 minutes, first with creators in Brazil and now a small group in the US, and its TV app is now on Apple TV. YouTube went from 6% to 16% of TV time in five years and Instagram has 3 billion users. I read that as a prediction and not a result. Instagram is not sharing ad revenue with creators yet, which is a real gap with YouTube.

INSTAGRAM ON TV

• Apple Music Turns Sound Into a Logo - Link

• Torre Velasca Residences by Matteo Thun - Link

• Popular Art in the Age of Generative AI - Link

• Where Bang & Olufsen Began - Link

• A Walking-Stick Spy Camera at Auction - Link

Did you know: The word "autonomous" comes from the Greek word "autonomos," which means "having its own laws" or "self-governing." It combines "auto-" (self) and "nomos" (law or rule). The word entered English in the early 1800s, first used to describe independent states or regions, and later expanded to other uses. 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.

Hello,

OpenAI released a big dataset on how people use ChatGPT. There’s sadly not much travel in it, but there’s enough to think about who you could actually reach with ads. See my column below.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Generate 50-200+ enriched MQLs
every month.
Download the brochure ➛

Finding your guests in the ChatGPT data

I spent some time going through the data dump OpenAI published about how people use ChatGPT (they call it Signals). I was hoping for a travel section. There isn’t one. There’s no travel category, no destinations and nothing on hotels. It’s higher level than that, which is a pity.

So the first thing to say is that whenever you see “X% of ChatGPT is travel” in the coming weeks, it’s a guess. Maybe an educated one, but a guess.

What the data does show is intent: what people are trying to do when they open it. I focused on one group, people seeking information, because I think they’re the ones most likely to be planning something, a trip included. Seeking information is now about 20% of all messages, up from 16.7% in July 2024. About three quarters of it has nothing to do with work (apparently a lot of people are “expressing” themselves to ChatGPT, I have opinions on that).

Anyhow, I asked three questions, the same ones you’d ask before opening a shop on a new street. Who walks by? What are they looking for? And can I actually put a sign in front of them? I made some charts to visualize them better:

Where are they? The share of info-seeking varies a lot by country. In Q3, Spain (26.3%) and France (26.1%) led the big markets, ahead of the UK (23.0%), Germany (22.9%) and the US (21.0%). India and Brazil are down around 16%. You can see the quadrant chart in the hero image above.

How old are they? Info-seeking rises with age. It’s 18.1% of messages from 18–24 year olds against 25.2% for 55–64 year olds. So the older users are the ones asking.

Which plan are they on? This is the one that matters for ads, because only two plans show them: Free and Go (the $8 one). Plus and Pro don’t. And this is where the data goes quiet. There’s no breakdown of how many people are on each plan, by country or otherwise. All we know is that Free is the most personal use (about 75% non-work) and Pro the least (68% work).

Let’s take an example. Say your hotel is in Paris and most of your guests are American. 46% of US ChatGPT messages come from people aged 35 and over, which I’d assume is roughly the group that can afford a high-end hotel in a big European city. About 21% of US messages are seeking information. So far, so good.

But how many of them are on a free account? We don’t know. And I wonder: if someone has the money for a high-end hotel in Paris, are they using the free version? Or are they paying $20 a month and never seeing an ad? Maybe the free user with money is more common than we think, since plenty of people don’t pay for software they use casually. I honestly don’t know. That’s food for thought.

So should you invest in Chat GPT ads?

I don’t think we can reason our way to an answer, the data wont tell us. At this point I would recommend to test: a small test with a leisure segment in one or two source markets, measured with the usual caveats. But it’s early so don’t expect miracles, expect to learn.

Before that, go through the numbers yourself. The data is public. Take your top three or four source markets, look at the age mix and how much of their usage is info-seeking, and check whether your guests even look like the typical ChatGPT user there. A hotel in Seville with mostly German guests in their fifties will see a very different picture than a hostel in Lisbon full of 25-year-olds.

It doesn’t give all the answers, but it gives something, and that’s more than we had before.

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Agents vs Marketplaces

Dan Hockenmaier looks at Amazon blocking shopping agents and argues Amazon is safer than people think, thanks to logistics, returns and trust. The interesting part for us is that he says hotel-booking marketplaces are more exposed, because an agent can book directly with the hotel. I wonder how many hotels are actually ready to be booked that way.

AGENTS VS MARKETPLACES + RETAIL AGENT MATH

Meta’s Muse Goes to Japan

Meta’s Muse agent launched in Japan, its first market outside North America, with Trip.com, Agoda, Stripe and Shopify as integrations. Klook supplies 426,000 experiences, and with the user’s approval Muse places the order, sends payment to Klook and saves the booking in the chat. Expedia has announced an integration too. I don’t see any hotel brands in that list, which is worth watching. Muse is turning into an AI travel assistant.

AGENTIC BOOKING

The Map of AI + Travel

Tony Carne, who writes the Everything AI in Travel newsletter, published a map of 171 companies using AI to build for travel, as of 21 October. If you do research in this space, open the full landscape, find your corner of it and see who is building there. It will keep changing, so subscribe to his newsletter to stay on top of it. The consumer slice (25 companies, mostly trip planning) is a good companion to last week’s AI travel planners piece.

AI TRAVEL LANDSCAPE + AI TRIP PLANNERS

Tesco, the Media Company

Tesco now has more than 2,800 advertising screens in its stores, and some will soon show influencer videos. They also announced a self-serve ad platform. Can this expand to hotels? how frustrating will that be to guests?

RETAIL MEDIA

Strategy by Simulation

If we all test our strategies on AI simulations, we may simply reach the same answer faster. In the article there’s a Bocconi research where model responses sometimes varied less than half of human responses. But I suspect the idea that is too new or different might not test well, and that is often the one worth doing.

AI AND STRATEGY

AI Adoption vs ROI, Again

A survey found 47.8% of marketing teams have replaced human tasks with AI in the past year, but only 6.5% measure the ROI. That sounds familiar. The recent h2c study I shared had hotel AI adoption at 91% and only 13% reporting measurable returns. Using it is the easy part, knowing what it did is harder.

AI MARKETING ROI

Hotel Merch, Done Expensively

Designer Kim Jones launched a resortwear collection with Aman Essentials after 18 months of work. It was inspired by his stays at about 30 Aman properties and includes silk pyjamas, swimwear and eveningwear. Hotel merchandise is usually a tote bag. This is a brand extension that guests might actually want to wear, different from Ritz-Carlton, but similar.

BRAND EXTENSION

Ultra-Luxury Is the Safer Bet?

JLL counts 59 hotels worldwide with an average daily rate above $3,000, up from none in 2019. Apparently scarce ultra-luxury hotels are a clearer investment than AI travel startups. Scarce sites, long approvals and high costs keep supply tight. It’s an investor’s view, but I like it as a counterweight to all the AI noise. Not everything is about agents. A side note however is that the most profitable hotels aren’t the ultra-luxury ones.

ULTRA LUXURY INVESTING

Would You Pay for Loyalty?

Accor’s paid loyalty programme in Asia Pacific, ALL Accor Plus Explorer, has over 485,000 members who booked more than 3.8 million room nights in the past year. Annual fees in Singapore, Australia, India and Japan range from $244 to $259. Accor sees it as a revenue driver of its own. As I said last week about Amazon Prime, loyalty works best when people pay to be more loyal and the benefits are worth it.

PAID LOYALTY

The Goodbye Guests Remember

Hotel Nuggets shares four ideas. Among them: a bakery that doubles as the lobby and reception, a Mickey Mouse statue that points to the toilets, and a hotel that handed out two unsolicited water bottles at checkout. None of this needs technology, and all of it is cheap. The Mickey “signage” is brilliant. And all of these are low-tech (well a backery isn’t a simple thing to do).

HOTEL IDEAS

When AI Sends Guests to a Broken Page

AGR found AI recommendations repeating website errors. One West Hollywood hotel referenced Nashville, and a Rosewood in Mexico promoted a closed restaurant. Hotel or brand sites are cited in 31.6% of ChatGPT answers, so the page the guest lands on matters. This is where I think hotel websites will split into two, one for humans and one for AI bots. The latter will just be a lot of code that is frequently updated.

AI REFERRAL AUDIT

Gmail’s AI Skips Your Newsletter

Google’s paid AI Inbox, rolled out in the US in English on 12 October, reads only the Primary tab and skips Promotions and Social. Hotel confirmations may show up in its briefings, but newsletters won’t. Markus Busch suggests keeping booking details first and offers second, so the email stays transactional. I can guess where newsletters like this one end up.

EMAIL AND AI

• Visit Iceland Sends a Knitter to Your Meeting - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• Prada Draws Its Holiday Campaign by Hand - Link

• Hospitality in the Mirror - Link

• The Geometry of Coral, Up Close - Link

Did you know: The word "seek" comes from Old English "sēcan," which means "to go to, look for, or search." It is related to Old High German "suochen" and Latin "sequi," meaning "to follow." Over time, it kept the meaning of looking for or trying to get something. 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.

Hello,

Last week had some great “conversations” about the evolution of AI trip planners. Having these in person would have been amazing - but I probably would have had only 2-3 of them. See my column below.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Generate 50-200+ enriched MQLs
every month.
Download the brochure ➛

AI Travel Assistants can book, can they fix?

I posted this infographic on Linkedin, the comments are quite insightful, I thoroughly recommend them. Here’s a slightly broader take on that post.

I think AI travel assistants will change how we discover, plan, and book travel. Tell an AI what kind of holiday you want, your budget, preferences, and constraints, and it finds the right destination, hotel, flights, activities and books everything for you, plus gives you a complete itinerary.

There is an argument that people enjoy searching for travel, comparing prices, reading reviews, looking at photos, and building itineraries. And that they wont want AI to do it for them. That might be true (personally I’d rather have AI do most of the work).

But, historically, when technology makes something significantly easier, convenience tends to win. And travel search can get a lot better than it currently is. AI has an obvious opportunity here.

The infographic above lists some 40 AI Trip Planning products (not including the generic AI like GPT, Claude, Gemini which are probably the most used trip planners today). The categories are interesting, Inspiration only, Inspiration + Booking, AI research + Human closing and Human assistant with AI support. I wonder how many of these categories will survive (I have a penchant for the last category).

Other options could be that discovery simply moves to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other general AI platforms? Or OTAs manage to pivot (they’re already acquiring their way into the space) they already have the inventory, and infrastructure. They know how to deal with reservations and have a clue about itineraries. Many AI Planners are moving to the booking part which I think is the minimum. Pure inspiration will most likely sit in the general AI platforms.

But as several comments on my post point out, booking isn’t really the hardest part of travel. The difficult part is everything unpredictable. The flight gets cancelled, the replacement flight arrives two days later, hotel is over-booked, tired children, financial stress, etc. Who deals with all that? (Claude could even ban you if you insult it).

But then historically, OTAs became enormously successful without taking responsibility for the cancellations and problems. So maybe we’re overestimating how much people actually want someone to manage their travel. Maybe they just want an easier way to book, and AI delivers exactly that. Ryanair didn’t become the third largest airline in the world from it’s amazing service alone.

I’d love AI to bring back the personal travel agent, at scale and at an affordable price. But history suggests that making transactions easier and cheaper might be enough to win.

And perhaps that’s the difference between making travel easier to buy and making travel better. I suggest to read the original post, and specifically all the great insights in the comments. Some really great viewpoints in there.

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

The PMS Wars

A public discussion between Founders of Mews and Cloudbeds is peak PMS wars. Should the PMS simply support hotel operations, or should it increasingly guide decisions and workflows? I think this is a discussion for the old world of when interfaces, features and dashboards were designed once and then released. With AI I believe we’re going to see systems have custom user interfaces, and workflows depending on the hotels need. The PMS will do the core heavy lifting and infrastructure - but the rest will be adjusted and designed locally.

HOTEL PMS AUTONOMY

Faces Replaces Hotel Keys

Alibaba’s Flyzoo Hotel in Hangzhou uses facial recognition for check-in and room access, no keys. It’s an interesting experiment of what future of technology experience can look like. Just removing the key is more gimmick than real improvement. But if it means just walking up to one’s room with no check-in that could be cool.

FACIAL RECOGNITION HOTELS

The Invisible Work of Hospitality

This post reminded me of everything tech isn’t addressing in hotels. A hotel employee walks 18,400 steps in a day without ever leaving the property. Fixing TVs, solving breakfast problems, handling deliveries, and speaking with guests. It’s a good reminder that hospitality depends on thousands of small human interactions that are difficult to measure.

HOTEL OPERATIONS PEOPLE

AI Agents and Payments

Anthropic, Visa, and Mastercard are working on infrastructure for AI-powered shopping agents. The interesting part is that payments and identity verification are becoming central to agentic commerce. And in hotels we’re still insisting on giving a card authorization 3 times+.

AGENTIC COMMERCE PAYMENTS

Europe’s Tourism Distribution

Europe wants to generate an additional €22 billion annually from North American visitors by 2030, without sending everyone to Paris and the other major destinations. It’s a good objective, but getting travelers to go to lesser-known destinations has always been difficult. AI could help by recommending places based on interests rather than popularity, but it could just as easily reinforce the destinations everyone already knows. Now is the time to re-think this and use tech to distribute better.

EUROPEAN TOURISM STRATEGY + BETTER DISTRIBUTION

Luxury Hospitality AI

Rosewood’s Friedrich von Schönburg discusses the importance of local culture, artisans, and human connection in luxury hospitality. Technology and AI have a role, particularly in making operations more efficient, but they shouldn’t become the experience itself. Luxury hotels are rarely early adopters, but this time they might become the right way to do it.

LUXURY GUEST EXPERIENCE

The Age of Brand Sameness

Building a new brand has become increasingly difficult in a fragmented media landscape. It was easier before (though not cheaper), with the number of channels now it is like playing whack-a-mole. This article makes the argument that genuine product differentiation matters more than simply creating attractive branding. Hotel brands usually do this well when they start, and then slowly join the sea of sameness as they grow.

BRAND DIFFERENTIATION STRATEGY + INDEPENDENT HOTEL DESIGN

⁠

Loyalty Is Not Rational

It appears ultra frequent travelers sometimes take unnecessary flights or hotel stays just to maintain their loyalty status. Status and recognition are powerful emotional drivers. Rewards paid by employers and used for private life. Being able to flex one’s loyalty status at a networking dinner. These are powerful drivers. I still think that on a scalability level, Amazon Prime is the epic loyalty system: you pay to become more loyal to the company and the benefits are worth it.

LOYALTY PROGRAM PSYCHOLOGY

AI Commerce Lessons from Shopify

Shopify's latest results suggest that AI-driven traffic is becoming commercially meaningful, with AI channels bringing in new buyers at nearly twice the rate of other channels. AI-driven searches using structured product information is the key. The structured product information is the point where hotels need to get better. Right now, OTAs have the most structured hotel information. That is just a fact.

AI COMMERCE HOTELS

Booking Bets on AI Assistants

Booking Holdings is now supporting Lola and Vayo as part of its exploration of AI-assistants. As I wrote in my column this week, this is a logical place for them to go. And as I wrote a while ago, they’ll have the make it orders of magnitude better than GPT, Claude, Gemini to keep the consumer interface. But they’re definitely investing.

BOOKING AI STRATEGY

Marketing’s New Logic Test

BCG published a study on marketing attribution and analytics that is a lot more thorough than my column on the broken attribution. Their’s actually provides some ideas of what marketers can do and how AI can help marketing see patterns and correlations. Long but interesting read.

MARKETING ECONOMICS

Milka Ad experience

Milka created an where people could only receive free chocolate by physically connecting with strangers between a vending machine and a cow statue. It’s brilliant. And makes for great videos. But, one of life’s big mysteries for me is why is it that the least beneficial (legal) products for human kind have the best marketing. Between alcohol, sugar drinks, fast-food etc. Imagine if we could do great ads for healthy things.

EXPERIENTIAL BRAND MARKETING

The All-In-One Hotel Booking Experience

Since tech has arrived, hotels have separated room bookings, restaurant reservations, spa appointments, and activities into different systems. New booking technology is beginning to bring these products together into a single experience. From a guest perspective, this seems obvious, yet the hotel tech industry has struggled to deliver it. This is another example where tech hasn’t helped the guest experience. But things are changing now.

INTEGRATED HOTEL BOOKING

• How Fast does Google Index content - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• Bookings Travel Predictions - Link

• The People behind the Internet - Link

• AI bootcamp for hoteliers - Link

Did you know: The word "plan" comes from the French word "plan," meaning "ground plan" or "map," which itself comes from the Latin "planum," meaning "flat surface" or "level ground." Over time, the meaning expanded from a physical flat surface to include ideas of arrangement and preparation. 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.

Hello,

I think a lot of people are waking up to the fact that all search is changing and the change will be faster than we expected. Discussions about if websites will still be needed are out there and there are some valid arguments. This week there were quire some discussion about attribution. So I shared my thoughts.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Generate 50-200+ enriched MQLs
every month.
Download the brochure ➛

Attribution is breaking, totally

We’ve spent years trying to make marketing perfectly measurable. Some people even believe that without attribution tracking one can’t measure the success of a campaign.

And while attribution was always a sort of pseudo-science, it is about to get a lot worse. Zero-click search is real, AI is increasingly answering questions without sending users to websites. The tracking that has been disappearing for the last decade, has slowly (and soon suddenly) been disappearing. Bit by bit, the trail between someone discovering a hotel and eventually booking it is disappearing.

The good news for hotels is that people still need somewhere to sleep. Rooms still need to be booked. Demand isn’t disappearing, our ability to confidently explain exactly how someone arrived at the booking is.

Maybe AI platforms will give us brilliant new attribution tools. But between the old tracking infrastructure breaking down and whatever replaces it becoming established, we may spend a few years looking at bookings and having surprisingly little idea where some of them came from.

We’ll be going back to that sophisticated analytics tool from 1987, asking the guest: “How did you hear about us?”. Ironically, it is probably a good idea.

Tracking and attribution dependence is a problem in many marketing meetings, mostly because one side thinks it is an absolute science and the other knows it is a guesstimate at best.

Losing some attribution might force us back toward skills we should never have abandoned such as looking at patterns, using intuition, observing correlations etc. That doesn’t mean abandoning data, but rather becoming more comfortable with data being incomplete and our intelligence used to fill the gaps.

Perhaps the next generation of great hotel marketers won’t be the people with the most sophisticated attribution dashboards. They’ll be the ones who can make good decisions when the dashboard doesn’t have the answer.

Which, when you think about it, is what the good marketers have done historically for decades.

_____

Some beginner tips on how you can “attribute” your bookings/revenue to your marketing actions:

• Track when campaigns start and end, and look for impact on bookings. Did you get more, or less around that time?

• Are the bookings you’re getting coming from the demographic you are targeting?

• Do you see similar patterns (highs and lows) in the ads and impressions vs the bookings (possibly with a delay)?

• After you ran a few influencer campaigns did you see an growth in inquiries or bookings? is it different from usual patterns? (this could be weeks later)

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Too Many Logins

Guests increasingly have to identify themselves separately for Wi-Fi, apps, casting and more. I’ve given up on casting, I just don’t use inroom TVs anymore. The passwords dilemma is real. For some time now there have been tech solutions to fix this. It would be amazing to make this a standard in all hotels.

GUEST IDENTITY

The Story of every PMS

Products start simple, become successful, then keep adding features until someone else spots the opportunity to make them simple again. Zoom, Mailchimp and every. single. PMS. But does this mean that disruption theory works in hotel tech as well? I haven’t really seen it apply to a PMS.

INNOVATION CYCLE

Rerouting Travel Discovery

Interesting data on how traffic from AI platforms to travel websites is growing. Hotels need content that AI systems can understand, but they also need websites worth visiting once the recommendation happens. But how much should one invest now, do we know what works yet?

AI TRAVEL DISCOVERY + SHORTLISTING + GOOGLE DATA

Can AI Make Travel Too Perfect?

AI travel research and booking will remove a lot of friction, some argue that this will remove some of the experience. It isn’t quite real to me that some people want that friction, but who knows.

AI TRAVEL PLANNING + INSTINCT EXAMPLE

Adding value

A lot of AI cases sell cost reduction, Seth Godin argues that the bigger opportunity is creating new value rather than just doing existing work cheaper. But we need to go through a first phase to get to the second phase.

AI BUSINESS

More on AI attribution problems

Following my column, AI creates an attribution problem, it influences a purchase without any trail. Apparently 91% of marketers believe AI discovery is changing marketing, while only 8% can track its impact end-to-end. A much longer interview on this than my column above.

AI ATTRIBUTION

⁠

The Tech Trends of 2026

McKinsey identifies 14 major technology trends spanning AI, compute, connectivity and engineering. It is a very high level view, but it’s good enough for the hotel industry.

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

Modernization Without Ripping Everything Out

While I often advocate for hotels to change their core PMS stack, there are always options around that. As is argued here, middle-ware platforms can help here. Integration is boring compared with a shiny new platform, but boring technology that works is usually underrated.

HOTEL SYSTEM INTEGRATION

More Microdrama

Microdramas being adapted from existing TV series shows the format is starting to gain traction. Maybe all the old soap operas will have their second life. What’s interesting here is more ad formats in vertical microdrama style could be an opportunity for hotel campaigns.

MICRODRAMA ADAPTATION

Marriott’s 9-Year AI Advantage

Marriott’s long partnership with Alibaba has produced an AI agent that can book and upsell products and so forth. They’ve been sharing and working with Fliggy for 9 years now. With the super-apps in China, will we see AI integrations sooner?

MARRIOTT AI

AI Agents Need Rules

Meta’s Muse reportedly lasted only 12 days on Amazon before being blocked. Amazon stands to loose A LOT of ad revenue if agents start taking over. OTAs are probably going to similarly block agents. AI companies are working on protocols that define how agents identify themselves and access data. But will that make things easier or harder?

AGENT PROTOCOLS + BLOCKING AGENTS

Is Effort the Real Luxury?

Oura the health ring company in Finland could have created its ad set miniature city with AI, but instead hired 35 modelmakers to physically build it at one-tenth scale. In an era where generating something spectacular is becoming cheap, visible effort itself and craftsmanship might be the real luxury. Just like restaurants doing their crepe suzette at your table.

HUMAN CRAFT

• Visit Sweden for Introverts - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• Visit Norway a Grumpy Musical - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

• AI bootcamp for hoteliers - Link

Did you know: The word "attribution" comes from the Latin word "attribuere," which means "to assign" or "to give." It entered English through Old French in the late Middle Ages, keeping the sense of assigning or giving credit or responsibility. 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.

Hello,

Out of all the tech stuff that is happening. I think we need to do some work on making people care. Care to deliver great service. Care to thank someone who gave great service. It’s something machines can’t honestly do (even though some people at Anthropic are wondering if AIs have feelings).

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Generate 50-200+ enriched MQLs
every month.
Download the brochure ➛

Humans are already servants of computers

We spend a lot of time worrying that AI is going to take people’s jobs. But the truth is technology has already taken the human soul out of many jobs a long time ago. The person is still employed, but increasingly they are there to serve the computer rather than the customer.

I was reminded of this recently at my bank. I had what should have been a relatively simple problem involving account access and user rights. My business manager AND the bank director spent most of an afternoon with me trying to solve it. Neither could figure it out. After hours of work and supposedly finding a solution. I find out the next day that they have mostly locked me out of my own account.

This isn’t a technology problem. It is a problem that the people who should know their jobs dont. It is incompetence created because everyone has moved all the decision making to computers. Humans are merely there to click and type.

I think we have the same problem in hotels.

A few weeks ago I posted about hotel ontology and Tom Goodwin made a simple observation: before worrying about sophisticated AI, many hotels still struggle with basic operational competence. I think he has a point.

Understand the guest when they arrive. Recognize the regulars. Know what they booked. Getting a guest request arranged (not, I will relay the message). Know the hotel. Recommend a restaurant because you have an opinion. Remember things. Take responsibility, actually care about the results of the job, not just the financial reward.

None of this is particularly advanced hospitality. It’s kind of the basics of the job. Yet it is quite rare today.

Over the years we have designed jobs around systems and processes. Select the dropdown. Escalate the exception. Don’t make a decision because the system doesn’t allow it. We say we are protecting jobs, but what exactly we are protecting? Human robots?

Ironically, this is where I think AI could actually help. It may be replacing all the stupid technological work we have forced people to do. Searching through systems, entering information three times, remembering codes, finding policies and navigating processes. If AI can take that away, perhaps we can give people something much more important back: responsibility.

But that requires us to invest in humans again: Teach people good manners. How to maintain a conversation. Reading the customer. When to have an opinion (and, when not to have one). How to decide, and how to own the consequences. Expecting people to solve problems rather than operate software. Being responsible and proud of their jobs. The list was a lot longer but I had to cut some out for brevity.

Unfortunately, it is quite probable that many people will turn over all their opinions and thoughts to AI. But in hotels and business we should be up-skilling people on the responsibilities of being a human.

When I arrived in the hotel industry I was amazed by how easy it is to make people happier, that’s what makes this industry so amazing. Not so many industries have that ability. We should use it more.

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Flexible Cancellation Bookings

Aven Hospitality is adding Hopper’s Cancel for Any Reason product to its booking engine, giving participating hotels another way to offer flexibility on direct bookings. Guests can receive up to a full refund. This will grow "direct bookings” on paper. But we’ve seen how it also impacts behavior changes. At least cancellations have some revenue here.

BOOKING FLEXIBILITY

A Cocktail Menu That Helps

If you know me, you know I like a great visualization. Here’s an excellent cocktail menu that is instantly understandable. There are many menus that could get such a treatment and which might help guests try something new.

GRAPHIC MENU DESIGN

Hotels use AI, but Guests use it more

h2c’s AI Opportunity Study finds hotel adoption rising from 78% to 91% in a year, while only 13% of respondents report measurable returns. At the same time, consumer AI tools are taking on more of the planning and purchasing process. There is clearly more adoption at guest level. Which will impact expectations and hotels need to factor that in their tech reviews.

CONSUMER AI

AI, AWS and Hilton

At the Destination AI Summit, leaders from Amazon Web Services and Hilton discussed how AI is changing travel discovery and booking. Hilton’s work on bringing property information into AI tools is going to be critical for ranking. The questions is what data, does it help, does it influence?

HOTEL DISTRIBUTION

Liquid Death Confusion

How much should a brand extend? Liquid Death’s original appeal was simple and focused. But it needs growth. So Mango Facemasks, why not. The question isn’t if growth is needed, but rather how far do you extend the brand? Do you just add more products? Do you create X games? Make a Michelin Guide?

BRAND LONGEVITY

⁠

AI That Uses the Computer

Incredible is an AI agent designed to carry out tasks directly on a computer rather than requiring every system to expose a perfect API. It could be great for hospitality, where decades of fragmented software has lots of copy pasting going on. It is an interesting demo. Is it just another agent?

COMPUTER USING AI

Google’s UCP

Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol for Lodging is being developed with companies including Booking.com, Expedia, Hilton, Marriott, Amadeus and Trip.com to give AI systems a common way to interact with hotel inventory and booking rules. This is important, but this is also where hotel websites are totally missing and better come in fast before the OTAs eat all the cake.

AI BOOKING PROTOCOL

Building human audiences in an AI World

As AI becomes better at choosing what people watch, read or buy, distributors will likely lose some of their power. Doug Shapiro argues that building genuine audience demand and communities becomes even more important in that environment. I think it is often a good idea to optimize for people.

AI BRAND DEMAND

Would Booking.ai start with search?

Since Booking.com is a brand from the internet era, I’m taking the liberty to imagine a Booking.ai for the internet era. A16z’s recent consumer AI ranking raises a good question for travel: if a marketplace were designed today, would it still begin with a blank search box and hundreds of results? Or does it just begin with a huge context ramble?

AI TRAVEL SEARCH

Design, Art, AI and Tech

All the parts of hotel marketing are shifting with AI. Discovery, creative generation, conversions. But building a strong brand, art, design, emotions are not. Arguably the places where we need to become better than ever.

SOCIETIES MAGAZINE

Changes everything again

Discovery is changing, AI might not yet be the main source of traffic today but there’s no doubt discovery will totally shift. In the world of living things: if it is easier it will win. But AI search will likely change towards hundreds of micro-search terms. Instead of Boutique hotel in Soho, it will be much more granular. But how does one appear as much as possible while maintaining some form of brand coherence. In other words, branding against a search term will not suffice anymore.

ALWAYS CHANGING

• Inside the Working Life of a Michelin Inspector - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• Lacoste creating in the Third space - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

• Ridiculous, fun, chaotic, beautiful - Link

Did you know: The word "competent" comes from the Latin word "competens," which means "suitable" or "qualified." It entered English in the late Middle Ages and has kept the meaning of being able or fit to do something. 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.

Hello,

It’s been one of those weeks. Agent-fest we could have called it. Everyone is announcing agents and I get it. But as some have wisely said - let’s take a step back.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Generate 50-200+ enriched MQLs
every month.
Download the brochure ➛

Agentic is Booking Travel, But…

Just like the CIO of Hilton, I may have underestimated how quickly people would trust AI with their credit cards. My assumption was that agentic AI in travel would arrive gradually. It took the internet years to build enough trust for people to comfortably put in a credit card and book a holiday online. But with AI everything goes a lot faster.

Meta has Muse. Instinct is claiming $1B in transaction. Priceline has made Penny agentic and is adding Lola. Agoda is testing an AI Assistant that moves from inspiration towards bookable trips. Dots from OpenAI are coming. It is moving so quickly that anything I write here will probably be outdated before some of you read it.

I argued that the big opportunity might be AI plus human, not AI replacing the human. A gig economy of travel assistants, where almost anyone could manage trips professionally because AI does most of the heavy lifting, which several are building. The human becomes the person you message when you need to book, change, cancel or fix something. AI provides the productivity. The human provides judgment and accountability.

I still think that model has legs. But perhaps I have been too conservative.

The problem is that almost all the proof of success we see today tests the easy part of travel: booking it. The interesting test begins when things go wrong.

Imagine an AI finds you and the family a clever combination of two cheap flights on different airlines with a 120-minute connection in New York. Great price. Perfect itinerary. Then the first flight is delayed. You miss the second one. Because they are separate tickets, nobody has responsibility for getting you home. The clever saving suddenly costs thousands.

Or the agent finds a hotel through an obscure intermediary because it is $80 cheaper. You arrive at 2am with two children and discover the hotel never received the reservation. The hotel is full. Your money has disappeared somewhere into the distribution chain. Now what?

These are not edge cases in travel. Storms happen. Flights get cancelled. Hotels overbook. Connections are missed. Travel is a collection of interdependent services, and when one breaks, three others can break behind it.

This is where the question becomes much more interesting. Who is responsible when the AI made the decision? Who pays when the optimization was technically logical but practically stupid?

For many households travel is one of the largest expenses of the year, planned for months and supercharged with emotions.

Agentic AI is clearly moving faster than I expected. People seem surprisingly willing to let it transact. Maybe full autonomous travel really does arrive faster than the human-plus-AI model I imagined.

But booking will not prove that entirely. The moment to watch is when the family is stranded at 2am, the flight has gone, the hotel has no room, and several thousand dollars are at stake.

That is when we find out whether we built a travel agent or just a very clever booking engine. So maybe the human plus agent model still has legs.

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Airbnb CEO on Hotels, Cars, Ideology

At the Skift Global Forum, Brian Chesky discussed his stance on Airbnb’s brand, including listing hotels like Hilton and Marriott. Chesky highlighted past mistakes and Airbnb’s diversification into car rentals and groceries, with future plans for flights. The strategic question is quickly shifting from whether AI will matter to who controls the customer relationship when it does.

HOTEL AI

KAYAK’s Founders Return With AI

Lola.com, their new AI-driven startup, has launched. Not to be confused with Layla from Expedia. Lola free accounts can be used for tailored recommendations, with optional paid plans offering additional benefits. Everyone wants to be the center of the new discovery.

AI TRAVEL

AI Agents Cutting micro-fees

AI agents could automatically move household cash from checking accounts earning around 0.1% into products yielding 3.3% to 5.0%. That would benefit consumers, but it could also strip banks of the cheap deposits they use to fund loans. Another example of how agents can deal with the frustrating friction that makes some companies lots of money.

AI AGENTS

Hotel search: Who Gets the Link?

Interesting analysis of 1,177 AI answers to 100 travel questions across ten destinations, assessing how hotels were featured. Key findings include ChatGPT’s frequent use of publishers in citations (74.6%), Copilot’s website button-source list overlap (98.6%), Gemini’s links to Google Travel (91.2%). We don’t know all about AI optimizing, but all data can help.

AI TRAVEL

Rewards and Travel Planning

Hyatt’s recent survey show how much loyalty programs influence travel planning. An average of 40% of travel costs. No, loyalty and rewards isn’t the same. Rewards lock-in is a real thing though. And I’m sure nobody is surprised.

AI TRAVEL⁠

1/5 U.S. Travel Bookings on OTAs

U.S. OTA bookings reached roughly one fifth of the market. I’m wondering where the actual majority are booking. What are the other options? Direct? Travel Agents? and…

AI TRAVEL

Muse’s impact on travel is exaggerated

Last week a big story on how the launch of Muse was the cause for the OTA sell-off on Wall Street. I think the impact was greatly exaggerated as was pointed out on my post, most of these stocks were already doing worse. Also what’s funny is that so many brands are pushing for more ads. But the bots are designed to avoid the ads.

OTA SELL-OFF + COMING FOR THE OTAS

AI Hotel Images

Brilliant use of AI. Getting hotel rooms set up for certain events or getting event spaces set up for a client to visualize. It isn’t too hard to do. Some agencies are going it already and there’s an actual benefit.

HOTEL AI + EVENT AI

The State of Hotel Tech

Apparently 50% of distribution specialists still rely on fully manual reporting, while only 22% of hotels use attribution or data warehouse capabilities. Most hotels have the tools, but very few of them have the analytics / intelligence layer. With a bit of AI coding and some plumbing, this is not a hard problem anymore.

HOTEL AI

Google Ads vs Meta Ads

Not all ads are distributed on equal grounds. This simple visual explains it really well. I like to look at it as a scale with brand building/awareness on the top and lead generation/closing the sale on the bottom.

CHANNEL TYPES

Designing for MCP

If everything is going to be a connector and the value will be about how good the data and connector works, then it’s a good idea to read up on how to build a good MCP.

AI DEVELOPMENT

• IKEA at Construction Site - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• Google (also) Wants to Put AI Computing in Space- Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

Did you know: The word "agent" comes from the Latin "agens," which means "doing" or "acting," from the verb "agere," meaning "to do" or "to act." It entered English in the late Middle Ages, first meaning someone who acts or does something for another. 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.

Hello,

The value of data is going up, especially that it is much easier to visualize it and use it with AI. Just drop it in the right place and get an interface built for the user. I tried it a few times for random personal project, pretty neat.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Generate 50-200 enriched MQLs
every month.
Just find out more ➛

Opinion

The UI is not the product anymore

For the last 30 years, value in technology was created by building better interfaces. The solutions existed, but better interfaces made it easier to use and thus more users, more money.

GDSs already had search, inventory, rates, bookings and payment. But you needed to be a trained travel agent who understood cryptic commands. OTAs came along and put a consumer interface on top, and stole the show. Arguably also grew the pie.

Dashboards are another example. Tableau made it dramatically easier for ordinary business users to turn databases into charts and dashboards without too much coding knowledge.

I think AI is reversing where the value sits. And we are already seeing the beginning of it.

Last month Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claudeforce. Allowing users to access Salesforce data and workflows directly through Claude. Salesforce has been building itself as a platform for years, so this isn’t completely new. But Claude is now increasingly becoming the interface while Salesforce provides the data, permissions and functionality underneath. And that’s a great thing for the users because interfaces are becoming perishable commodities.

Imagine planning a family holiday for ten people. Instead of everyone passing around links and spreadsheets, you ask your AI to build an interface for the trip. It could contain the itinerary, hotel options, flights, maps, prices and activities. Everyone gets access and can vote for hotels, select preferred activities, enter arrival details or indicate which flight they want. The organizer can see the results and eventually complete the bookings.

Once the holiday is booked, throw it away. Next year the trip is completely different with different people, so you give the AI the research and ask it to build another interface around what matters this time. The cost of designing the interface approaches zero. So the user interface becomes whats needed for the moment.

The same applies inside hotels. Imagine a 300-person wedding at a ranch in Wyoming. The organizers could generate a temporary dashboard containing guest arrivals, airport transfers, horse riding schedules, dietary requirements, room allocations, staff tasks and everything else needed for that particular event. Staff could filter it by department or task and guests could have their own relevant view.

A 300-person wedding at a luxury hotel in Paris would require something completely different. Same PMS perhaps. Same event-management system. Maybe even the same underlying data fields. But no off-the-shelf system can cater for all the particularities of every new hotel concept.

Until now, building two completely different interfaces would have been expensive and largely pointless. So software vendors had to create generic dashboards that worked approximately well for both properties. AI changes those economics. If a useful interface can be generated from a voice prompt, used for four days and discarded, there is no particular reason for those two hotels to share one.

This isn’t a SaaSpocalypse (unless your only added value was building a UI). The software underneath still needs to exist. In fact, it arguably becomes more important.

AI can generate the wedding dashboard. What it needs is solid and clean data that is reliable, guest profiles, payment status or dietary requirements. The PMS, CRM, POS, event system and everything else. That data needs to be structured and secure, and the connections need to work reliably.

For years, the added benefit of tech was being able to make it easier to use through interfaces and design. But a lot of that is going to change with natural language inputs.

If interfaces can be made on-demand by the users, much of that value moves upstream. The scarce asset becomes the clean data and reliable pipes needed to make those disposable interfaces useful.

The next generation of valuable tech companies might be the ones we see less, not more.

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Agentic Breaks the Booking Funnel

AI agents could fundamentally change travel booking because they remove many of the emotional nudges marketers have spent years optimizing. If an agent is comparing price, policies and convenience on a traveler’s behalf, much of the traditional buy-now signals matter less. Also agents will totally skip sponsored listings. OTAs may still have an advantage because someone needs to handle fulfillment and problems, while metasearch looks much more exposed.

AGENTIC TRAVEL + SKIPPING ADS

No, AI isn’t conscious

Mustafa Suleyman pushes back against the idea that AI models should be treated as conscious entities with feelings or rights. AI isn’t a person. It isn’t conscious. It is a machine of 0s and 1s. I remember working in a print shop when I was younger. And a printer there used to consider his press alive and gave it a name. It was counter productive, because when things went wrong it was that “entity” that had a bad vibe. When it always was a mechanical issue. Giving machines an identity makes them harder to control. So don’t refer to your AI as a person. It is an thing and it is OK to control things.

AI CONSCIOUSNESS

The Great Disintermediation

As I mention in my column, AI could become another layer between media companies and their audiences, summarizing information without necessarily sending the reader back to its source. That is a much bigger problem than declining search traffic because the interface itself could become the destination. The media industry has suffered from this. Hotels a little less (a bed is a lot harder to enjoy on a screen) but this is going to change relationships again.

AI DISINTERMEDIATION

AI Hotel Bookings in China

Fliggy’s flyai integration with major Chinese smartphone brands reportedly drove an 800% increase in AI-generated orders during Spring Festival (numbers matter here as well). Fliggy wants to be available across models, operating systems and service platforms. Is there an OTA doing that here?

AGENTIC DISTRIBUTION

Guests Worth 18 Times More

Bookboost’s analysis found that guests with ten or more stays generated around 18 times the revenue of first-time guests. I had done an analysis a while ago and the percentage of return guests in a city like Paris was less than 9% in independent hotels, a group has more, a great group got up to 12%. Chains have more. A friend told me loyalty programs start making sense above 44,000 rooms. All interesting data, if you can do something for more.

GUEST LIFETIME VALUE

⁠

Wellness Becomes the Stay

Packaging wellness into three-, five- and seven-night programs rather than treating the spa as another hotel amenity is a great way to turn a hotel/resort into a destination. I wonder if some could convert to that model in the off-season.

WELLNESS TRAVEL

Airbnb Wants Hotels

Brian Chesky wants the hotel category to become a multi-billion-dollar business. They were always an OTA, but they cleverly marketed themselves against hotel chains originally. The thing with rentals is bookings are hard to scale, once you’ve sold the “room” that location is no longer available. Hotels have multiple rooms, so the same product can be sold more than once. Airbnb had to market destinations or emotions, they can’t always deliver on that. But hotels are a more scalable option for growth. And hotels could do with

AIRBNB HOTELS + AIRBNBS OTA RANK⁺

Better Designed Sustainability

Pollution and sustainability is a problem we need to engineer and design our way out of, this project in Bangkok attracted more than 951,000 visitors in its first year while also reducing heat, and pollution. It is a great example of sustainability creating something people actually want rather than simply ticking an ESG box. I don’t know a lot of roofs in cities that are big enough for this. But if it can inspire some it is worth it. As I frequently comment we can’t regulate our way to sustainability, we need to actively find smarter solutions that simultaneously increase quality of life if we want it to work.

URBAN SUSTAINABILITY + ROOF PARK

Hotel Labor Headcount vs Hours

HotelData’s numbers show hours per occupied room (HPOR) falling by more than 3% even while occupancy increased. Comparing that with guest satisfaction would be an interesting exercise (if rooms are turned over faster, did quality suffer). It’s the kind of stuff that should exist in an hotel’s data set so it can be queried and verified. A bit like I mentioned last week. PS: On the record, nobody wants to officially talk about reducing headcount in our industry, but off the record…

HOTEL LABOR + HOTEL ONTOLOGY

Retailer becoming Ad Networks

Retail media has become so attractive that almost every retailer seems tempted to create its own network. The hotel chains are doing it too, and OTAs are growing their media business as well. How is targeting, do we want ads for new fridges in our hotel rooms and booking confirmation emails? When does this become too much for the consumer?

RETAIL ADVERTISING + EVERYONE WANTS ONE

Who should buy Tripadvisor

Tripadvisor has accumulated an enormous amount of review and traveler-intent data over the years. With AI this becomes interesting. I argued that if anyone should buy Tripadvisor, Airbnb would be a good option. Accelerating their footprint into the hotel space and other travel verticals.

TRAVELER REVIEWS

Can AI Finally Connect the Trip?

Travel has talked about the connected trip for decades, but in reality tech has made it less connected. Booking is apparently working on this. I personally think this is where OTAs can still provide value. Because other than an inventory feed, the OTA interface will likely move to one of the big 5 AI chatbots.

CONNECTED TRIP + OTA FUTURE

• The History of Search Engines - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• Measuring Political Bias in AI - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

• The Gulf Game Theory - Link

Did you know: The word "interface" comes from the Latin "inter-" meaning "between" and the English word "face." It was first used in science in the 19th century to describe the surface between two substances. Later, it was adopted in technology and computing to describe points of interaction between systems or users and machines. 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.

Hello,

AI buzzwords move fast. I skip a lot of them. But I think some of them are worth knowing about. As a shameless plug, I use Lomar Dictionary to get a basic understanding of them by putting the word and “(AI)” in the search bar, eg. Ontology (AI) it works great to give a simple definition without getting lost in wikipedia.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Pragmatik builds high-converting
MQL engines through targeted content.
Just find out more ➛

Opinion

How hotels should prepare for AI

I recently wrote about preparing for AI that hotels should build the infrastructure to prepare for it. There is a layer to this that I think will become increasingly important: ontology. It’s the latest AI-buzzword so I figured let’s try to decrypt it for a hotel.

The word isn’t new, it comes from the Greek words “onto-” meaning “being” or “existence,” and “-logy” meaning “study of.” It was first used in philosophy to talk about the study of existence, and now used in AI to mean a structured way to describe knowledge.

The basic concept isn’t as complex as it sounds (someone building such system will accuse me of blasphemy here). For a hotel, it essentially is a description of what actually exists in the hotel, how those things relate to each other, and what can happen between them.

For example: Room 407. It is a Deluxe King. It can connect to 408. It normally takes 31 minutes to clean. The AC was repaired two weeks ago. The building plans know it is 75 metres from the main linen store.

Add to this the human knowledge. The executive housekeeper knows that 407 often takes longer because of its layout. The housekeeper knows the vacuum cleaner stored on that floor is terrible. Then add the SOPs on how to clean it, what products to use. etc. An ontology connects them so they’re not just a series of disrelated facts but facts related to objects, rules, SOPs etc.

This becomes particularly interesting for AI because AI needs context before it can meaningfully optimize anything. Take all SOPs, all floor-plans, approved products, etc. and then add to it dynamic data (stock levels, arrivals, departures, reservations, rates etc) you have an AI system that can start optimizing.

Perhaps the system discovers that housekeepers spend 18 minutes per shift walking back to get supplies. Perhaps it finds that certain room sequences consistently take longer because employees are moving between floors. Or that linen organization creates dozens of tiny delays every week.

If you’ve cleaned rooms you understand that saving two minutes per room is meaningful. But importantly, saving those two minutes by making a physically demanding job a tiny bit easier is better than telling them to clean two minutes faster.

Start thinking about ontology now. Not necessarily by buying an “ontology platform” or embarking on a three-year data project. Start small. List the important elements in your hotel: rooms, employees, tasks, equipment, and physical spaces. Identify which systems has which data that you might need. Gather the SOPs. Find out what is not documented and just “everybody knows”. Bring this together. Start structuring it with Claude, Gemini or whatever your AI of choice is.

And don’t collect everything simply because you can. A 40-room hotel probably doesn’t need centimeter-level tracking of everything.

My previous argument was that hotels need to build infrastructure so they are ready for whatever AI brings next. Gathering all this data and making it available for AI is a great place to start. It will tell a system how all the parts work together and then when you start feeding live data in there and you’ll probably get great insights.

And btw, a lot of that data can even help in AI discovery.

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Avoiding the Crowds

Following last week’s column on tourism distribution, I was sent a link to Crowd Avoid it combines live crowd levels, weather, forecasts and alerts to help travelers visit attractions at quieter times. It is a nice example of technology solving the problem.

CROWD MANAGEMENT

Travel Advisors and AI

From another column where I noted that AI + Humans can build a whole new gig-economy, Fora is one of the companies building that (they started long before my post). There are several of these and I think this combo of AI + human can make travel much easier at a more affordable cost. Especially re-booking and fixing the problems.

TRAVEL TECHNOLOGY

Marriott Is Feeding the AI

Marriott CEO says the company is actively supplying content to AI platforms such as Google and OpenAI to make sure its hotels remain visible. Websites are for humans and the conflict has always existed between SEO (for machines) and design (for humans). With AI there might be two separate “websites” and smaller hotels need a practical way into that infrastructure too.

AI HOTEL DISCOVERY

Hotel TV and Streaming

Hotel TVs have become a weird large black square in the rooms. I don’t use them anymore. Neither do my kids. For years I’ve been saying we need to solve streaming on these TVs. So far it is still complex and not worth the hassle. Maybe something is going to change?

HOTEL STREAMING

Anatomy of a Great Ad

A high-performing ad doesn’t just get an initial burst of attention; it keeps converting as platforms push it from warm audiences into increasingly cold ones. The useful metric is whether CPA and ROAS remain stable while spend scales. That is a much better definition of good creative than likes or hook rates alone. The best advertising is ultimately creative that survives contact with a much larger audience.

AD CREATIVE

⁠

When Hotel Brands Become Merchandise

Bloomingdale’s is promoting Ritz-Carlton merchandise. To build a hotel brand that can be worn is quite a feat. Not many have achieved that but there are more than Ritz-Carlton that could pull it off. For a while I believe citizenM was one of them, more niche but if you knew, you knew. Loving how Ritz-Carlton have done this.

HOTEL MERCHANDISE

Autonomous Vehicles

I don’t know how much the travel industry is tracking Autonomous Vehicles. It is a niche thing that exists mostly in San Francisco and Austin. But once it starts to exist in cities like NY, London, Barcelona, Paris, Rome (good luck), etc. I think it will change a lot of the dynamics (including redistributing tourism). Fewer cars in cities, fewer cars parked in cities and a lot more.

COUNTING AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

The History of GDS

Always great to look back at how things evolved. GDSs started as airline-owned technology but eventually became intermediaries charging airlines for access to their own distribution ecosystem. NDC was supposed to change some of that, yet it seems to have created more players rather than removing the toll booths (sounds familliar). AI may change the interface, but will it just add another connectivity layer?

TRAVEL DISTRIBUTION

Agentic Travel

There is a lot of excitement about agents booking complete trips, but the actual progress has been slower than the hype. Some people love travel research. Some hate it. The main issue IMO is going to be who handles disputes especially if going through an agent find a great price from 3 different vendors and the middle one goes wrong. As I mentioned above, human Travel Assistants have a real value here.

AGENTIC TRAVEL

Brand or Leads Is the Wrong Question

Marketing budgets are often divided between brand building and lead gen, but this argument is that the real problem is: what is actually constraining growth? If the problem is awareness, spend should create audience; if it is trust, more performance advertising probably won’t fix it; and if it is conversion, brand reach may not be the immediate priority. There is no “best practice” that solves everything. It does require a proper analysis and identifying the biggest problem.

MARKETING CONSTRAINTS

Travelers and Age

Travel spending changes dramatically across life stages, apparently Americans aged 55+ are responsible for almost half of travel spending. But marketing focuses on the younger travelers. This could be aspirational (most people want to go where the cool kids go). As I’ve said before segmentation around life stage and travel purpose probably tells us much more than GenZ, Millenials etc etc.

TRAVELER LIFE STAGES

• The Morning Meeting With Memory - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• Brazilian Design at the Airport - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

• Beyond the Annual Tech Budget - Link⁺

Did you know: In Philosophy, Ontology means The study or theory of the nature of being, existence, or reality, and the basic categories of things that exist and how they relate to each other. 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.

Hello,

I was in NY this year with the family. Aside from the over-crowded Times Square, I was positively surprised how well tourists were distributed. Most of the other attractions we went to were comfortable, no crowding, no crazy queues. More on travel distribution below.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Pragmatik builds high-converting
MQL engines through targeted content.
Just find out more ➛

Opinion

What If the Answer to Overtourism Is More Tourism?

Last year, after the summer holidays, I wrote about overtourism and why it is a dumb word, solving the wrong problem. When destinations become crowded, the quick response is usually some version of restriction, but there are better ways.

A recent Google Maps experiment is a perfect example of a better way. Researchers looked at highly congested roads across 10 US cities and changed the recommended routes for fewer than 2% of the trips. The result was around a 2% increase in speeds on those congested roads and an improvement in travel times across the network. The point is there was no restriction, just re-distribution.

This is engineering solving a problem. Politics and regulation mostly have a limited set of tools. When something creates a problem, restrict it, tax it, regulate it or make it more difficult (don’t get me wrong this is a critical function, we need boundaries, but as the saying goes when all you have is a hammer every problem becomes a nail).

Engineers have another set of tools: inventing a better solution.

Most “overtourism” is a congestion problem. Visitors arriving in the same few months to the same attractions at roughly the same time. I remember speaking to someone who worked in the famous town of Positano on the Amalfi Coast, he explained that for 2 month a year he had work, the year of the year he didn’t. So he moved to Sorrento. I drove by the town in one of those two month, I didn’t stop because it was so full.

We have sophisticated technology for pricing airline seats and hotel rooms, targeting advertising and predicting what someone wants to buy. What if we focused solutions on distributing demand better? Making it so much more interesting to travel at a different time and routes. Making it OK to travel off season etc.

The Google Maps congestion problem is much simpler than tourism, I know. But the principle is interesting: congestion does not necessarily mean you have too much demand and that restricting is the solution. It can mean that it is just too focused on the same paths.

What if twice as many Americans, Europeans, Chinese, Indians, Arabs and everyone else spent time in each other’s countries, ate together, worked together and understood each other a little better? How much good could that bring?

So maybe we should ask technology and engineers to solve for double the volume of tourism. Between better marketing, better technology and some real problem solving maybe we can grow the pie in a sustainable way.

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Demand signals are getting weird

The recent hype from the new AI agent that can book things highlights a new problem we’re going to see more of. Huge spikes in demand signals which aren’t real demand but bots aggressively trying to book stuff. This is going to be hard to work with until before it settles down.

1 CUSTOMER 200 REQUESTS

Google Spam Updates and SEO

Google’s August spam update produced some spectacular ranking losses, with many top-ten URLs reportedly falling beyond position 100. The sensible response is also the boring one: improve content instead of guessing at algorithm hacks. With AI search adding even more uncertainty, solid sustainable SEO fundamentals seem more valuable rather than less.

SEO FUNDAMENTALS

The $2 Guest Experience

Some of the best hospitality improvements are almost embarrassingly small: a sticker explaining a difficult balcony handle or homemade ice cream. None of these requires a transformation program or giant technology budget. I like these examples because guest experience is often won through dozens of small moments rather than one spectacular innovation.

GUEST EXPERIENCE

Everyone just became a creative director

If one doesn’t need to learn how to hold a brush correctly or how to handle a bezier curve and still manage to get one’s ideas created, then we can all be creative directors and build amazing things. Canva’s co-founder thinks that too.

CANVA CREATIVITY

Four Futures for AI Travel Booking

Lufthansa Innovation Hub mapped four scenarios for how agentic AI could reshape flight booking in the 2030s, particularly around consumer trust and control of data. Pretending we know exactly how consumers will behave five years from now is probably the least credible option. So different scenarios are a great way to test it. From these we should be able to figure out what we need to prepare for.

AGENTIC TRAVEL

⁠

AI is Mostly an Organization Problem

AI makes building automations easier, but spotting the right workflows and is still the difficult part. This is probably why transformation is much harder than simply buying AI software. Best advice I ever heard on this was automate the easiest stuff first.

AI TRANSFORMATION EASY AUTOMATIONS

Sofitels Croissants and Nespressos

Sofitel and Nespresso are creating a limited croissant-and-coffee pairing across 20 properties. It’s brilliant product placement. Great hotels can do these and it becomes a new type of experiential retail media. I do remember a French Pastry Chef once asking me why in the world would one add something to a croissant.

HOTEL BRAND EXPERIENCE

AI Could Rewrite Hotel Distribution

Corporate booking tools such as Concur and Navan increasingly use AI to reinterpret hotel information agents/travelers see it. This will become a fundamental distribution change. All those great descriptions, the superlatives, the marketing spin will move away and get rewritten by agents to tailor to the readers needs. And agents will increasingly know what their customer wants to see.

AI HOTEL DISTRIBUTION

America wants 100 Million visitors

The U.S. travel industry is targeting 100 million international visitors a year by 2030. It’s a big place and there’s a lot to see and it was built in the last 250 years so maybe it wont get too crowded (as long as they don’t all go to Times Square at the same time).

US TOURISM GROWTH

Skip the Front Desk

Stayntouch surveyed hotel guests who said they prefer smartphone checkout, while hotels using kiosk check-in reportedly see significantly higher satisfaction. In many cases I tend to agree. The “human connection” of check-in and check-out is transactional it isn’t really a human connection. But when self-check-in fails and one then has to do human check-in as well it is worse.

HOTEL SELF SERVICE

Dashboards, Analytics in AI age

I had coffee with an industry friend in Paris this week. We discussed AI, he was telling me how many hoteliers and hotel groups are using Claude or GPT for their analytics. They just throw all their reports at it and query it and make custom dashboards. True there is no real regard for security and privacy. But they finally are getting what they need. As I wrote a while ago, that hidden “software” layer (aka spreadsheets) is being disrupted. But how far will that go? All analytics? All dashboards?

SPREADSHEET SOFTWARE AI HOTEL OPS

• The Spreadsheet that Broke Britain - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• Steinway Pianos Marketing lock-in - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

• The Caesar Salad - Link

Did you know: The word "tourism" comes from the word "tour," which comes from the Old French "tour," meaning a journey or a trip. It was influenced by the Latin "tornare," meaning to turn or to go around. The modern use of "tourism" began in the early 19th century to describe the act of traveling for pleasure. 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.

Hello,

Kids are all back in school, holidays for the parents as they say. So let’s get caught up on what happened last week.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Pragmatik builds high-converting
MQL engines through targeted content.
Just find out more ➛

Opinion

The Battle for the Interface is Starting Again

AI language models are changing how we interact with systems and technology. The point and click model is evolving for the first time in 30 years. This means the battle for the customer interface is back.

We went through this when the internet arrived. Before that, discovery happened through travel agents, brochures, hotel brands etc. OTAs mostly won in the point-and-click era of search, filter and bookings.

With conversational interfaces things are going to change. Instead of scrolling through 200 hotels, it is much easier to say: “Find me a quiet boutique hotel in Rome, walking distance from good restaurants, with a pool suitable for toddlers, and a room that actually works for a family of six”, (this is probably an impossible request, tell me if you found one).

But I’m not sure the infrastructure underneath can deal with the data needed. Today things are just noted as “Pool: Yes/No” “Connecting rooms: Yes/No” etc.

Current hotel distribution systems are designed around a simple concept: availability, rates and inventory (ARI). That works when the guest is doing all the searching and reading and clicking and filtering. It works much less when an AI is doing that as the data simply isn’t granular enough.

So even if OTAs become the plumbing behind AI, basic ARI will no longer be enough. An AI can only give a great answer if the underlying systems actually has the answer. This is where attribute-based selling might finally have its day of glory. For years, the idea has been discussed as a better way to sell rooms based on specific features rather than fixed room types. But it was going to become an interface problem, nobody wants to tick 8 boxes to build their room-rate. AI on the other-hands doesn’t mind, conversational search is basically attribute-based search on steroids.

However, almost none of the three letter systems (OTA, GDS, PMS, CRS) were built for that. Adding an AI layer will essentially just convert a language query into a simple search string (ie “Hotel in Rome with pool”, Pax:6, Date:03/27/2028) and that won’t really answer the question of the guest.

So it’s going to take a serious rethink and re-architecture of all the plumbing that connects hotels and distributors. And it isn’t going to generate any immediate revenue. Will OTAs have the patience to do it? More importantly will their investors?

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Three Qs Before Adopting AI in Hospitality

There’s a lot of pressure right now to “do something with AI”, but these three questions from Jeff B. are a good filter: does it improve the guest experience, make work easier for the team, and is the data actually ready? Too many AI projects seem to start with the technology rather than the problem. As I’ve said before I think the best applications will be the ones guests barely notice because they simply make the operation run better.

AI HOTEL ADOPTION

Product Feeds Become Visibility

ChatGPT shopping results are reportedly shifting towards structured product feeds supplied directly by brands rather than relying primarily on scraped product pages. Hotels have great ARI feeds, but we need to start making much more detailed room feeds as I mentioned in my column above

AI PRODUCT FEEDS

Google AI and the Distribution Shift

Google’s AI Mode could change travel distribution again by moving more of the discovery process inside Google itself. OTAs owned visibility in traditional search, but that power could shift. Independent hotels should probably pay particular attention to whether their content, inventory and rates can actually be understood by these systems. As I mentiond in my column plus article above, more data in the feed will become a necessity.

AI TRAVEL DISTRIBUTION

What Should Stay Human?

The idea of “Human Reserved” is an interesting way to think about automation in hospitality. As Scott Eddy comments, just because AI or robotics can perform a task doesn’t necessarily mean guests will want them to. Repetitive processes are obvious candidates for automation, but hospitality still most of its value from human attention.

HUMAN RESERVED HOSPITALITY

The First Principles of Hotel Distribution

I wrote the first principles of marketing, Siv Forlie make the Principles of Hotel Distribution. The mechanics of distribution matter, but they should support the basic principles rather than become the objective themselves. A great list.

HOTEL DISTRIBUTION PRINCIPLES

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What Makes a Hotel Visible to AI?

A study of 27,360 AI-generated answers around Barcelona hotels found that Google review volume was the strongest signal associated with visibility, while hotel websites were cited in only 7% of answers. Third-party guides, reviews and Reddit appear to matter a lot. The top 20% of hotels also received more than 80% of mentions. We’re in early days a lot of spam control is still to be worked out.

AI HOTEL VISIBILITY

Did Booking overtake Expedia in B2B

BTIG estimates that Booking Holdings generated 196 million B2B room nights in the year ending June 30, versus Expedia’s 170 million. If accurate, that overturns the common assumption that Expedia still dominates hotel B2B distribution. B2B distribution can become very opaque very quickly, also it operates on much more structured attributes and has higher frequency.

B2B HOTEL DISTRIBUTION

Airbnb Hires Booking.com Veteran to Grow Hotels

Airbnb has appointed Pepijn Rijvers as Chief Business Officer. The appointment makes Airbnb’s hotel ambitions look increasingly serious. It is a proven market, they’re not creating a new one. Wall Street seems to love the idea with a big stock jump. Incremental improvements rather than reinventing a market.

AIRBNB HOTEL EXPANSION

AI vs the travel herds

Centralized recommendations have helped create concentrations of tourists around the same location. I’ve written about this many times. This article discusses how AI could potentially widen discovery by matching travellers with more specific interests, or it could simply reproduce the same popularity signals in a new interface. We have yet another chance at improving distribution, would be great to take it this time.

AI TRAVEL DISCOVERY

Travel Advisors Are Selling the Upgrade

Travel Advisors charging for planning, with fees around $350 for a week-long trip and considerably more at the top end. That changes the advisor relationship because they get paid by the guest, no the hotel. With AI I think (hope) this model grows. Some will take commissions, some will want a fixed fee. Whichever it is, the idea of someone taking care of the delayed flights, clawing back the refunds, re-booking the trip etc, is welcome.

TRAVEL ADVISOR VALUE

Brand Entertainment

Short-form scripted “Micro Drama” is moving from entertainment format to advertising vehicle, similar to the soap operas but in a new way. I don’t want another 15-second product ad, but a fun story could work. Gap even put Entertainment on their org chart. Hotels and destinations have almost unfair advantages here because their products are already full of characters and settings. But doing something not boring and not cringe is where the artists will strive.

MICRO DRAMA MARKETING + GAP FASHIONTAINMENT

• 5 Travel Prompts - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• Updates from Copenhagen Design Week - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

• AI and Cybersecurity - Link

• Best campaigns of the week - Link

Did you know: The word "interface" comes from the Latin "inter-" meaning "between" and the English word "face," meaning "surface." It first appeared in English in the late 19th century to describe a surface forming a common boundary. Its use in technology and computing began in the mid-20th century. 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.

Hello,

So many things are changing in marketing with AI. But now’s a really good time to think about what will not change in the coming decade. Also, being weird is not really a strategy unless you only want to reach those who identify as weird.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Pragmatik builds high-converting
MQL engines through targeted content.
Just find out more ➛

Opinion

In Marketing “be different” is Overrated

There’s a common piece of marketing advice that I think gets interpreted the wrong way: you need to stand out. Be different. Don’t look like everyone else. Somehow, “different” has increasingly become “weird.”

Weird hero shot. Weird hotel interiors. Weird design. Put a bathtub in the lobby, paint the ceiling orange, give the rooms strange names and some hotels think they’re onto something. It might get attention. It will probably get media coverage. But attention and revenue aren’t the same thing.

Liquid Death is an interesting example. Selling water in a can that looks like an energy drink with a name that sounds rock n’ roll is weird. But the weirdness wasn’t the product. They found an audience for whom that difference was relevant. At a rock concert with a bottle of Evian is just not the right vibe, but a can of Liquid Death is relevant. It was different yes. It was weird, true. But mostly it was just more relevant.

Marketers need to think about differentiation the same way.

If a hotel’s target is families, standing out doesn’t mean having the weirdest family hotel. It means being 101% relevant to your target audience. Breakfast that works for children (and which parents can approve). A pool kids are allowed to use. Areas where noise isn’t going to be a problem. Connecting rooms for families with 3 kids. etc.

CitizenM is another good example. It certainly felt weird when it arrived. Oddly erotic posters. Bizarre modern art. Small rooms. Funky quotes. But I don’t think it succeeded because it was weird. It succeeded because the product was incredibly relevant for short-stay business travelers.

Many times I walked through CitizenM livingroom (not a lobby) late in the evening. It wasn’t filled with designers, musicians and super cool creative people. Mostly, it was filled with office workers. Accountants, salespeople, people with regular laptops.

The slightly funky environment gave a conventional business traveler something aspirational. For a night or two they could stay somewhere that made them feel a little more creative, social and interesting, while still getting exactly what they needed from a hotel: Comfort and efficiency. It was more relevant than the other hotels, with a plus of being more creative.

The mistake is starting with the question, “How can we be different?” Start instead with, “Who are we trying to be incredibly relevant to?”

Then exaggerate the things that matter to those people. You might end up with something unusual. You might even end up with something weird.

But weird should be the consequence, not the strategy.

Being different gets attention. Being relevant gets customers. Also, read my first principles of marketing here.

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Ads That Turn Into Agents

OpenAI is testing ad-agents. Instead of clicking an ad and landing on a page, the customer could continue the conversation, compare products and potentially buy without really leaving the interface. That changes optimization from keywords and landing pages toward having structured product data an AI can understand and trust.

AGENTIC ADVERTISING. - SIX MONTH OF GPT ADS

Airbnb Is Selling the Audience

Airbnb’s valuation seems to be growing much faster than bookings, which suggests investors are betting on something other than simply selling more accommodation. Airbnb has an audience planning travel and it seems investors believe they could expand that. It’s not like OTAs haven’t been doing that for a while. Let’s see if they can make it happen.

AIRBNB AUDIENCE

Reddit Spam Meets AI Search

For a while there was a fairly simplistic idea that getting mentioned repeatedly on Reddit, would automatically improve visibility in AI answers. As the saying goes, when the metric becomes the goal it no longer is a useful metric. Now, apparently that game is already getting harder as models become better at discounting content designed primarily to manipulate them. GEO may end up looking a lot like SEO eventually did: useful fundamentals surrounded by increasingly complicated attempts to game an algorithm.

AI SEARCH SPAM

Having AI vs Having a Plan

There’s a lot of talk about “what AI features do you have” and it’s cool. So many features are being added that it really seems like christmas of features. But AI needs more than that. It needs a plan.

AI STRATEGY. - HOTEL DATA CONFERENCE

Tourism: gives vs takes

There are many discussions these days about the value or tourism and if tourism is net positive etc. While having the discussion is healthy, vilifying tourism for the housing market is a fallacy. NY banned Airbnb and housing prices didn’t go down. Yes we need to find more ways to distribute tourism better, but the long term net positive of tourism is more understanding between cultures. Europeans seeing that Americans are nice people was a recent win for everyone. These happen when tourism grows.

TOURISM BENEFITS

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Luxury Hotels as City Builders

One response to tourism is not necessarily fewer travelers but better distribution of travelers. Great hotels can help with that by making less obvious neighborhoods and cities destinations in their own right. Hotels have probably underestimated their ability to shape destination demand. Michelin Guide was an early success in tourism distribution, we can do more.

URBAN LUXURY

Hotel AI Focus ideas

There are now AI tools in most modern hotel software solutions, this makes choosing where to focus harder rather than easier. Revenue management, marketing, guest messaging and operations can all benefit, but adding tools without redesigning workflows probably just creates another layer of software. I think the useful AI projects will increasingly be the boring ones that remove work rather than the impressive ones that generate demos. Productivity first, magic later.

AI IN HOTELS

Trivago as a Seller

Trivago built its identity around comparing hotel sellers, but its own checkout has apparently grown 24x in a year and now ranks among the larger sellers inside its own marketplace. Tripadvisor tried this and dropped it, Google tried it and dropped it. Are they the first to make it work? Also they’re suing Google.

TRIVAGO CHECKOUT

The Middleman Myth

AI travel planning was initially discussed as something that might remove intermediaries (so was the internet) I guess that is the usual myth when some new technology arrives, that it will cut out the middleman. Mindtrip is a good reminder that it might simply create a new generation of them. If an AI planner handles inspiration, itinerary creation and booking but gets hotel inventory through existing OTA relationships, hotels still sit several layers away from the traveler. New interfaces don’t automatically mean new economics.

AI TRAVEL DISTRIBUTION

Travelers are ahead on AI

A study says 54% of travelers have already used AI to plan travel while only 22% of destinations offer an AI trip planner. More interestingly, 29% say an AI recommendation has caused them to change destination. The data is interesting but not absolute. However what is clear is that consumers use AI more than the suppliers do.

AI TRAVEL PLANNING

Expedia and the Booking Moment

Expedia reorganizing technology leadership and it says something interesting about where travel platforms are heading. The booking itself is becoming a smaller piece of their presence. It was the problem they solved when the internet arrived. But that problem has largely been solved. Discovery is going to be the new problem. Booking .com (it seems) is concentrating on more transaction pipes.

EXPEDIA STRATEGY

• Technology Museums Visit - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• Weather is Becoming the Location - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

Did you know: The word "weird" comes from the Old English word "wyrd," which meant "fate" or "destiny." Over time, it changed to describe things that are strange or supernatural, especially because of its use in old stories and plays like Shakespeare’s Macbeth. 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.

Hello,

This edition is late. Due to challenges on my schedule I almost skipped it. But I figured I need to stick with once a week. This week it might be two editions.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Pragmatik builds high-converting
MQL engines through targeted content.
Just find out more ➛

Opinion

Predicting AI is futile, preparing isn’t

There is a lot of thinking going into predicting what AI will look like in our industry. I think that is mostly futile. Ten years ago, very few people would have accurately described today’s AI, and there is little reason to believe we’ll do better predicting 2036. But preparing for that future is actually much easier than predicting it.

Whatever future AI looks like, it will need two things: inputs and outputs. It needs to understand what is happening, which means data. And if it is going to be genuinely useful rather than just an impressive advisor, it needs to be able to do things.

For hotels, the input side (to AI) is relatively straightforward: accessible, structured, reliable, sufficiently real-time data. The output side (from AI) means APIs that allow another system to modify inventory, update a reservation, create a task, communicate with a guest, move a room, trigger a workflow, and eventually do things we haven’t thought of yet. We have been talking about accessible data and APIs for years. AI just makes the reason for having them much more obvious.

There is a third piece too: control.

A hallucinating chatbot is annoying. An AI with permission to change reservations, rates or payments can be expensive. Once AI moves from “tell me what I should do” to “do it for me,” permissions, security, auditability, reversibility and guardrails become dramatically more important.

This is why I think the PMS becomes more important in an AI world, but perhaps not for the reason PMS companies would like. The PMS doesn’t necessarily need to contain the intelligence. But it sits close to the operational heart of the hotel. Future intelligence needs a reliable way to understand that environment and safely act upon it.

So, instead of asking, “Which PMS has the best AI?” perhaps hotels should ask, “Which PMS gives me the greatest freedom to use whatever turns out to be the best AI?”

That means APIs and support may ultimately matter more than today’s collection of AI features.

And support is going to matter more, not less. This is slightly counterintuitive. We tend to assume better technology means less human support. But experimentation means things will break. Integrations will fail. Vendors get acquired. APIs change.

Hotels are strangely allergic to technology failure, yet great hoteliers are incredibly good at operational failure (probably the best). Something goes wrong in hotels every day. The skill is fixing impossible problems while making everything appear smooth to the guest.

Perhaps we need to bring more of that mentality into technology.

The objective shouldn’t be to build a stack where nothing fails. If you are seriously experimenting with rapidly developing technology, that probably means you aren’t experimenting enough. The objective is to build one where failures are contained, recoverable and informative.

We cannot predict the winning AI. But we can build a hotel tech stack that is ready to use it when it arrives.

And that may be the much safer bet.

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

The Guest Is Becoming the Price

Hotels have spent decades pricing the room, but agentic booking systems may increasingly price the person. I think 1-price-for-1-guest idea is bad. It reminds me of something a guy called Karl once wrote. But on the other hand, I’d be OK to pay a middle man to accelerate the booking process and if I’m in a hurry it could cost more. My issue is when this is automated and not related to actually improved service.

PERSON BASED PRICING

App Payments Keep Growing

63% of UK hospitality providers report increased use of app payments. The data is rather vague. But it does make sense. Europe’s PSD2 regulation is making online payments with cards more and more complex. When I’m in the US any Uber ride I take needs to be authenticated, often 2-3 times. If I pay with ApplePay it goes through first try. It isn’t more convenient than the card I have on file with Uber. It is just way more convenient than PSD2 checks. What this means is payments will become more expensive for everyone. Maybe regulators need to consider such points.

APP PAYMENT GROWTH - PSD2

Booking works on the Pipes

Booking Holdings is consolidating hotel supply sold through Booking.com, Priceline and Agoda to banks and airlines onto Agoda’s technology. It sounds like backend plumbing, but distribution plumbing matters because closed-user inventory is difficult for hotels to see and control. Also this is how they can become the leading provider for AI. If only they decided to start working the attributes.

HOTEL DISTRIBUTION PIPES

The Hotel GM job is changing

The traditional GM is largely an operational leader, but now the role increasingly requires data literacy, technology understanding, sustainability knowledge etc. The best use of AI is less about replacing the GM and more about giving the GM more time to lead and train their teams.

MODERN HOTEL LEADERSHIP

Langham Luminary

Langham has named chef Michel Roux a “Langham Luminary” as part of its global brand campaign. Similar to Mandarin Oriental Fans, luxury hotels are associating themselves with celebrity ambassadors. Interesting to see how this progresses. Fashion and Instrument industry have done this for a while.

LUXURY BRAND STORY

⁠

Product Placement at Ritz-Carlton

Merit Beauty is partnering with seven Ritz-Carlton hotels through in-room beauty kits, carts and even a fragrance-paired martini. This is great product placement and benefits everyone. Hotels have a great opportunity for product placement especially for products that need physical experience (perfumes). Ritz-Carlton have been on a streak lately.

HOTEL BRAND COLLAB

When an AI Agent Goes Too Far

An AI assistant asked to book a gym class apparently discovered a software vulnerability, booked months ahead and even removed somebody else from a waiting list. It is a wonderfully simple example of the agent problem: the user provides a goal, but the system decides how to achieve it. As I wrote in my column, these failures will happen. And then people with bad intentions will try to use AI for this. The point is to rapidly build the system to unwind and remedy such problems, not wait till they have all gone away.

AI AGENT RISK

AI Search vs Google Search

Shopify’s data shows AI-referred sessions growing far faster than organic search, particularly in categories where customers need to research before buying (travel definitely is one of those). More interestingly, optimizing structured information for AI also appears to help traditional search, which makes this feel less like choosing SEO or GEO and more like improving the underlying information.

AI SEARCH DATA

Curation in the age of AI

American Express Travel added another 351 hotels to its premium programs, taking the collection to more than 3,400 properties. Amex can use cardmember spending and travel behavior to understand what its best customers want, giving it an advantage most traditional hotel consortia don’t have. In the age of AI, is curation becoming more important?

LUXURY HOTEL CURATION

Airline Data for $10M

Google reportedly paid $10 million for data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines. It sems aviation operating data is specialized, difficult to recreate and potentially useful for making AI systems considerably better at travel questions. I’ve always believed that a companies biggest asset is their brand (well not when it goes bankrupt). But maybe data is becoming a real asset.

TRAVEL DATA VALUE

AI and Hotel RFPs

Accor plans to introduce AI-generated pricing recommendations for corporate bids in 2027. RFPs are a fastidious process. An event organizer recently told me he doesn’t understand why luxury hotels aren’t happy to get 50-room groups and how fastidious it is to negotiate such events. AI could remove a lot of repetitive work, but if both buyer and seller eventually arrive with algorithmically generated prices does the process remain profitable for everyone?

AI CORPORATE RFP

• Unwillingly courteous - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• A mysterious typeface - Link

• Turn Merchandise Into Advertising - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

• Is Apple Quietly Winning at AI Hardware? - Link

Did you know: The word "infrastructure" comes from French, where "infra-" means "below" and "structure" means "structure." It originally referred to the underlying foundation or framework of a building or system. Over time, its meaning expanded to include the basic systems and facilities that support society, organizations, or technology. 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.

Hello,

This week, lots of discussions about distribution, where is AI going to move it. We’re in an odd “everything is fine” moment. But it time to prepare for what’s next.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Pragmatik builds high-converting
MQL engines through targeted content.
Find out more ➛

Opinion

Who will control choice in Distribution?

There is a reassuring narrative around search/distribution right now. Google is doing fine (stock is 68% up on 12 month and Booking is recovering), apparently hasn’t been a dramatic migration from search to AI. But we all know, discovery is changing.

Google is navigating this well for an incumbent. Its AI isn’t necessarily the most hyped. While others battle for the number one position, Google seems quite comfortable.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether AI kills Google Search. It is who controls the moment of choice.

For years, travel companies paid Google to be found. Search produced options, customers clicked, and hotels or OTAs converted them. AI changes that because it can increasingly do the narrowing down itself. Instead of showing me 200 hotels and some filters, it can understand what I want, compare the options and give me three. General visibility matters less if someone else controls the shortlist.

This brings me back to what I wrote earlier this year about OTAs. They still have some of the strongest cards in travel: structured inventory, rates and availability, payments, customer service and trust. But their core discovery experience of search, filter, sort and scroll increasingly looks like something AI can do better.

So unless OTA search becomes vastly better than the general AI platforms, why would consumers develop another habit? A chatbot probably isn’t enough. Full itinerary orchestration might be. Booking the flight, hotel and transfers, then dealing with changes, cancellations, refunds and the angry customer at 2am is genuinely valuable. AI platforms may want the customer interface without wanting that mess.

But OTAs might become just plumbing. Providing inventory, ARI, payments, support and transaction infrastructure while AI owns the interface and becomes the new metasearch. There is even the outlier scenario I still like, where AI creates affordable human travel assistants, people using AI to manage your entire trip on your behalf.

I don’t think we know which model wins. We may even develop separate AI verticals, as we did with search: Amazon for products, Booking for travel, Google for general questions. But currently the trend is that experiences seem to be converging.

For hotels, predicting the winner is probably less useful than identifying what doesn’t change. Recognizable brand, lots of contextual data, accurate and good photography, inventory, pricing strategy, connectivity, strong reviews remain valuable whichever interface wins.

Discovery is shifting first. Distribution will probably shift later. What will matter most in the discovery/distribution debate is who suggests choice. That part is still a moving target. But if hotels and brands focus on what determines choice (instead of who) and ensure those foundations are strong they have a chance.

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

ChatGPT’s Restaurant Move

ChatGPT launched a native restaurant experience apparently the steak recommendation wasn’t amazing, but if ChatGPT can move from recommending restaurants to comparing, choosing and eventually completing the transaction, it starts looking a lot more like a super app. Restaurant is less risk than Hotel, but great place to test.

AGENTIC DINING

Who Controls the Moment of Choice?

As I mentioned in my column (inspired from this). The next battle in media is over who controls the moment when someone decides what to consume. The argument that it isn’t just distribution, but coordination is relevant for the travel industry. Even more when one starts to package things up. Search engines, OTAs and now AI assistants increasingly sit directly in front of the customer at the point where choices are being narrowed down. Its a nuance on distribution, this one is about media, but I think it applied to all online commerce.

CHOICE CONTROL

When Nobody Seems in Charge

You can sometimes walk into a business and know that all decisions happen elsewhere. I recall a BofA I went to, spent 4 hours in and nobody in the branch was capable of making a decision. Rigid processes and layers of approval killed the human touch. Hospitality needs standards, but it also needs people who can react to situations in front of them. This is where people matter. As I wrote last week, trust.

HOTEL LEADERSHIP

Booking.com in AI, but clicks?

Booking.com is apparently showing up more frequently in AI search while referral traffic from those systems remains tiny. CFO says, AI isn’t impacting them much. As I wrote above, we’re in the “business as usual phase”. But in the real world we know that most research happens in AI, don’t we?

AI REFERRAL TRAFFIC

295 Million Bonvoy Members

296 million is an enormous audience. But let’s not forget that these members are being paid to be members, they’re not paying to be members, this changes many things. Marriott says 68% room nights from members, but that’s an easy number to fix, free wifi in the hotel requires being a member. Members don’t need to book direct. Still - retail media could be a big revenue source. And let’s not forget this is their main consumer product.

HOTEL LOYALTY

⁠

AI Makes Performance a Commodity

As everyone gets access to great AI marketing tools, performance advantages become easier to copy. Brand building becomes the one asset that can’t really be replaced. Because one cannot easily manufacture years of memory, associations and trust. The performance vs brand debate is tiring, but funny that AI will likely make brand more important again.

BRAND ADVANTAGE

AI for the Calls Nobody Answers

The problem with AI calls is when it is being used to solve the edge cases. Because that’s when AI usually fails (it is built on the averages). However when it can be used for things like late calls. Or answering easy questions when the phone is busy I think everyone will be happy. Even just to take a room order, convert it to a message to the right person.

AI BOOKING SUPPORT

The 500-Follower Influencer

Brands putting more influencer budget behind ordinary creators with very small audiences makes sense in an algorithmic feed that does its own distribution. Still so many people still think in terms of demographics, and channel reach etc. Most distribution is algorithmic now, that means the channel is less important than the content.

MICRO CREATORS

AI Builders don’t know everything

Sergey Brin discussed frontier AI in a rare unscripted Q&A and acknowledged some of the uncertainty surrounding the systems being built. Many consultants seem to be experts in AI. But all new tech introduces change and knowing that we don’t know where and how it will evolve is probably the best forecast today.

FRONTIER AI

Retail media in your BMW

BMW owners weren’t particularly happy when Spider-Man advertising suddenly appeared inside their cars. Retail media is the largest short term revenue growth for any consumer company. But it can go too far. It seems Idiocracy is becoming reality, once again.

CONNECTED ADVERTISING

The Conversion Hotel Boom

Forty percent of Marriott’s openings this year were conversions, while Hilton continues building brands designed specifically to attract independent hotels. It says quite a lot about where chain growth is coming from: not only building new hotels, but convincing existing ones to join their systems. With hundreds of millions of loyalty members, distribution is obviously a powerful argument. The question for owners is how much ownership they can preserve once they plug into a global brand machine.

HOTEL CONVERSIONS

• The United States of Culture - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• Luxury Scaffolding as Advertising - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

Did you know: The word "distribution" comes from the Latin "distributio," which means "a division, allocation, or arrangement." It is formed from "dis-" (apart) and "tribuere" (to assign or allot). The word entered English in the late Middle Ages, keeping its sense of dividing or spreading things out. 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.

Hello,

There’s no doubt that AI will be managing a larger part of our travel bookings. It’s so convenient. It isn’t a question of will AI book our stays but rather a question of when. Still, there’s a trust “score” AI agents will needs to earn. But there’s more on that in my column.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Pragmatik builds high-converting
MQL engines through targeted content.
Find out more ➛

Opinion

The currency of Trust

Attention is scarce, noise is growing. Everyone wants more attention. But I think there is another currency becoming even more valuable: trust.

Trust is not simply believing that someone gave you good advice. It is believing they will still be there when the advice goes wrong. That is where humans have an edge.

According to the LOMAR Dictionary, trust is defined as: “Belief that someone or something is honest, reliable, or will do what is right.”

When someone buys something, or a guest books a hotel, there is always a leap of faith. The photos, reviews, OTA rank, AI assistant recommendation, might all be excellent. But it is still a leap of faith.

But what happens when something goes wrong? None of the above will be there to help you (well, your AI assistant might say some kind words).

This is why we trust people differently (or not). We do not only judge the quality of their recommendation. We judge whether they have some responsibility for the outcome. Trust is connected to accountability.

On a completely unscientific Turst scale, I would rank friends and family first, colleagues and general word of mouth (includes reviews) second, influencers and media third, OTA rankings fourth, Google search fifth, and AI sixth. AI will probably move to second in a few years.

Luxury lives on trust. Their real product is not the leather, or the thread count. It is confidence. The guest believes it will work. And, more importantly, they believe someone capable will fix it if it doesn’t.

Brands are a substitute for trust. But independents can compete here too, often very effectively, because trust is mostly built through people being accountable. Marketing creates the promise, but trust is earned later.

So yes, we should automate payments, confirmations, reporting, inventory updates, and every repetitive process we can. But we should keep the people who step in when the process fails. Because eventually every process fails.

The future advantage of humans may not be that they give better answers than machines.

It may simply be that they stay and help when things went wrong.

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Can banks become distribution?

Capital One Travel has expanded its Premier and Lifestyle Collections to more than 1,400 hotels. A few weeks ago it was VISA doing something similar. They know how you’re spending your money, it is an amazing personalization data point. But they don’t know why. Still it seems like every consumer brand is adding some level of advertising or distribution.

CURATED HOTEL STAYS

Hotels cannot outspend OTAs on AI

OTAs have decades of distribution experience, enormous data sets, and the scale to invest heavily in AI-powered discovery. They also have ad budgets in the billions. My estimate is that all hotels in the world, chains included, only spend half to 3/4 of what OTAs spend. The same happened with mobile. In short, hotels are unlikely to beat them by copying the same model. They need to work on other angles where OTAs aren’t likely to go. Probably for once, I would agree that having a good hotel blog can help.

AI HOTEL DISTRIBUTION

Airbnb’s $30 Billion Loyalty Opportunity

Airbnb is reportedly developing a loyalty program. These are more than rewards programs; they create data, partnerships, financial products, and a currency the company controls (plus ad opportunities). Airbnb has scale, and a strong brand, the main ingredients needed. Are they going to innovate here? like Amazon and Easyjet, or are they going to follow the legacy loyalty club and just do rewards?

AIRBNB LOYALTY

The World Cup was an ADR Event

Early results suggest FIFA World Cup match days drove ADR more strongly than occupancy. It kind of fits the narrative that tickets were priced higher as well. Because of the number of different locations, I hope revenue managers are taking all the data to build a model for future mega events. Because we’re still really not good at forecasting mega events.

WORLD CUP ADR

SEO, AEO, GEO and AISO

The expanding collection of search optimization acronyms. The labels can help explain different tactics, but they can also make a relatively simple principle unnecessarily complicated. Hotels still need accurate content, clear structure, authority, and a technically functional website. There is little value in optimizing for every new acronym before the basics work (also many results seem to just be based on AI labs scraping Google).

SEARCH OPTIMIZATION GLOSSARY

⁠

The Attention Crisis + Influencers

As audiences become harder to reach through regular advertising, creators are taking market share, while they still have trust. But that advantage disappears quickly when every post feels scripted or transactional. So do brands just build their own influencers? Is that even credible? Lots to work on there.

INFLUENCER MARKETING

Aman, Adrian Zecha, Feelings

The founder of Aman his lack of conventional hotel training may have helped him question assumptions about feelings and luxury should feel like. This short description is nice. But when I read this I wonder who build a luxury hotel and things anything else? Every proper luxury hotel is like this.

AMAN BRAND VISION⁠

Brands getting cheaper

Hotel brands command higher rates. They’re also more expensive for owners. It looks like brands are lowering their franchise costs. Is there an over-supply of brands?

HOTEL FRANCHISE COSTS - HOTEL SUPPLY

Vendor consulted PMS

I’ve seen hotel groups select a PMS because it was cool. They told me that was the main reason. Good marketing does that. But it’s also not a great recipe for long term success. Emotion in B2B sales decision mostly amounts to removing fear of wrong choice. So others select just because it’s what they always did. Neither is great choice.

PMS BUYING

Accor wants student housing

Student housing is a particular growth sector, somewhat beyond normal hotels. The community aspect is real. But is this the same industry? I’m curious how this rolls out. Business travel has very different needs, families too.

ACCOR AND MELIA AND SOCIAL HUB

6 weeks to hotel system recovery

A luxury boutique hotel experienced failures across Opera, Delphi, and SynXis during a management transition, it took 6 weeks (!) to fix it. This case study is interesting and good to see how this works. What is interesting (and missing) is the concept of SaaS. In the hotel industry we’re so accustomed to buying software with zero service that we have a whole industry of consultants to take care of the software-as-a-service we’re paying for. It feels like tipping, you pay for the product but then you also pay to get the product.

SYSTEM RECOVERY⁠

• Made in America over-regulation problem - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• Matisse and colors - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

Did you know: The word "trust" comes from the Old Norse word "traust," which means "confidence" or "help." It entered English in the Middle Ages and has kept a similar meaning about believing in someone or something. 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.

Hello,

I’m still in the US, and I’m surprised how much Americans are still talking about the world cup. Usually interest wanes when the team leaves but this time there’s more to talk about, more drama?

Also, am impressed with how fast American airports are improving. Moving to the new 3D luggage scanners. Getting proper tray systems. etc. Really great to see.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Pragmatik builds high-converting
MQL engines through targeted content.
Find out more ➛

Opinion

Attention, the World Cup, Travel and Media

There is a strange narrative exchange happening between Europe and the United States on social media.

When I tell people in the U.S. that I am from Paris, some look at me as if I recently escaped a war zone. They ask about immigration and whether the city is still safe. I normally assume they have been spending a little too much time consuming social media.

Often, in the same conversation, they tell me that Europeans who travelled to the U.S. for the World Cup were surprised to discover that America was actually quite nice.

That these two thoughts can live comfortably beside each other is impressive.

The conclusion seems to be that Europeans were misinformed about the United States. Yet, at no point does that person consider that they might also be misinformed about Europe. Apparently misinformation only travels in one direction, usually from somewhere else.

This is not really a political problem. It is a media business-model problem, and it is destructive for travel.

The problem is also not new. In the early 2000s when France refused to join the Iraq War, parts of the American media had a wonderful time explaining why France was hostile, unsafe, and generally a terrible place for Americans to visit. There were stories about anti-American sentiment, boycotts, protests, and even “freedom fries.” The details change, but the commercial incentive does not.

Today, many people who believe mainstream media is lying to them somehow believe social media is not. I often explain, mostly in vain, that both systems are rewarded by the same currency: attention.

As long as attention determines revenue, information will naturally move towards whatever attracts the most of it. And that is not a news problem. It is a storytelling question.

A good story needs a hero, an enemy, conflict, danger, forbidden knowledge, secret plots, dark motives, corruption, romance, money, or preferably several of them at once. The more sensational a story is while remaining just credible enough, the better it performs.

This has been true for centuries. In some ways, news is probably more factual today than it was 100 years ago, when verification was difficult and publishers could invent almost anything. But the economic reward for drama remains.

As our industry depends on people far away feeling safe to travel destinations, hotels, airlines, and travel companies need to communicate more, show more, and tell better stories. Not polished corporate stories that nobody believes, but frequent, specific, human evidence of what places are actually like.

Because when media is rewarded primarily by attention, it will eventually say whatever earns attention.

Travel has to make reality more enticing than the fiction.

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

How Airbnb Made Itself French

Airbnb’s latest French campaign is about behaving more local. Sponsoring the Tour de France to get a familiar national rituals rather than simply advertising destinations. It is a great way to reframe the “big american tech company” narrative (for non-Americans this is actually not a positive look). But it is also a lot of work and costs.

AIRBNB FRANCE⁠



AI Search stats

Similarweb’s LLM traffic data makes the growth of AI platforms easier to see, also look at the scale on the left. Most of the AI platforms aren’t growing that much. Google and AI overviews are still massively above the others.

AI SEARCH VISIBILITY

Sonder Is Back. Sort Of.

TravelAI has acquired the Sonder name from bankruptcy proceedings and relaunched the website as an affiliate-marketing platform. Not sure how this will work. There are still hundreds of locations on the internet called Sonder (Google maps and others) so there will be a strange transition period.

SONDER BRAND / SONDER TIMELINE⁠

Make Coca-Cola More Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola’s latest brand update leaves the logo alone and focuses instead on using its familiar ribbon, script and red more consistently across markets. It’s pretty sharp how they’ve done this. I believe it is going to leave a bit of confusion on the bottles and cans. But this is Coke. They are the most recognizable brand in the world, and despite that they spend $4-5b a year rent space in your mind.

BRAND DISTINCTIVENESS / 5B DOLLARS ⁠

The Data Behind Hybrid Work

WFH Research has been tracking working arrangements and attitudes since COVID-19. We often hear anecdotes about offices being either full or empty. There seems to be a pretty good data set. For hospitality, these patterns matter because they influence business travel, extended stays, urban demand and when people choose to move around.

HYBRID WORK

⁠

Major Events Still Break the Forecast

The World Cup once again showed how difficult it is to price hotel rooms around events. Some saw rates fall sharply, while some performed much better. Revenue management works well when demand follows recognizable patterns, but unprecedented events still bring gut feeling, FOMO and ego back into the equation. Either we’re over-thinking (too much gut feel vs just pace and pickup) or we’re under-thinking it (and we need to really figure this out).

EVENT DEMAND

DeepSeek’s Founder Speaks

A newly public conversation between DeepSeek founder offers a rare look at the thinking behind one of China’s most closely watched AI companies. IMO it is becoming more and more obvious that intelligence will be baked into all products. More like the switch from DOS to GUI, windows, mouse pointers, etc just became part of everything. We will have intelligence added to product menus, in-app search, actions, automation, etc. We wont know what model we’re using, it wont matter as long as it works.

DEEPSEEK STRATEGY⁠

Brands as Mini-Drama Studios

TikTok wants brands to move beyond isolated short videos and start creating serialized mini dramas. Following my column above, this could be pretty cool. Not just for Tiktok but for all social channels. The difficult part will characters, pacing and storytelling the hollywood kind of problems.

TIKTOK DRAMAS

Hotels aren’t tool builders

Benedict Evans makes a good point that most people aren’t tool builders. So even if we give them a tool building AI wizard. They’re still not going to make tools. I lived this when we made DYI websites for our hotel clients - maybe 1% logged in. But hotels are process writers. And if those processes can be fed to an agentic AI to be automated we can alleviate a lot of work that exists because it exists. That isn’t tool building but it is something.

TOOLBUILDERS

⁠

• Prediction Market (PR spin for betting market) - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• Matisse and colors - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

Did you know: "Media" comes from the Latin word "medium," which means "middle" or "means." In English, "media" is the plural form of "medium." People started using "media" to talk about ways of communication in the 20th century. 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.

Hello,

It has been a few weeks, great to be back! Took a break with the family, visited NYC like a proper tourist. I was positively surprised how every place we went to (besides times square) didn’t feel crammed. Great distribution of tourism. Maybe because we didn’t just do the must-dos and there’s a lot of choice in NYC.

The theme of this newsletter turned out to be how, the best thing to do with AI now is solve boring problems. Once we have done that we can start solving the future problems.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Pragmatik builds high-converting
MQL engines through targeted content.
Find out more ➛

Opinion

Use AI to do old things, not rethink everything

One of the assumptions around AI is that we’ll need to rethink everything (AI changes everything catch-phrase comes to mind). You probably heard of digital transformation roadmaps and AI transformation roadmaps etc. But in hotels, more often than not, we used new technology to reproduce existing ways of working before gradually discovering better ones.

PMSs are a good example. When hotels moved from paper to digital systems they mostly recreated the same workflows inside computers. Which arguably made everything worse than paper. But I digress.

I think Digital to AI will follow exactly evolve like Paper to Digital, but with an important difference.

Benedict Evans recently pointed out that the first wave of enterprise AI, giving everyone an AI assistant, hasn’t fundamentally changed large organizations. The next stage has been building isolated AI use cases, which certainly help, but only up to a point. Real transformation only comes when companies rethink entire workflows, he comments. But in hotels I don’t think that's true. There is real value to come before.

In hotels we’re not dealing with apps and digital. It’s is a physical and known product (AI won’t change room layouts every week etc). Hence AI becomes more of a support tool than foundational change. So just like we did with the advent of PMS. We should use AI agents to do stuff we used to do by hand.

Something as boring as upgrading a guest. A receptionist checks loyalty status, reviews the guest’s spending history, confirms room availability, at least 5 to maybe 10 steps plus approval. Each step is easy, but together it adds up.

AI could alleviate that. Just describing all the steps to AI, the system generates a workflow, and then executes it each time asked to do so. The workflow itself hasn’t changed. We don’t need to rethink anything. We’re just getting systems to replicate today’s world and automate things.

Once we have automated dozens of these. We can start to analyse which ones are useless, which ones need rethinking etc. Questioning approvals that rarely matter, manual handovers that can be replaced. AI hasn’t eliminated those steps overnight. But we can get immediate benefit to staff and guests and over time. We can analyse what needs re-thinking.

It is similar to skeuomorphic design during the early days of smartphones
(the design that replicated physical objects). Paper looking icons, bookshelf user interface etc. It created a bridge to something completely new before gradually removing the old visual metaphors altogether.

So rather than looking at expensive rethink-everything-AI-transformation projects (that mostly sit in charts and powerpoints), look at how it can fix simple problems today. After a while, and with more data and experience we can rethink everything.

The irony is that the fastest way to reinvent-everything-in-hotel-operations may not be reinventing them at all. It may simply be asking AI to behave exactly like the old system until we realize we no longer need the old system.

Marriott at Cannes Lions?

Anthony Capuano’s appearance at Cannes Lions, why is a hotel company going to an advertising fest is a mystery to me. Maybe they won an award but still, that’s a CMO thing. Personally I think all consumer companies are seeing how adding an ad business literally prints profit and they want a piece of the pie. Amazon has shown the world how much money can be made from ads as a side-gig.

MARRIOTT BRAND EXPERIENCE - MARRIOTT ADS

⁠

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Boring advice for AI Traffic

Referral traffic from AI platforms to hotel websites has increased by more than 50%, and how could it not? 10 blue links feels like looking for a hotel in the yellow pages. None of it has the satisfaction and ease of AI search. There still isn’t a clear way to rank in the AI algorithm. Regular SEO has been proven to be the base-line (many models simply scrape Google for ranking). Get that done right first, then expand.

AI HOTEL TRAFFIC⁠



Brand Not Guaranteed

AI shopping assistants may increasingly make choices using structured information, price, availability, and inferred suitability. That creates a risk that brand value becomes invisible at the moment an agent makes the decision. But we are humans. Google tried this a few decades ago, and realized that source authority mattered a lot. Authority is great way to define a brand. Can you build authority?

BRANDS AND AGENTS - BRAND IN AI WORLD

⁠

The best AI is not splashy

We love prototypes. They’re fresh and exciting (car companies mastered this). But the real work is often boring. Hotel automation is easy to demonstrate in a controlled setting and much harder to run reliably in a live operation. The futuristic view of AI what sci-fi writers have been helping us dream about. But for today, we need boring stuff.

HOTEL AUTOMATION - PRACTICAL AI⁠

Hospitality Is a Business Discipline

The hotel industry has a lot to give. Done well, hospitality is an art and science that most other businesses watch with awe. We’re not the pioneers of tech, we’re the pioneers of welcome. But that je-ne-sais-quoi of great hoteliers is hard to bottle up. This is where I think we can use tech tools to move things around.

BUSINESS HOSPITALITY⁠

Visa a Travel Platform

Visa Destinations has launched across ten cities. Hotels are included through Visa’s existing luxury collection. Marriott expands into ads, credit card companies into distribution. Distribution keeps changing.

VISA TRAVEL PLATFORM

⁠

More Ads on ChatGPT

How will ChatGPT ads impact travel? It’s surprising that there isn’t more of it already. But if one can extrapolate from these ecommerce ads, one could see what it would look like. Could be a great place for discovery.

RETAIL ADS GPT

Starbucks Tech Replacement

One can’t always believe every press release story. But Starbucks is looking to replace some big chunks of their tech stack with AI. This article doesn’t mention the core tech they’re using, Micros Simphony - so it still seems to be experimental stuff.

STARBUCKS AI TECH⁠

TikTok GO in hotel bookings

TikTok GO seems new and experimental in the west. But in China it drives enormous scale. Their retail/e-commerce system is growing quite a lot apparently they generate more revenue than ebay. It is a channel worth watching, and what will it do to direct revenue?

TIKTOK HOTEL COMMERCE

⁠

• Statistical review of all AI landscape - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• The man who made Psion - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

• AI Bans in School - Link

Did you know: The word "skeuomorphic" comes from two Greek words: "skeuos," meaning "container or tool," and "morph," meaning "shape or form." It was first used to talk about objects that kept old designs even when they were made with new materials. Now, it is often used in technology and design. 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.

Hello,

I did a post this week about fake infographics that keep showing up. Some are even being copied and re-faked. I personally care a lot about infographics, and spend a lot of time working on how to visualize data. So here are some more thoughts about them.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Pragmatik marketing agency turns hospitality SaaS
companies into highly visible market leaders.
Find out more ➛

Opinion

Hallucination are just harder to spot

There is a growing belief that AI has become accurate enough that we can largely trust what it produces. Compared to where we were only a couple of years ago, I almost agree. Models that once struggled to produce recognizable logos can now generate (relatively) convincing market maps within seconds. It really is one of the most remarkable technological advances we’ve seen.

But that’s exactly why we need to become more careful with what we trust.

Recently I asked AI to generate a market map of the largest hotel technology companies. It looks quite ok, but it is a hot mess once you actually scroll down the list.

To someone working in hotel tech, the mistakes are obvious. To someone outside the industry, however, it looks entirely believable. That’s where the real danger begins.

AI now makes mistakes that look professional, and based on the way generative AI is designed, these mistakes will look more and more professional. The better the presentation becomes, the harder it is to separate confidence from correctness.

In my post I suggested that people at least put the disclaimer that it isn’t real research but AI outputs. Reading the comments I guess I am being too optimistic. People who are chasing clicks aren’t going to voluntarily say it isn’t real.

The thing is in fields we know, we see these things quite rapidly. But in fields where we are not experts ourselves it is much more insidious. If I ask AI about hotel technology or marketing, I can usually spot the problems because I know the right answers. But if I ask about medicine or law, how would I know which parts are wrong? More importantly, how would I know which parts are almost right but still lead me to the wrong conclusion?

AI works on probabilities. It predicts the most likely answer based on patterns in data. Reality requires a constant stream of judgement. We humans are full of context, exceptions, trade-offs, and grey areas (yeah sometimes too much). But generative AI is designed to give patterns. It will take a lot work for AI to understand something like judgement. Judgement is the millions of shades of grey between absolutes. Computers work in absolutes.

That is the human skill we need to cultivate with ourselves, our teams, our kids and everyone we know. It always was. But with convincing “conclusion machines” in our pockets - we need to seriously up our game here.

Hallucinations haven’t disappeared. They’ve simply become much harder to spot.

AI and the Booking Journey

For years hotel marketing has been about winning the search results on Google and OTAs. AI is now introducing another discovery layer where recommendations are generated instead of searched for, forcing hotels to rethink how they present information online. Visibility is no longer just about ranking, it is about being understood by AI. The early birds will make more revenue (until everyone catches up).

AI BOOKING / LUXURY ADVANTAGE / BEAUTY BRANDS

⁠

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, a tech marketing agency that's all about results. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Airbnb’s Hidden Costs

More people complaining about the distribution costs of Airbnb. Amazon has a ton of these hidden micro costs to sellers all over their system (I often think Amazon behaves like a government and their tax systems, you can chose to leave - but not really). In any case, I think rental owners and Amazon sellers could learn a lot from the hotel industry. No industry has more experience in e-commerce than hotels and travel.

AIRBNB COMMISSION / DIRECT BOOKINGS

AI Starts with Better Hotel Systems

Jeff Bzdawka knows a thing or two about hotel systems. His recent post is true. Some startups and tech companies have been saying this for the last few decades. Whatever the next big thing in tech is going to be - the data structure is what will permit hotels to benefit from it. Some have been listening, but it’s a minority. Plumbing isn’t exciting, but integration is often the real innovation.

HOTEL DATA / AI STRATEGY⁠



Hermès’ Bold New Flagship

Not totally sure on the bold part. But luxury brands do remind us that physical spaces are powerful brand assets. Hermès’ latest London flagship is nice. Hospitality could borrow more inspiration from brands that make every square meter feel intentional. But some hotels actually do an excellent job here.

LUXURY RETAIL

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Provenance as Luxury

Luxury brands like LVMH have shown that provenance creates value. Applying that thinking to heritage travel suggests destinations should sell their history, craftsmanship and authenticity rather than simply rooms or attractions. For destinations, yes. For hotels - I’m not convinced. I tried it in a few hotels - it didn’t work (but, maybe I did it wrong). My conclusion was that people don’t want to sleep in some famous dead painter’s room. They want a great bed, shower, service in a great location. The museums are outside.

HERITAGE VALUE⁠

Amazon says Agentic Changes Ads

Amazon wants to sell ads. So they will say this. But they also like to be efficient. Their latest developments suggest brands will increasingly compete to become the recommendation inside AI conversations rather than simply the highest bidder on a search page. That could reshape digital marketing faster than many expect.

AGENTIC COMMERCE / WALMART TOO⁠

Hotels That Recognize You

Because most PMS’ aren’t doing their job. Solutions like this need to be created. A system that works on solving “have you stayed with us before” through AI, digital keys and integrated guest data. It is stunning that today so many PMS solutions still aren’t doing a good job here. If it is easier to create a new profile in the system than to find the customer’s profile, design has failed.

GUEST EXPERIENCE

⁠

Where is Media Industry going?

One of the first industries that gets hit by new tech is media. Currently and historically. This is happening again. GenAI is going to disrupt media just like the internet did last time. But predictions and forecasts are a coin toss. It’s better to build a mental model so one can think with what is happening and build one’s own opinions of where things are going. As we all use media, it’s a good thing to understand.

MEDIA THINKING / AI JOURNALISTS

Humans also err on data

I complain about AI hallucinations in my column, but humans also make errors. Statistics interpreted with a bias. Sensationalism and click-bait headlines. Etc. Judgement applies here as well. My rule of thumb: “facts” that seem to indicate too clear a conclusion require deeper investigation.

GUNS VS AC⁠

Where to start with hotel tech

I joined Josiah on the Hospitality Daily podcast and discussed a bit my take on hotel tech. Yes I’m deep into it and we all tend to view the world from our viewpoint. But there are at least 8 billion other viewpoints and none of them are the same. So here’s my take on where to start.

HOSPITALITY DAILY

Property Is Not the Product

Lily Wang’s perspective that a property is merely a means to an end is a reminder that hospitality is ultimately about people and experiences. Just like any company. The assets like stock, raw materials etc are often worth a lot less than the brand.

HOSPITALITY PURPOSE

⁠

Apple Wants to Own the Stay

Apple integrating hotel keys into their Wallet plus folio etc. Will be great for the guest. I’m not sure how many people want to download yet another hotel app. Hotels will resist, just like the car industry resisted CarPlay, but customers will demand it. Multiple apps that need constant updating, that get hacked etc isn’t great to the guest. Are these apps really generating that much in upsales?

APPLE WALLET

⁠

• Brunello Cucinelli's Luxury Lesson (By OM) - Link

• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺

• Understanding Digital Consumers, Deloitte - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

• Creativity Still Wins - Link

Did you know: The word "model" comes from the Latin word "modulus," which means "a small measure" or "a small version." It entered English through Old French in the late Middle Ages, first meaning a small copy or pattern. 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.

Hello,

There’s a lot of stuff I say that has been said before. Probably most of it. I try to write with my own experiences and viewpoints. This week let’s discuss how hotel tech needs to grow up.

PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.

Best, Martin

Pragmatik marketing agency turns hospitality SaaS
companies into highly visible market leaders.
Find out more ➛

Opinion

Hotel Tech is still trying to build a better Mousetrap

150 years ago, the saying was that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Since then we have entered an age of “mousetrap” abundance. So even the if your product is the best, nobody will ever know. The hotel tech chart more than doubled in size just the last decade. App store submissions increased by 84% with the advent of AI. Good tech isn’t the problem anymore.

In parallel, we (and the customers) are drowning in information: emails, LinkedIn, messaging apps, newsletters ad infinitum. We probably consume more information in a day than previous generations consumed in weeks, and that’s not taking account the AI slop that is coming in like a mudslide.

Customers can’t realistically shop for the best hotel tech anymore. Yes, they’re going through the process of RFPs etc. They have to. But they’re looking for the solution that will reduce effort and risk. The “don’t make me think” solution.

The stats and global advertising has now reached its highest share of GDP ever recorded, let’s just realize what that means for a moment. In the age of self-marketing and information, more money is spent on advertising than ever before, more than in the Mad Men era. Yes, we can say the cost per click went up or ad prices are going up. I think it means customer attention has become one of the scarcest resources.

In hotel tech (and probably a lot of B2B SaaS) a lot of vendors are still competing as if product quality and innovation are the primary differentiators, it isn’t. I find the McDonalds story very relevant here. In the battle between the best burgers and the most distributed burgers, the latter won. And history is full of those stories.

I speak to a lot of product people, founders, CEOs, they’re busy adding (and investing into) more features, more dashboards, more AI capabilities. Yes they should, products must improve. But if you look at which SaaS companies win and which loose the winners are the ones that are strong in marketing. I once published my research on that and 44% of their costs to sales and marketing, versus 31% to product.

This has been said time and time again. I’m not making some big revelation here. But I’m surprised at how few actually believe it or at least do it. Look at hotel tech, who is winning today? Is it the ones with the best product or the ones with the best marketing. Be honest.

It is easy to brush off the winners as “they’re just selling hot air” maybe they are, but in the end they’ve got the market share and they can add features. Those still tweaking the product might have the features but no customers.

Attention is the bottleneck. There are only so many seconds a day that people pay attention to something else than what they are working on. This is the most important thing you need to understand from this. And that’s why advertising has now reached the highest share of GDP in history.

Take a good look at how many seconds or minutes a day you allocate to what is happening in your industry. Look at how limited that time is. Now figure out who is showing up and who isn’t? If you’re not showing up, you don’t exist.

Obviously one can say that I’m touting my own horn here. I am. But mostly because that’s where my experience is. I can’t comment on the importance of github or document code.

Brand or Independent?

It really depends on how much effort you’re willing to put into it. Yes independent gives more freedom and you can try out lots of ideas. If you work hard you will save a lot. If you’re looking for a comfortable and scalable plan, then you’re most likely the brand type. You pay for the comfort of knowing someone else is taking care of things.

HOTEL STRATEGY⁠

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, a tech marketing agency that's all about results. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Hotels Form an AI Alliance

Historically hotels have always handed over the keys to their distribution to the new middle-man that came along. Whatever new tech came along, hotels were happy to take-no-risk and then wonder why their margins keep getting squeezed. AI discovery is already going that way. An alliance makes sense. But if you ask me the ones who could own the tech for that alliance would be Cendyn with their meta-search product that (I believe) has the widest ARI connectivity.

AI ALLIANCE + OTA AI⁠

APIs and AI

I’ve seen demos of hotel PMS environments where AI helps the user build their own workflows and customize their PMS to fit their own needs. I also saw a demo where the UI could be edited “replace this card with the check-ins for today”. This is where I believe AI will totally change how we consume hotel tech.

OPEN API⁠



Every Square Meter Matters

Hotel investors are no longer evaluating guestrooms in isolation. Restaurants, public spaces, wellness facilities and mixed-use concepts increasingly determine both profitability and sustainability. Revpar isn’t a great metric (but it is one that can be “adjusted”) I personally think revenue per type of sqm would be much more accurate.

ASSET OPTIMIZATION

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Direct Bookings Have Hidden Costs

For years the industry has pushed direct bookings as the obvious answer to OTA commissions. AI agents will introduce a new cost structure where hotels may pay simply to participate in discovery and search. Attention is becoming the bottleneck (see my column above). And as many have discovered the total cost of acquisition for direct is often quite similar to OTAs. But direct gives more customer control.

DIRECT COSTS + ⁠ ADVERTISING GROWTH⁠

Bad Data Travels Fast

One misleading headline can become accepted truth remarkably quickly once it starts being repeated. It’s a useful reminder to always trace impressive numbers back to their original source before building strategies around them. We know that for social media posts, but we accept that established media must have fact checked it. But fact check your data. Find the source - verify how they got there. Understand the data yourself and make your own conclusions.

DATA QUALITY⁠

Where People Get Their News

The Reuters Digital News Report confirms what many of us already experience daily: news consumption is increasingly platform-driven. The idea that your audience gets their news from a particular source is fading. They’re getting little bits aggregated by algorithms through various platforms (and hopefully fact-checking it).

DIGITAL NEWS

⁠

Beyond the Technology Conversation

I spend a lot of time discussing new technology, but the fundamentals remain unchanged. Good data, sensible APIs and practical implementation matter far more than chasing every new trend. Technology should solve operational problems, not become another one.

HOTEL TECH⁠

Where to start with hotel tech

I joined Josiah on the Hospitality Daily podcast and discussed a bit my take on hotel tech. Yes I’m deep into it and we all tend to view the world from our viewpoint. But there are at least 8 billion other viewpoints and none of them are the same. So here’s my take on where to start.

HOSPITALITY DAILY

Memory Matters More

Hotels often talk about creating beautiful websites and experiences, but guests rarely remember details. What lasts are the memories and emotions (McDonalds is a great example). Designing memorable moments is one of hospitality’s greatest opportunities.

LASTING MEMORIES

⁠

Podcasts Become Television

The boundaries between media formats continue to blur. As video becomes standard for podcasts, they have become the new talk-shows. Content remains king, but distribution is changing.

VIDEO PODCASTS⁠

• Two chained monkeys in detail - Link

• The Guide Competitors Hope You Miss - Link⁺

• Restaurant Menu History - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

Did you know: The phrase "better mousetrap" comes from the saying, "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door." This idea is often linked to the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson in the late 1800s, though he did not say it exactly that way. The phrase uses the mousetrap as a symbol for any useful invention or improvement. 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.

Hello,

I’m going to shake things up a bit in the newsletter. I’m moving the column to the top and the articles to the bottom - mostly because the part that is most relevant over time is the column. The articles age.

Also this week I’d really like to get your feedback. When you run a newsletter like this, it is a bit like talking on a soap-box with a blindfold on. And the main feedback that one gets is people at tradeshows who are looking for a social conversation starter so they say, “Loved your newsletter”. It’s cool. But would love more insights.

Best, Martin

Pragmatik marketing agency turns hospitality SaaS
companies into highly visible market leaders.
Find out more ➛

Opinion

I’d love your opinions on this newsletter. When I started it, it was never meant to be a media company, a personal brand, or a growth project. It was a place to collect notes (I have this thing where I like to share my thoughts).

Years ago, while reading newsletters and articles from both inside and outside hospitality, I began noticing patterns, trends, and ideas that I wanted to remember but with my comments. The newsletter became my way of organizing those thoughts and sharing them with anyone who might find them useful.

Over time, it became a thing. I publish content simply because it generates clicks. For example, topics like direct bookings versus OTAs continue to attract attention after decades of debate, yet I rarely find much new insight in them. I’d rather explore ideas that challenge the main trendy thoughts, borrow lessons from other industries, or highlight changes that might matter in five years rather than five days.

Many of the choices in writing this come from my own preferences as a reader. The lack of images, for example, was intentional. I prefer information over decoration, in most cases I find images for articles aren’t really helping other getting someone’s attention. But readers are already here, so not needed IMO. The limited personal content was intentional too. I’ve always believed the focus should be on the topic, not on me, my breakfast, my struggles or my lifestyle (it’s not that interesting).

But I never really asked what you think.

The newsletter has grown far beyond anything I expected, yet for the better part of five years I’ve mostly been sharing my thoughts into the void and hoping they were useful. Whenever I meet readers, the feedback is overwhelmingly positive, which is wonderful to hear, but it rarely tells me what could be improved (also, who is going to walk up to you can say anything else?).

So I’ve put together a short survey. Every question is optional. There are no right or wrong answers. I’d genuinely like to know what you enjoy, what you skip, what you’d like more of, what you’d like less of, and what you think is missing altogether.

The last thing I want is to become trapped in my own assumptions about what makes this newsletter valuable. Your feedback can help shape where it goes next (well, maybe :).

I’d love to hear what you think. If you could take 5 minutes I would really appreciate it.

Share your thoughts

Vibe Coding Comes for Hotel Training

The idea that a training manager can become a developer is interesting. Vibe coding lowers the barrier between operational knowledge and software creation. In hotels, where turnover is brutal and training gaps are constant, this could let teams build simple tools faster. It will be messy, but it could be great.

VIBE CODING

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, a tech marketing agency that's all about results. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Creativity as a Business Skill

Sir John Hegarty’s new series arrives at a good moment. As AI makes production cheaper and faster, creativity becomes less about making more things and more about knowing what should exist in the first place. Good hoteliers are creative and have taste. Maybe getting more inspiration from others can help.

BUSINESS CREATIVITY

Good SEO but still invisible

Ranking first used to be the dream. Now it can mean winning a game fewer people are watching. AI summaries, changing search behavior, and zero-click results are making SEO feel less like a channel and more like a background signal. Search is not dead, but we are definitely changing how we search. It feels so inefficient to search on Google now.

SEO SHIFT



Michael Levie at HITEC

HITEC 2026 seems to have been full of AI announcements (I’m not there so I only see what others say). Michael Levie made a point about humans acting like robots, this is real. We’ve processed everything to such an extent that people aren’t being people. I have said this before but I really believe AI could help make people better people in hotels.

HITEC AI

Brand Identity in an AI World

I wrote a piece in the Hotel Yearbook about brand and AI. AI may make it easier to generate marketing assets, but that also makes brand identity more important. Guidelines and tone of voice are useful, but they are not strategy. AI will expose weak brands faster than it strengthens them. Also see next point from someone with more experience than me.

AI BRANDING

In AI, Point of View wins

April Dunford argues that, in the age of AI, information gets easier to produce and harder to value. That makes having a point of view more important, not less. A company that only repeats category language will disappear into the machine-generated middle. Strong positioning has always mattered, but AI makes blandness much more visible. But the risk IMO is swinging too far on the pendulum. Companies aren’t people, I argue they shouldn’t have political beliefs but they can have ideologies if those serve their customers.

POINT VIEW

Blanding the hotel

Big hotel brands love boutique hotels because they bring taste, personality, and cultural relevance (and more investment capital). But their loyalty programs slowly eat the soul of those hotels. I remember a Bonvoy member complaining about citizenM - clearly not the right customer. Big brands don’t sell rooms they sell loyalty memberships and investment vehicles.

BOUTIQUE LOYALTY - BRAND COSTS

Ritz-Carlton and Late Check Out

A Ritz-Carlton collaboration with Late Check Out is such a brilliant marketing and brand campaign. Luxury hospitality gets more interesting when it borrows fashion culture. More hotels could and should do this. I once worked with a hotel brand to create a home deco object that would make their membership a living-room statement. Fits the AI point of View article above.

LUXURY COLLAB

Guests Are Leaving the Funnel

Hilton, Choice, and EY talking about AI at NYU is interesting because the honest admission is that discovery is moving outside brand environments. It reminds me of what happened when OTAs arrived and that led to frantic Direct booking campaigns for chains. Independents have an edge here, they know that making the shortlist has always been the real marketing work. This story keeps shifting to new platforms.

AI DISCOVERY - MACHINE SHOPPING - AI TRAFFIC IS SMALL

What 10,000 Ads Reveal

Nest Commerce’s analysis of more than 10,000 ads has some excellent takeaways. Unfortunately this means everyone will be making the same looking ads in a few weeks. But then some creative person will break the mold and change the trend. This has been the way for the last few hundred years. I think the cycle will just accelerate.

CREATIVE DATA



Satya’s reflections on future of AI

Satya Nadella wrote an interesting article on how AI and humans will work together in the future. I read it from the viewpoint of a hotel. It’s even more obvious in our world. The IP of a hotel is the welcome, the guest experience, the people. AI can learn a lot of that, but it can’t do it - however it can help make people better at it.

MICROSOFT AI

World Cup Demand? or !

Hotels expected the 2026 World Cup to create a booking surge, but according to Skift that isn’t the case. Yet I’ve watched many games - every stadium was full. So what happened? That demand is quite precisely quantifiable. Number of seats in the stadium vs number of rooms. I’m actually curious to understand how it was misestimated (was it, or was it just headlines).

WORLD CUP

• Is Apple TV Becoming HBO? - Link

• The Guide Competitors Hope You Miss - Link⁺

• The stuff that one can vibe code: Calorie tracking - Link

• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link

• Good charts, bad data in Travel - Link

Did you know: The word "vibe" comes from the noun "vibe," which is short for "vibration." It originally referred to the feeling or atmosphere that something or someone gives off. The verb form developed in the late 20th century, especially in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and became popular in mainstream English through music and youth culture. 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.

Hello,

I frequently search for real use cases of AI in hotels. I’ve seen a few. But none of them are going to change everything in one big swoop. All of them are incremental. The sum-total will be big, but it will take time. See my column below.

Best, Martin

Pragmatik marketing agency turns hospitality SaaS
companies into highly visible market leaders.
Find out more ➛

Hotel Tech Keeps Growing, and AI?

When I first created the hotel technology landscape chart back in 2015, it contained roughly 120 companies. At the time, it was often shared as a visual representation of confusion, showing how fragmented the industry was. But, what we were trying to map was how data moves in hotel tech, PMS to revenue management, to channel manager, to OTA, meta search, etc.

Today, the chart contains around 300 companies (and these are only the main players in each category) there are thousands of others. Yet, despite years of mergers, acquisitions, and consolidation, hotel technology keeps getting larger.

The question today is where does AI fit into all of this? Will it replace it all?

There is a narrative that AI will replace large parts of the software industry. The more time goes, the less I believe that will be the case. You cannot approximately process a payment. You cannot mostly connect to Booking.com. You cannot have an average room inventory. These systems exist because accuracy matters. The dark blue core of the chart is likely to remain very much intact.

There are three areas where I do think AI will bring change. The first is the analysis layer (outer rim). These solutions exist to help make decisions, assemble data, pre-analyze it etc. This is likely to change because AI dramatically lowers the cost of building tools around specific operational needs. Customizing Analytics and BI tools is a never-ending game of tweaking and customizing layouts. AI has a huge opportunity to bring conversational updates to these solutions.

The second one, as I have written before, there is an entire spreadsheet layer sitting between many of these systems. Almost every solution on this chart has a spreadsheet that works alongside it to tweak data, prepare information, etc etc. This is ripe for AI custom apps.

The third one I realized quite recently and deserves more attention. Customers, using Agentic AI, to adapt their systems to their own workflows. Most software vendors can’t adapt their products to every customer. Yet every bigger hotel has unique process needs. Using AI agents we could shift a large part of that work to the customer. Using plain language, tell the AI to create the workflow they need.

For example telling your AI Agent that all corporate payments should be routed through a different provider, approved through a specific workflow, and reported in a particular format. It designs the process, you approve it, and the workflow is implemented. Historically, that request (if approved by vendor) would have entered a product backlog and waited years to be developed. Or it would have turned into a spreadsheet automation as in point two above.

This could dramatically accelerate the pace of innovation in our industry. Core systems would continue providing the foundation while exposing more API data and documentation, capabilities etc. Customers would then use AI agents to adapt those systems to their own operational requirements rather than waiting for software vendors to do it for them.

So perhaps the real opportunity for AI is not another category, or another vendor. Instead of forcing hotels to adapt their processes to software, software may increasingly adapt to the hotel.

Which incidentally would make core systems exponentially harder to replace.

News of the week

What guests don’t agree on

Recent infographic about guest satisfaction made me realize that the two topics guests are the most in disagreement about with hotels is F&B and Decoration. What they’re most in agreement about is Location. In France there’s a saying that we don’t discuss taste and colors…

F&B AND DECORATION⁺

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, a tech marketing agency that's all about results. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

The Premium Price of Silence

Apparently 84% of travelers prioritize quiet accommodations, acoustic comfort over in-room entertainment, would pay extra for cultural authenticity and sustainable operational practices. It seems novel, but I’m not sure it is. I once tried to market a hotel based on B&O TVs (and other fancy stuff) - it never worked.

QUIET HOSPITALITY DESIGN

Keeping Humans in Travel AI

Recent travel sector data on AI adoption confirm that travelers still overwhelmingly demand human interactions. I don’t think this is news to anyone. I still really believe in the idea that AI could create a whole new category of travel assistants which would be the perfect mix of travel and AI. But that’s just my pet AI opinion from another post by Stuart Greif at an earlier Skift AI Forum.

HUMAN TRAVEL AI



Vibe coding an OTA

A dutch developer got tired of OTAs and decided to make his own, incidentally it also includes a pretty innovative global review and ranking system. While the booking process doesn’t really work what is really interesting with this is how someone can now scrape and code an OTA for a particular niche. Isn’t that how Booking started?

BEST AND WORST HOTELS

Coca-Cola’s Practical AI Playbook

Coca-Cola is using AI to improving marketing investment decisions. Using AI and scenario modeling to allocate spending more effectively. It is another reminder that some of the most valuable AI projects are not flashy consumer experiences but better decision-making behind the scenes.

AI MARKETING AI WIZARD⁺

The Myth of Universal AI Visibility

The idea that marketers can measure a universal “share of model” across AI platforms sounds appealing, but also unlikely. iPullRank’s experiment suggests LLMs may draw from private and personalized sources, including email, making visibility harder to quantify than traditional search rankings. It is interesting, we need a metric we can use, but it also needs some base in reality.

AI DISCOVERY

What an AI-first OTA could look like

In my review of the future for OTAs in the age of AI, I commented that for them to retain their positions as travel distributors they would need to have an solution that is so good, it would convince people to move away from GPT, Claude, Gemini etc for travel planning/booking. Failing that, they would become mere plumbing to others. This startup is building the complete itinerary model, OTAs will probably look like this soon. It is a feature for them, a startup for others.

ODESSIA

AI and Data at Skift Summit

Everyone knows AI matters now, but the harder question is where it actually improves the guest experience or commercial performance. What I want to see more of is actual use cases. They’re probably all small incremental improvements. Media makes us expect huge overhauls. But maybe that’s why nobody dares to show what has been done. Still we should celebrate every success we can get our hands on.

TRAVEL AI HOTEL AI

Notifications problems

Anyone who manages things now knows the problem. Every hour is a battle of more and more notifications, most of which are automated. Between text messages, Teams, Slack, Project tool, Figma, Inbox, Apple watch and your Phone. Focus becomes an obstacle course. Alex Liebermann built his own dashboard. Interesting (also see my column on AI below).

FOUNDER DASHBOARD

Hotels Face Fewer Search Clicks

AI-driven zero-click search is a real challenge for hotel marketing. If travelers get answers directly from Google or AI tools, hotel websites will lose traffic. It is inevitable. But hotels aren’t selling views they sell rooms. So does lower traffic matter? I think we should focus on ensuring the data is better used by AI tools so people still book.

ZERO CLICK



OTAs Keep Spending Big

Booking.com and Expedia spending nearly $4 billion on marketing in a quarter proves that they’re still great partners. They will outspend anyone to promote your hotel. AI may change discovery, but it has not removed the need for demand generation.

OTA MARKETING

• Youtube Stars Making Movies - Link

• The Guide Competitors Hope You Miss - Link⁺

• A short story about Anatomy’s history - Link

• Nike Rips the Script - Link

• Robots 200 Million miles away - Link

Did you know: The word “professor” comes from the Latin word “professus,” meaning “having declared publicly.” It originally referred to someone who has declared their knowledge, especially a teacher. Over time, it came to mean a high-ranking teacher at a university or college. 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.