133 - AI and the PMS wars

How are PMS' going to react to AI? The ads are coming, to GPT and to Google. Art, AI and everyone going bananas.

Hello,

For all the American readers, Happy Thanksgiving. Lot’s of interesting stuff happening including a rebrand of citizenM that put some confusion out there. I’m assuming the rebrand was actually for the owner/operator company not the actual hotel brand which now belongs to Marriott.

Note: Have you submitted your ideas to improve the hotel brands chart yet?

Best, Martin

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The 2026 Travel Trend Report Overload

I tend to agree with Lennert Dobravksi here that we need more “Insight Leadership” that sweet spot where proprietary data, rigorous analysis, and a clear narrative come together. It’s a fair criticism: our industry is drowning in PDFs that say very little or other GPT generated stuff that isn’t actually actionable. Every vendor actually has the possibility to do so if they wish. Also his post has a great summary of available travel trend reports.

TRAVEL TRENDS REALITY

From Dashboards to AI

Mirko Lalli’s reflection from the Phocuswright stage is about moving beyond dashboards that he claims nobody has time to read a kind of always-on co-pilot that can answer all questions. I’ve gotten a demo of BI with an AI layer that provides rapid replies. It is a really interesting angle for actual BI. I never found it super useful to have it in Google analytics because I wanted to see specific things. But might be great to deep-dive for actual analyzing. I think key charts and numbers still deliver information faster than a long text answer.

AI FOR DESTINATIONS

Ads Arrive in Google AI Mode

Google has started bringing sponsored ads into its conversational AI Mode, marking the formal start of generative search monetization. For now, the placements are cautious, but the direction is clear: answers and ads will increasingly blend. Compared to ChatGPT, which still working on something “different”, Google has a big structural advantage. The open question is where the line between “helpful suggestion” and “paid nudge” will be drawn, and how visible that will be to users. Also, see more on OpenAI’s advertising plans below.

GOOGLE AI ADS

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

Going Bananas With Creative AI

Google’s massive advance with AI images is stunning. This example shows how generative AI is turning anyone into a “good enough” creator. The analogy is to past media shifts: once the tools get cheap and intuitive, creativity stops being gated by technical skill. That doesn’t kill professional artistry, but it does change what’s considered special. But we still need people with taste and for now, AI hasn’t really shown it has excellent taste.

AI CREATIVE SHIFT

OTAs Overtake Search as the Starting Point

SiteMinder’s report confirms what many suspected: more travelers now start their hotel search on OTAs than on Google. At the same time, a meaningful chunk still end up booking direct, and 80% want AI features like price monitoring. This means OTAs are becoming the discovery layer, while direct can still win, it is going to be harder. It never was a zero-sum-game. Hotels need a good mix.

OTA DISCOVERY SHIFT

All that bubble talk

So much is being said about a bubble, I think most people who aren’t directly writing, or generating stuff every day (which I think is most people) will tend to agree. So we’re going to go through a phase where people will say “I told you so”. What we have gone through so far is a massive proof of concept with the most open sandbox ever and a lot of people are building a lot of projects that will turn into products. But this always takes time.

AI BOOM OR BUBBLE

ChatGPT Ads, But Not Like Google’s

Sam Altman has confirmed that ChatGPT will start testing ads, but this won’t be your classic search page with blue links and banners. The model is to blend hyper-relevant offers into the flow of conversation, charged on clicks or actions, powered by intent understanding rather than keywords (what does that even mean? I often wonder if these statements from OpenAI aren’t written by ChatGPT). The reality is that once there are ads there will be preferences and big advertisers will complain about certain off-brand responses. There is no easy fix to this. They have the brand to do something big.

CHATGPT AD FUTURE

Shopify Stores Live Inside ChatGPT

Shopify brands like Glossier, SKIMS, and Spanx can now be browsed and bought directly inside ChatGPT via a black “Buy” button—no website detour, no cart page. This is a glimpse of what is possible. It doesn’t mean no brand. It means easier access. The hotel industry needs a Shopify-like platform. We have countless booking engines but nobody seems to be trying to actually move the industry forward in the way the Shopify is the go-to place for any ecommerce work.

SHOPIFY CHATGPT COMMERCE

Making Hotel PMS Change Actually Work

Implementing a new PMS isn’t a software project, it’s a leadership stress test. Ryan King’s perspective is clear: disciplined planning, visible exec sponsorship, and empowered local champions matter more than the shiny feature list. I’ve been through one of these, not pleasant. Leadership needs to prepare for a shift. Vendors need to make it easier. See my column below.

PMS CHANGE LEADERSHIP⁺

If AI Picks the Hotel, Are You Still a Brand?

Last week a post came up about GPT selecting hotels and that if GPT does this then it isn’t a brand anymore it is just a commodity. I wrote about it in last week’s column. This week OpenAI announced ads. In the end there are fundamentals that wont change. When there is some much change happening (AI is changing things), it is great to think about the first principles and try to apply those.

AGENTIC HOTEL COMMERCE + SAM ALTMAN CONFIRMS ADS + FIRST PRINCIPLES

Opinion

AI is coming for the PMS, but not the way you think

I’m putting this in my series about the PMS Wars, aka, the race to upgrading hotel PMS.

There’s an explosion of talk about AI in hotels, but very little actual application. Or is there? AI has been coming to hotels for a while, but not in the flashy, headline-grabbing way many expect. There won’t be a moment when a chatbot takes over the front desk or a robot manages your F&B logistics overnight. Instead, AI is creeping into every corner of hotel operations in small, incremental ways. Quietly. Invisibly. Often without anyone calling it AI at all.

Some of it has been here for years: duplicate guest profile smart cleaning, predictive pricing in RMS platforms, or analytics, recently automated review responses. Many hoteliers already use AI every day, it’s just labeled as “automation” or “smart features.” But with the growth of large language models and vertical-specific AI agents, we’re at the beginning of all kinds of new layers being added or embedded into to hotel systems. And at the center of it all? The good old PMS.

The PMS is now more important than ever. Not because they have suddenly become amazing (some of them really aren’t), but because they hold the binary truth. Room 204 is either booked or not. A guest has checked in, or not. Breakfast is included, or not. These are not fuzzy data points. They are structured, definitive, and crucial.

And here’s the catch: LLMs, for all their intelligence, still struggle with binary systems and transactional integrity. They’re great at summarizing, interpreting, and conversing, (after all they are language models) but not at reliably storing or retrieving structured truth. For that, they need a database. They need a core system. They need a PMS.

That means all future AI features, whether they handle room assignments, shift scheduling, guest messaging, F&B inventory forecasting, or financial reconciliation, must interface with the PMS. And this is why PMS platforms are regaining prominence in the hotel tech stack.

Some vendors are already moving. AI-powered room assignment optimization, reducing housekeeping strain already exists and is accelerating turnaround times. I recently got a demo of BI tools using LLMs to simplify analytics reporting. But what’s coming next we don’t know yet, things like menu planning, procurement forecasting, scheduling, pattern cost optimization, won’t arrive in a single wave. It’ll arrive as a thousand micro-improvements, slowly transforming hotel operations from the inside out.

But it will take modern, solid PMS foundation, and shifting isn’t easy. I’ve seen this first-hand. Migrating a PMS in a hotel I managed was a nightmare. Data didn’t transfer. Staff were disrupted. Workflows collapsed. And the new system? Better on paper, but far from plug-and-play. And that’s the paradox: changing a PMS is painful, but not changing it might soon be worse.

The market seems to be getting the memo. According to industry analysts, more than two-thirds of hotel chains are reviewing their PMS strategy. Cloud-native platforms with modular, open architectures are winning attention. The era of the hyper-local PMS, the ones that can’t integrate is likely ending because I’m not sure everyone will go through the hassle to integrate to them (I might be totally wrong on this).

The so-called PMS Wars I talked about a few years ago may not have been that noisy. But the battlefield is real. A few vendors are out in front. Aggregation is likely not going to happen, the problem is that merging PMS is an impossible task. Hotels just needs to go through a switch.

And vendors need to make that switch as easy as going from an iPhone to an Android, or vice versa.

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• NEW: Hotel Design & Tech Benchmark Q4 2025 - Link⁺

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Agentic (AI): Describes someone or something that acts as an agent, meaning it can make its own choices and take action independently, often to achieve certain goals. 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.