154 - Hotels used to be innovative

A brief introduction to the history of innovation in hospitality. Maybe AI slop can kick off a new creative era? That's how we always did it - workflows in hotels. And more

Hello,

With AI I think we have a unique opportunity in the hotel industry to move old workflows that have been replicated into the digitial world and have resulted in over-engineered processes away from people. And maybe that could bring back real delightful innovation to guests. And maybe I’m just being too wishful. Now for something (not) completely different:

Best, Martin

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AI has made it easier for almost anyone to make something, but that means a lot of people with zero taste will make things - because they can. Performance obsessed marketers will iterate their ads indefinitely, until they all look almost exactly the same. Originality, taste, and judgment are becoming more valuable. Maybe this brings us to a new Mad Men era (after all, they came after a time when snake oil performance marketing was abundant).

CREATIVE QUALITY

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.  

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AI DISTRIBUTION

Aviation Fuel

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TRAVEL PRESSURE

Dumb Social Media Wins for Hotels

Some simple hotel social media tactics from Scott Eddy. Film before the hotel is ready, Use your comments as feedback, shoot vertically, multiply the content you have, post it twice, put prices in your captions, use “unusuable” footage. I tend to agree with him on most of this. Tell a story, give it some heart and soul. But it does require you have a clear vision of the positining. Tactics only work if you know where you’re going.

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Hotels Have a Workflow Problem

The idea that hotels do not have an AI problem but a workflow problem is pretty much the story of digital transformation in the industry. AI wont fix broken operations but it could be used to add an abstraction layer (that will cause future problem). I believe the advantage of a lot of the AI agentic work will be speed to prototype the workflows that should be changed.

HOTEL WORKFLOWS

The Future of Marketing

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MARKETING FUTURE

Creative Relevance Matters

More on the risks in AI and creator-led content: brands can produce more while becoming less recognizable. Advertising needs memory structures, not just volume, and brand assets are what make campaigns compound over time. In the AI era, distinctiveness may become even more valuable.

CREATIVE SALIENCE

The Impossible Hotel DOSM Job

The Director of Sales and Marketing role has become a pile-up of old and new responsibilities. Revenue management, CRM, performance marketing, distribution, brand, sales, and analytics. We need better systems and smarter responsibilities.

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Prompt Injection Gets Real

Prompt injection moving from theory into real abuse is a warning. The more AI systems read websites, emails, documents, and guest messages, the more exposed they become to manipulation.

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Uber’s partnerships with Accor and Expedia show how travel distribution is becoming more embedded and cross-platform. Loyalty points, hotel inventory, rides, and app ecosystems are starting to connect in more practical ways. Here’s a case where integration and inventory still requires a lot of customer adoption. Uber is usually a last-mile habit. Not a planning and booking one. Can they shift behavior to move up the funnel.

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Opinion

Infographic designed with ChatGPTs new image function. While directionally correct, it has a lot of errors in the details.

The innovative history of hotels, that faded

For decades, maybe centuries hotels were the perfect place to showcase innovation, new technology and the lifestyle of the future. Running hot/cold water, in-room phones, elevators, in-room entertainment. These things were in hotels first. But since the digital revolution, hotels faded away from being innovators.

I wrote this on LinkedIn last week and, I wanted to revisit it here. During COVID, I spent a lot of time researching the history of hotel innovation together with TechTalk Travel, Shiji and the Hotelschool The Hague.

My premise for the research was, maybe during these big disruptions hotels innovated. So we looked into the wars, and so forth to see if this was true. It wasn’t. There didn’t really seem to be any correlation. But what struck me most was how, for decades and even centuries, hospitality was the global showroom for innovation.

Hotels were often the first places where people experienced electric lighting, elevators, private bathrooms, plumbing in every room, telephones, air conditioning, in-room TVs, and even minibars. They were aspirational places where guests encountered the tech they wished they could get at home. A hotel stay meant stepping into a new sort of ideal. You can download the mega-pdf of the history of hotel tech here.

But somewhere around the rise of the internet / smartphones this ended. Possibly due to the fact that a lot of the innovation was digital and not physical, and hotels are physical places. But the shift happened quite rapidly, in just just 15-20 years or so, most hotels started seeming clunky or vintage when it comes to innovation. Innovation at home started moving faster than in hotels. At home we have personalized entertainment in most rooms, subsidized TVs with our personalized streaming preferences, cheap connected speakers, voice controlled lights and plugs. A lot of the things that “the house of the future” promised became cheap commodities.

Hotels couldn’t / didn’t catch up. Our IT systems made it so complex that installing simple things like screen casting into our rooms became immensely complex. In some ways our own systems made it harder to innovate. Closed or expensive APIs. Legacy setups. Processes and “we’ve always done it like that” or other reasons.

Can hospitality become the innovation showcase again? Can hotels return to being the place where people first experience the future living ideals?

I think we can, but as the biggest shifts are happening in the digital space - we need to look at how to embed it, instead of showing it. I’ve long advocated for a new role of Experience Designers or maybe that should be a new discipline of the interior designer. But I digress.

Above I listed some of the key innovations and asked GPT to make an infographic out of it. It is quite good. But many errors (as AI tends to be). So take it with a grain of salt - but it is directionally correct. And the new ChatGPT image generator was surprisingly good at the text part of the image.

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• Understanding Jackson Pollock’s relevance - Link

• The inspiration Benchmark for hospitality - Link⁺

• Computer History: IBM 1401 - Link

• Richness vs Sadness - Link

• How Hermès Watches joined the watchmaking big league - Link

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Did you know: The word "innovate" comes from the Latin "innovare," which means "to renew or change." "Innovare" is formed from "in-" (into) and "novus" (new). The verb entered English in the 16th century, keeping the meaning of making something new or introducing change. 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.