160 - But what do you think?

Asking subscribers to share their thoughts on what should be improved with this newsletter. Lots about AI search. Loyalty and brands. How to manage your brand in an AI world.

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

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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.

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

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• 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

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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.