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.
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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⁺