| It's Thursday, March 5. NYU SPS and BCG say 37% of travelers already use AI tools inside travel sites to plan and book trips. Meanwhile, OTA giants Booking, Expedia, Airbnb, and Trip.com spent more than $20 billion on marketing in 2025 while the industry experiments with AI agents. The UK's CMA opened an investigation into Hilton, IHG, and Marriott over possible data sharing through STR. At the same time, Amadeus issued its first multi-year earnings target while betting that more AI-driven bookings will flow through its systems. | 🇩🇪 Whether you made it to ITB Berlin or couldn't this year, we've got you covered with our exclusive ITB Innovation Report: 2026 Edition highlighting the most exciting innovations coming out of the show. Two of my personal favorites this year are Canary AI Agent Builder Studio and Lighthouse Revenue Agent | | TOGETHER WITH JOURNEY LOYALTY | | Tired of hotel loyalty programs that just hand out points and discounts? So were the 1,496 distinctive properties that joined Journey in just seven months including Castle Hill Inn, NIHI Sumba, and Dunton Hot Springs. | Journey takes a different approach. Instead of training guests to wait for deals, it helps independent hotels build real loyalty with personalized, meaningful rewards that reflect each property's unique brand. | ✅ High-Value Guests: Gain access to a curated member base of well-traveled guests who spend more, stay longer, and book direct. ✅ Brand-Aligned Rewards: Design your own experiences like spa access, signature cocktails, or private tours that reinforce your identity while building deeper loyalty. ✅ Effortless Integration: Seamlessly connect with your PMS and CRM to capture preferences and deliver personalized service without added operational complexity.
| Journey is a global alliance of independent hotels united by character, experience, and a shared loyalty engine that grows revenue without discounting. | 👉 Discover how Journey helps you build loyalty on your terms | |
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| | | GOING DEEPER | 1. BCG: AI Is Reshaping How We Find, Book & Run Hotels | A new report from Boston Consulting Group finds AI is rapidly transforming hotel discovery, distribution, and operations. Travelers are increasingly relying on AI-powered search and conversational interfaces instead of traditional keyword queries, shifting visibility dynamics away from classic SEO and OTA listings. On the operations side, AI is driving gains in revenue management, staffing optimization, and predictive maintenance, moving from experimentation to scaled deployment across leading brands. | 🎯 Why it matters: The report makes clear that AI is not just a side project. Hotels risk losing share in AI-driven discovery layers while also falling behind on operational efficiency if they delay adoption. Visibility, margin protection, and guest experience are now directly tied to tech maturity. | 🔑 Key takeaway: For hotel executives, this is about infrastructure. Ensure rate, availability, and content data are machine-readable and accessible to AI discovery platforms. At the same time, prioritize operational AI use cases with measurable ROI: labor optimization, pricing intelligence, and service automation. The winners in 2026 and beyond will treat AI as a core operating system layer, not a marketing add-on. Read More → | 2. AI is Going to Kill B-Player Hotel Software and Make A-Players Stronger | Investors worry AI assistants could make traditional software obsolete by replacing dashboards and menus. But hotel software sits at the financial core of the business—managing room inventory, pricing, taxes, payments, and reconciliations—making it difficult for AI to replace the underlying systems. Instead, AI will likely sit on top of these platforms, helping hotels operate them more efficiently rather than eliminating them. | 🎯 Why it matters: Much of the current "AI reset" debate assumes software is mainly an interface for organizing tasks or displaying information. Hotel platforms are different because they directly control revenue flow—inventory, payments, and accounting—which makes them structurally harder to replace. | 🔑 Key takeaway: For hotel operators, if you're still working with the 17th best player in your space because 'that's always how you've done it' the opportunity cost is higher than ever. Invest and upgrade today so that you can be the disruptor in this next innovation revolution. For hotel technology companies, surviving the AI shift will require more than simply adding AI features. The companies that remain standing will be the ones that keep investing in meaningful product innovation, stay deeply connected to their customers' operational realities, and build brands that operators trust to run the financial core of their business. Read More → | 3. UK Probes Chains Over STR Data Sharing | The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has opened an investigation into whether Hilton, Marriott, and IHG shared competitively sensitive data through the hotel analytics platform STR, owned by CoStar. Regulators are examining whether the tool allowed rival hotel chains to reduce uncertainty about each other's pricing and strategy. No wrongdoing has been determined yet. | 🎯 Why it matters: The investigation targets a core technology used widely across the hotel industry: shared benchmarking data and analytics platforms. Regulators are increasingly concerned that algorithms and shared datasets could unintentionally enable coordination between competitors. | 🔑 Key takeaway: Hoteliers should treat data strategy as both a competitive and compliance imperative. That means auditing how guest, pricing, and loyalty data flows across systems, ensuring strong governance frameworks, and designing tech architectures that support both innovation and regulatory transparency. By proactively aligning data policies with fair competition principles, hotels can avoid enforcement risk while maintaining flexibility for AI-driven personalization and distribution. Read More → |
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| | TOOLS & TACTICS | ⚒️ Hotel Tech Tools You've Gotta Try | ✅ Journey Rewards: Rewards program helping independent hotels drive more direct bookings. | ✅ Triptease: Increase direct bookings using targeted marketing and smarter ads. | ✅ Cloudbeds: All-in-one hotel management software at the speed of AI. | ✅ Tripleseat: Manage hotel group bookings, catering and event sales with AI. | ✅ Canary Technologies: Powerful but simple AI powered digital guest journey platform. | ✅ Actabl: Turn powerful BI data into actionable insights that maximize profits. | ✅ ROH: Automate sales and finance to save time and capture more revenue. | ✅ MeetingPackage: Simplify MICE bookings and boost event revenue. | ✅ Sertifi: Simplify hotel check-ins and payments with secure digital solutions. | ✅ Vouchercart: Turn gift vouchers into prepaid revenue across rooms, dining, and spa. | |
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| | | | | | PODCAST SPOTLIGHT
President of Plusgrade on Agent-Ready Hotel Revenue | What if 70% of your guests are willing to upgrade—but your pricing strategy is leaving that revenue on the table? In this episode, Erik Tengen, President of Hospitality at Plusgrade and former co-founder of Oaky, explains why the future of hotel profitability isn't RevPAR—it's total revenue, frictionless upselling, and becoming "agent-ready."
Experienced hotel operators, GMs, commercial leaders, and ownership groups focused on driving profit—not just topline revenue—in an increasingly AI-driven distribution landscape. | Why TrevPAR Beats RevPAR in 2026 and Beyond Dynamic Pricing Isn't Just for Rooms "Commercial Empathy" as a Competitive Moat What It Means to Be Agent-Ready Scaling Upselling Without Nickel-and-Diming Guests
| 👉🏼 Check out the interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. |
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| | Thanks for reading! If you have any questions you can contact info@hoteltechreport.com | Disclosure: Some things in this newsletter may be a sponsored post or CITYKEY LLC (D.B.A "Hotel Tech Report") may be getting a small commission if you sign up / fill out their form or CITYKEY LLC might own a percent of the business. In particular, but not always, those sponsored or commissioned or owned posts might have an * in the subject headline. Read our privacy policy here. |
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