Which AI are you using? Are they brands like Apple vs PCs, or commodities like electricity? Plus: Starwood relaunch, Google Metasearch updates, IKEA loyalty late but great.
Hello,
Someone at IKEA figured it was time to create a loyalty system, and the marketing team figured they’d make the best of being late to the game. They did great. I wrote a commentary about Deepseek – sorry, but it’s not what you think. Have a great week.
Best, Martin
Sponsored by Klairhaus. Support the newsletter, treat someone to great office gadgets.
A Return to Quality and Hospitality?
Post-pandemic we saw ideas like “housekeeping optional” creep in. Which would put the industry below par with rentals. However that trend seems to have (luckily) faded away. Bringing quality to hospitality is a testament to the value of hospitality. However, it’s important to recognize that Airbnb has been advancing more than hotels with technology to remove friction in the guest experience. Hotels should learn from this and improve their own technology offerings, such as payments, making casting to TVs standard and ensuring in-room entertainment is better than at home. Could this resurgence in hotel quality be an opportunity for hotels to not only emphasize their traditional strengths but also to innovate and enhance the guest experience through technology?
HOTEL INDUSTRY RESURGENCE
Starwood’s Comeback
Barry Sternlicht is relaunching the Starwood brand under his current hotel management company, SH Hotels & Resorts, with a portfolio of 14 hotels and plans for expansion. Sternlicht, known for innovation in the hospitality industry, has the chops to build some new concepts and scale them. I love unique hotel concepts that cater to specific needs. But few have managed to scale these like Sternlicht.
STARWOOD BRAND COMEBACK
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. Google’s New Hotel Metasearch Design
Google introduced a redesigned layout for their search page, with more visual real-estate, and user experience features such as three bigger property images, expanded reviews, and a larger map preview. Bringing the visual and emotional brand elements front and center. Moving away from pure transactional value. Interesting change, am curious to see the impact on sales.
GOOGLE METASEARCH HOTELS
Can Digital Video Balance Short-Term Sales and Long-Term Growth?
Performance vs Brand, the eternal debate. Mark Ritson discusses the effectiveness of combining long-term brand awareness with short-term performance marketing, as demonstrated by Boots’ use of YouTube. Boots achieved a 5 to 1 return on investment for their performance ad and built their brand through emotive storytelling. Does it apply to hotels as well? Hard to say for regional brands. If it doesn’t apply to repeat guests it definitely will apply to ADR.
DIGITAL VIDEO MARKETING RETURN ON INFLUENCE SPEND
IKEA is getting into loyalty too
IKEA recently launched a new loyalty program, and their ad campaign playfully acknowledging their late arrival to the trend with a campaign that uses old viral trends to communicate a “better late than never” message. Brilliant move, acknowledging a weakness and turning it into talking point. But if they need loyalty program with such a strong brand and product line – they’re probably starting to feel the heat from the many other channels for cheap designer furniture.
VIRAL TRENDS HUMOR
Train yourself to use AI creatively
There are so many ways to use AI today. I’ve found that getting lists from others can help and inspire, but the best ways are those that I have built into my workflow that actually speed up my workflows. When I talk about them to others, they usually shrug since it doesn’t work on their workflows. AI tools are so versatile they need to be turned into a habit. Read, try, practice, refine, implement.
CREATIVE AI TOOLS
Podcast: I was invited on the Hospitality Daily Podcast and spoke about technology in hospitality, some thoughts on what wont change in hospitality, and why I co-founded 10minutes.news. Best, MartinOpinion
LLMs: The Utility We Won’t Even Notice
I wasn’t sure I wanted to comment on the DeepSeek vs. OpenAI debate. To be honest, there’s been so much said, it feels boring. But not addressing it feels like avoiding the topic, so here we go.
Here’s the thing: AI, as we talk about it today, is really just LLMs (large language models). And LLMs are quickly becoming a commodity. Every piece of software, every digital interface, and every text-based tool will have some form of LLM embedded in it. Your PMS will have one. Your channel manager, your CRS, your booking engine—every single platform we use in travel and hospitality will incorporate LLMs to some degree.
And when that happens, the debate over which LLM is “best” will become irrelevant. Just like we don’t really think about who supplies our electricity—we just plug in and expect it to work—the same will be true for LLMs. When you charge your phone, you don’t wonder if the power comes from Duke energy or Dong energy. You just expect it to be reliable and affordable. The same will apply to AI-powered interactions.
We’ll use LLMs without knowing which provider sits behind the interface. We’ll switch between them as needed, without much thought. One software provider may use OpenAI, another may integrate Claude, and yet another may run an open source model fine-tuned for specific tasks. It won’t matter to the end user.
The real differentiator won’t be the LLM itself but rather how well it’s integrated into workflows, how intelligently it understands context, and how seamlessly it enhances experiences (no, everything is not better via a chat-box). Some models will be better at specific tasks—some will be optimized for financial calculations, others for guest interactions, others for internal reporting. I think it will be as commoditized as a mouse cursor on a computer. At first it was a novelty, now it is normal.
We’re moving into a world where AI-driven conversations will become the norm. Users will expect follow-up interactions that improve over time, just like we expect predictive text to learn from our writing style. But the question of which LLM is better? That’s just noise.
The real conversation is about how we use and integrate AI, not whose name is on the label.
