Hello,

There’s so much hype on AI and there’s also a productivity gain. But every so often some really great usecase shows up, and I figured I’d the ones that could be useful. Have a great read.

PS: The most complete hotel brands chart ever made, we included a form to submit any errors, missing brands etc.

Best, Martin

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Wyndham Hotels & Resorts adds 25 new hotels in Europe

The Rise of Synthetic Influencers

OpenAI’s Sora 2 is the start of “synthetic influencers” as a scalable thing. It lets you license your AI likeness to brands and content creators. Which is interesting and weird. But for B2B marketing this could make it a whole lot easier to produce videos. But then there’s already system like Synthesia for that.

AI CREATOR ECONOMY

Shift in Distribution

Booking, Expedia, and Airbnb discussed slowing demand, AI adoption, and the balance between efficiency and empathy. I believe this is a pivotal moment for them. But on the other hand they’re quite well equipped to navigate the tech changes. I guess like all major tech shifts, it is more about cultural adaptation than engineering and financial resources.

SKIFT GLOBAL FORUM

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.

Hotel Profit Management

For long, I’ve believed that the best way to measure hotel performance would be revenue per square meter, and further categorize that type such as rooms, lobby, F&B etc. It would be a lot more accurate and a lot less game-able than RevPAR. Until then, there’s a trend to measure total profit which is a great step. But isn’t that just a P&L?

HOTEL PROFIT STRATEGY

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The Journey of Hotel Rates

Expedia Group’s new study reveals how messy hotel rate distribution really is. Nearly all hoteliers report revenue loss due to rate misuse, often caused by redistributors in fragmented networks. It’s a behind-the-scenes headache that costs the industry a lot of money. One solution I heard of was hiring a legal team to go after every abuser, also expensive. Per Expedia the solution may not be more control, but more transparency. Maybe a good idea for blockchain (but probably also costly).

HOTEL RATE MISUSE

How Digital Nomads Could Reshape Global Work and Travel

Over 70 countries offer visas for remote workers, this movement is defining post-pandemic mobility. The trend is becoming a system and growing. Some even do it with their families. It is a great opportunity for hotels and hotel design. There’s more to it than throwing a one foot deep desk in the corner of the room. Imagine if they had quality second screens and Herman Miller chairs at a proper desk.

REMOTE WORK SHIFT

AI Workslop

It seems someone has Researched AI slop at work and shows that 40% of employees spend hours correcting AI-generated work, costing hundreds per month. This is going to happen all automation requires more pre and post work. But the end we don’t need to do the boring work and can focus on the creative side (plus quality control).

AI WORKSHOP INSIGHTS

Radiohead’s Hotel Occupancy Impact

Radiohead’s 2025 tour has boosted cities like Bologna and Copenhagen (mid-tier supply levels). Bologna’s second-night bookings up 73% year-on-year. Yet room prices barely caught up, revealing untapped revenue opportunities. Is managing Major Events an art or a science? I’m regularly surprised to hear that only 30% of hotels use an RMS.

EVENT TOURISM DATA WORLD CUP 2026⁺

Google blocks AI scrapers

As I mentioned earlier, this is where AI replacing OTAs discussion is problematic. Google’s decision to kill the “num=100” search parameter just broke scraping for AI search. OTAs will undoubtedly be doing something similar. Making it harder and harder to scrape. Let’s see how this evolves.

GOOGLE SEARCH LIMITS

Legacy Systems + Legacy Mindsets = ?

Simone Puorto’s story of trying to extract data from an outdated PMS is a perfect metaphor for legacy hotel tech today, the tech is old, but the mindsets are older. Bureaucracy and resistance to change make innovation harder than it should be. It’s a call for cultural as much as digital transformation.

TECH MODERNIZATION

Podcast: I was invited to talk about AI in hospitality on this podcast, along with many other great industry thought leaders. A great discussion, we didn't agree on everything. Which made it more interesting.

Opinion

Comet, the Agentic Browser by Perplexity. Credit: Forbes

Agentic Browsers for Analytics deep dives

A lot of agentic stuff is really good on paper. But then it fails just on the crucial part that makes the result useless – there are exceptions.

Recently downloaded Comet the Perplexity browser to see how it works and what are the use cases. I was analysing an e-commerce brand’s sales, ads, traffic etc. Some clear changes had happened that plunged the sales. But so many dashboards to navigate (and then people keep “fixing” the UI) it was frustrating. So out of necessity, I asked the browser to analyse and find the changes. It did a great job.

Here’s the thing. If there are no confidentiality blockers (and you’ve checked the terms and conditions), agentic browsers are one of the most immediately useful AI tools available to hoteliers today. Not for chat. Not for copywriting. But for deep-dive analysis.

Let’s say you’ve had a drop in direct bookings. Or your Google Ads ROI suddenly tanked. Or direct traffic went up but conversions didn’t. Instead of logging into eight different platforms, cross-referencing time periods, opening tabs, digging into reports ask an agentic browser to do the work for you.

Prompt example:

“Tell me why there was a drop in direct bookings between March 15 and April 10. Look at Google Analytics, Booking.com, Facebook Ads, our CRS and our PMS data. Also check for any unusual rates changes or campaigns that ended around that time.”

It wont be fast, but you can work on other things. Meanwhile the browser opens the dashboards, filters the dates, run the reports, analyses them and comes back to you summarizing what it found.

It’s not a replacement for a BI dashboard or properly structured analytics that gives you an immediate overview of your estate. If you need to review 20 KPIs every Monday morning, you want something faster and more visual. But for the “what happened here?” kind of analysis, this is gold.

So there’s another use case for AI that actually helps you get more work done. This comes with a huge caveat of data privacy and security, but I’ll let you sort that out.

Oh, also, Expedia and Perplexity have some kind of partnership and they give you credits for booking via Comet.