Hello,

This week was undoubtedly the Marriott/Sonder breakup week. It is sad to see a good idea collapse like this. I shared my thoughts, but mostly there are plenty of other opinions linked here. Here’s the newsletter.

Note: Have you submitted your ideas to improve the hotel brands chart yet?

Best, Martin

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That Marriott/Sonder breakup

It has been the story of the week. I’ve tried to write a column about it but I just don’t know enough about what Sonder actually did in terms of “tech-infused-hospitality”. I also don’t know what triggered Marriott to react like that. One thing Marriott doesn’t like to do is move fast, except here they did. Clearly someone noticed something and it was urgent to pull the plug. What I do know is that silicon valley doesn’t understand hospitality well and hospitality doesn’t understand tech well. Hotels are getting rid of their own tech and tech companies (like Airbnb) are moving to distribution, where tech does a great job. In the Sonder/Marriott case it was hospitality doing distribution and that’s not the best combo. If you want more on the breakup, here’s a pretty complete overview from multiple sources.

SONDER BREAKDOWN

Searching Trips By Passion

For some time now I’ve been ranting that AI/Tech could help the distribution problem of travel (over concentration in certain areas). Marriott talking about search by passions instead of just destinations is a step in the right direction. Letting guests look for surfing, hiking, or wellness first, and only then choose where to go, flips the funnel around the reason for travel instead of the room. This was the travel agent’s profession before. Airports have tried this too. It is the most sustainable way for travel.

PASSION SEARCH

Barry Sternlicht’s Second Act

Barry Sternlicht has already had one defining run, inventing W Hotels and giving the world the Westin Heavenly Bed. His story is a reminder that deep product taste and design instinct can still move markets, even in a world obsessed with asset light strategies and spreadsheets. When someone like that gets busy again, the rest of the industry usually ends up following.

HOTEL VISIONARY

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.  

Tech, Talent and Hotel Reality

One of the biggest problems in hotels is getting and keeping talent according to this article (plus CEO reports). Yet tech and automation isn’t necessarily considered as a solution. Most hotels considering AI and automation are still thinking of Chatbots according to recent survey by H2C, in other words they’re not thinking about AI and automation at all, they’re checking boxes. A lot of hotel back of house work is tedious process work, tech solutions can help.

FUTURE HOTEL MGMT

Housekeeping As The Real Luxury

This story from Guillaume about the housekeeping team, turned a hotel stay into something memorable with towel animals, notes, and extra coffee pods. None of that shows up in glossy brochures (and it looks corny when it does). But that magic of being able to observe the guest and creatively come up with a way to deliver it is what hospitality is all about. It is a useful reminder that for all the focus on tech and design, hospitality still lives in moments created by people. And that great people also means housekeepers (see my column below).

SERVICE MAGIC

AI as the creative

A chief strategist at Google published an interesting study which he summarized as don’t use AI to tweak your ads, use AI to create totally new ads. If true that’s a really scary thought. I don’t know how much AI the Quartr team used to create their amazing covers (I’m sure they used quite some). But as the creative lead… scary. Also what is a chief strategist? I thought Sergey Brin was their chief strategist.

AI AD ROI

Designing a Hotel’s DNA

I like to tell my teams that they need to work with their existing resources. This article is a useful reality check for anyone who thinks a positioning deck is the brand. It argues that you have to start with the business model, define a simple promise, then design every operational touchpoint to deliver that promise consistently. I know it sounds boring (rather than just posting lots of things on a mood board) both have value, but in the end resources tend to win.

HOTEL DNA

Quartr’s unboring design work

Quartr recently made a buzz with their really cool cover art for quarterly reports. Haris Cehic and the team of self taught, detail obsessed designers shows how much they value taste over fancy tools. Great design works. And as they mention, in the boring B2B world it works even better. What I think is that if you always make something that is a bit better and more than expected, just a tiny bit more, you tend to win.

FINANCE DESIGN

Wellness As A Hotel Strategy

In last week’s interview with Jannes Sorensen, Matthias discussed Luxury as discomfort, maybe that’s Wellness. Red light therapy, ice plunges, sleep programs, and smart nutrition are all being woven into tech enabled experiences that could lift revenue. The most interesting part is how welltech plus data lets hotels personalize stays in a way that feels premium rather than gimmicky. Interesting trend, spa trends are always evolving.

WELLNESS WELLTECH

Meta’s AI Demands Infinite Creatives

Infinite content and the debate about whether to use AI for ad creative is basically over once you look at Meta’s Andromeda update. If performance depends on feeding the machine a huge variety of assets for tiny audience slices, humans alone simply cannot keep up without burning budgets on headcount. That pushes brands toward automation whether they like the aesthetics or not. The winners will be the ones who treat AI as a creative system design problem, not just a cheap asset factory.

META AI ADS

Opinion

How Do You Actually Surround Yourself with Great People?

There’s no shortage of business wisdom reminding us that success comes down to surrounding oneself with great people. But what exactly does that mean? “Great” how? talented? worked in great companies? high salary? great credentials? It’s just so hard to act on this advice.

David Ogilvy had a nice quote on this: “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.” It’s a powerful image. But what does “bigger” mean in the real world?

I’ve come to believe that the “great” people and “bigger” people are the ones who can take your ideas, intentions, your plan, even your very specific instructions, and return not just a completed task, but something better than what you had in mind. They get the intent behind the work. And they improve on it. Note that intent can also mean urgency (i.e. sometimes the right thing is to do only what was asked for, but fast).

Say you ask for a press release about a product announcement. Someone good will get that written, formatted, and ready to send. But someone great will also return with a social post, a distribution plan (that they will execute), and a sharper angle that ties into your broader positioning. That’s someone who isn’t just executing, they’re adding to the value of the task.

Now this will get misunderstood that great people add work to everything. But great people are enough in sync with you that they understand when the priority is about improving the idea and when the priority is about rapid and precise execution. If something is urgent, they don’t come back with a bunch of ideas. They deliver only and exactly what you asked for – slightly faster than you had expected.

Finding such people doesn’t require a year-long performance review to uncover. You can spot this trait early. Get them on board and issue a task that has a clear purpose, and see what comes back. Was is slower than expected? Faster? Did they make it better? Are they completely off the mark after 3rd try? Maybe they restructured the data to make it more clear. Maybe they added context. Maybe they spotted something you missed. Or maybe they are totally out of sync and after a few tries – you know they’re not the one.

Even in the smallest tasks, you’ll see it. You ask for documents sorted by topic, and they return them organized by topic plus by date (within the deadline). A tiny upgrade, but one that shows they were thinking about usability, not just the request. These aren’t overachievers trying to impress, they’re people who understand your intention and deliver on it.

And those small improvements compound fast. When a team is made of people who each take what they’re given and enhance it, the result is exponential progress.

So yes, surround yourself with great people. But define “great” by how they respond to input. The ones worth keeping are those who not only deliver what you asked for, but return something you didn’t know you needed. Those are your giants.

Note: A critical point is that they deliver these elements with existing resources (time and money). Someone suggesting a large campaign plan for something that needs to be done before end-of-day isn’t getting it. Someone suggesting that if you hire 3 more people, or add 50% to the budget (that you don’t have), they can deliver better quality, isn’t helpful. And someone suggesting improvements that others should make instead of doing their own tasks well is also not helpful.

See my column on Flow and on Creativity vs Resources

• Claude prompting framework (10x easier) – Link

• Enjoy CarPlay while you Still Can – Link

• McKinsey Webinar: AI and Automation – Link

• IRL Branding In A Digital Age – Link

• Charts of the week – Link

• NEW: Hotel Design & Tech Benchmark Q4 2025 – Link⁺

Heavenly Bed: A high-quality bed developed and branded by Starwood Hotels & Resorts (now part of Marriott), known for its comfort and premium bedding features. The “Heavenly Bed” includes a custom-designed mattress, white plush comforter, several pillows, and high-thread-count sheets, originally introduced for Westin Hotels to enhance guest sleep experience. 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.