June 17, 2026

HITEC 2026 closes today and the week ends with more clarity on where the industry stands than it opened with. Marriott put a conversational AI product in front of 283 million loyalty members. Amadeus announced a full AI strategy expansion. And a recap written from the show floor captures the honest ambivalence underneath the announcements: AI feels both thrilling and unsettling, often at the same time, and the disagreements on cost, brand survival, and human roles are anything but resolved. Marriott Introduces Ask Bonvoy, a Conversational AI Search for 283 Million Members Marriott launched Ask Bonvoy in beta on Marriott.com and its mobile apps, a conversational AI search tool that lets Bonvoy members explore travel options through natural language rather than filter-based search. A full global rollout to all 283 million Bonvoy members is planned later this year, making it one of the largest AI-native travel discovery deployments in the industry. The launch is significant not just for its scale but for what it signals about the direct booking channel. Marriott is building its own conversational AI layer rather than ceding that interface to third-party platforms, which puts it ahead of most hotel brands in the race to own AI-mediated guest discovery. Read the announcement → HITEC 2026 So Far: Where AI Feels Thrilling and Unsettling at Once A first-person recap from the Hospitality Net team on the ground in San Antonio finds broad consensus that AI will reshape hotel distribution and operations, and deep disagreement on almost everything else: what it will cost, which brands will survive the transition, and what happens to the human roles that currently define the industry. The recap captures a show floor that felt urgent and unresolved in equal measure. Read alongside the week's content, the piece provides the framing the individual announcements lack. AI visibility, agentic systems, and direct booking interfaces all advanced at HITEC 2026. The harder questions, about who bears the cost and who gets left behind, went largely unanswered. Read the recap → Running Hotel Operations on WhatsApp Is the Equivalent of Managing Your Business on Personal Gmail Zenzap CEO Guy Weiss makes a direct argument: hotels that run internal operations on WhatsApp are creating data loss, privacy, and security risks that most operators have never formally assessed. The analogy to personal Gmail is precise. WhatsApp keeps communication in personal accounts, outside any company system of record, and when a staff member leaves, the operational history goes with them. Weiss says purpose-built work communication tools can cut staff turnover by up to 50% through better onboarding, clearer task management, and reduced friction, putting the business case well beyond data hygiene. Read the interview → Signals Revinate launched Ivy, trained on 17 years of hospitality data and 1.1 billion guest profiles. Currently live for chat resolution and call scoring at 96% accuracy, saving teams more than 30 hours monthly, with automated guest communications expanding to general availability in late 2026. Amadeus unveiled a full AI strategy expansion at HITEC. New tools

HITEC 2026 closes today and the week ends with more clarity on where the industry stands than it opened with. Marriott put a conversational AI product in front of 283 million loyalty members. Amadeus announced a full AI strategy expansion. And a recap written from the show floor captures the honest ambivalence underneath the announcements: AI feels both thrilling and unsettling, often at the same time, and the disagreements on cost, brand survival, and human roles are anything but resolved. Marriott Introduces Ask Bonvoy, a Conversational AI Search for 283 Million Members Marriott launched Ask Bonvoy in beta on Marriott.com and its mobile apps, a conversational AI search tool that lets Bonvoy members explore travel options through natural language rather than filter-based search. A full global rollout to all 283 million Bonvoy members is planned later this year, making it one of the largest AI-native travel discovery deployments in the industry. The launch is significant not just for its scale but for what it signals about the direct booking channel. Marriott is building its own conversational AI layer rather than ceding that interface to third-party platforms, which puts it ahead of most hotel brands in the race to own AI-mediated guest discovery. Read the announcement → HITEC 2026 So Far: Where AI Feels Thrilling and Unsettling at Once A first-person recap from the Hospitality Net team on the ground in San Antonio finds broad consensus that AI will reshape hotel distribution and operations, and deep disagreement on almost everything else: what it will cost, which brands will survive the transition, and what happens to the human roles that currently define the industry. The recap captures a show floor that felt urgent and unresolved in equal measure. Read alongside the week's content, the piece provides the framing the individual announcements lack. AI visibility, agentic systems, and direct booking interfaces all advanced at HITEC 2026. The harder questions, about who bears the cost and who gets left behind, went largely unanswered. Read the recap → Running Hotel Operations on WhatsApp Is the Equivalent of Managing Your Business on Personal Gmail Zenzap CEO Guy Weiss makes a direct argument: hotels that run internal operations on WhatsApp are creating data loss, privacy, and security risks that most operators have never formally assessed. The analogy to personal Gmail is precise. WhatsApp keeps communication in personal accounts, outside any company system of record, and when a staff member leaves, the operational history goes with them. Weiss says purpose-built work communication tools can cut staff turnover by up to 50% through better onboarding, clearer task management, and reduced friction, putting the business case well beyond data hygiene. Read the interview → Signals Revinate launched Ivy, trained on 17 years of hospitality data and 1.1 billion guest profiles. Currently live for chat resolution and call scoring at 96% accuracy, saving teams more than 30 hours monthly, with automated guest communications expanding to general availability in late 2026. Amadeus unveiled a full AI strategy expansion at HITEC. New tools

HITEC 2026 closes today and the week ends with more clarity on where the industry stands than it opened with. Marriott put a conversational AI product in front of 283 million loyalty members. Amadeus announced a full AI strategy expansion. And a recap written from the show floor captures the honest ambivalence underneath the announcements: AI feels both thrilling and unsettling, often at the same time, and the disagreements on cost, brand survival, and human roles are anything but resolved. Marriott Introduces Ask Bonvoy, a Conversational AI Search for 283 Million Members Marriott launched Ask Bonvoy in beta on Marriott.com and its mobile apps, a conversational AI search tool that lets Bonvoy members explore travel options through natural language rather than filter-based search. A full global rollout to all 283 million Bonvoy members is planned later this year, making it one of the largest AI-native travel discovery deployments in the industry. The launch is significant not just for its scale but for what it signals about the direct booking channel. Marriott is building its own conversational AI layer rather than ceding that interface to third-party platforms, which puts it ahead of most hotel brands in the race to own AI-mediated guest discovery. Read the announcement → HITEC 2026 So Far: Where AI Feels Thrilling and Unsettling at Once A first-person recap from the Hospitality Net team on the ground in San Antonio finds broad consensus that AI will reshape hotel distribution and operations, and deep disagreement on almost everything else: what it will cost, which brands will survive the transition, and what happens to the human roles that currently define the industry. The recap captures a show floor that felt urgent and unresolved in equal measure. Read alongside the week's content, the piece provides the framing the individual announcements lack. AI visibility, agentic systems, and direct booking interfaces all advanced at HITEC 2026. The harder questions, about who bears the cost and who gets left behind, went largely unanswered. Read the recap → Running Hotel Operations on WhatsApp Is the Equivalent of Managing Your Business on Personal Gmail Zenzap CEO Guy Weiss makes a direct argument: hotels that run internal operations on WhatsApp are creating data loss, privacy, and security risks that most operators have never formally assessed. The analogy to personal Gmail is precise. WhatsApp keeps communication in personal accounts, outside any company system of record, and when a staff member leaves, the operational history goes with them. Weiss says purpose-built work communication tools can cut staff turnover by up to 50% through better onboarding, clearer task management, and reduced friction, putting the business case well beyond data hygiene. Read the interview → Signals Revinate launched Ivy, trained on 17 years of hospitality data and 1.1 billion guest profiles. Currently live for chat resolution and call scoring at 96% accuracy, saving teams more than 30 hours monthly, with automated guest communications expanding to general availability in late 2026. Amadeus unveiled a full AI strategy expansion at HITEC. New tools

The hospitality industry has a communication problem that nobody talks about openly, but everyone experiences daily: operations running across a patchwork of personal WhatsApp groups, text threads, and informal messaging apps, with sensitive data leaking out the door every time an employee leaves, and shift managers sending critical messages into the void of a hundred-person group chat that half the team will never see. Guy Weiss, co-founder and CEO of Zenzap, has spent the last three years building the solution — a purpose-built work communication platform designed specifically for the operational realities of high-turnover, always-on industries like hospitality. He sat down with Simone Puorto to make the case that what the industry needs is not another tool to add to the stack, but a fundamentally different category of communication infrastructure. The conversation covers the hidden security and privacy risks of personal messaging apps in hospitality operations, the work-life separation problem that WhatsApp-based operations create for frontline employees, how response time data can serve as an early predictor of employee burnout and attrition, and why AI in hospitality should be understood as a noise-canceling layer rather than a job-disrupting force. The WhatsApp problem nobody names Weiss opens with an analogy that reframes the entire conversation. "Think about running your entire operations with hundreds of employees where everyone is using their personal Gmails," he says. "Sounds crazy, right?" The reason companies moved to corporate email was precisely to separate business communication from personal infrastructure — to retain data, manage access, and maintain control. Chat has never made that transition. The default for operational communication in hospitality remains the personal messaging app, with all the structural vulnerabilities that implies. The most obvious risk is data loss at the moment of employee departure. Every recipe shared in a group chat, every supplier contact, every price negotiation conducted over WhatsApp leaves the building with the employee who held it on their personal device. "If you have a chef working for you, all the recipes — this data is gone," Weiss says. "If you have suppliers, phone numbers and prices — this data is gone." Intellectual property walks out the door not through malicious intent but through structural design: the data was never the company's to begin with. The second risk is less discussed but, in Weiss's telling, equally serious: privacy. When personal phone numbers circulate in a group chat of a hundred employees, access to those numbers is uncontrolled. Weiss describes a pattern that Zenzap's customers have reported with uncomfortable frequency — employees receiving harassing messages from colleagues who obtained their personal numbers through a shared work group chat. "It's a whole new section of security and cybersecurity which people don't really think of," he says, "but it happens on a daily basis." The feature that emerged from this feedback — the ability to hide personal phone numbers within the platform — was not part of Zenzap's original product vision. It became one because customers asked for it. The third risk is operational: physical security.

The hospitality industry has a communication problem that nobody talks about openly, but everyone experiences daily: operations running across a patchwork of personal WhatsApp groups, text threads, and informal messaging apps, with sensitive data leaking out the door every time an employee leaves, and shift managers sending critical messages into the void of a hundred-person group chat that half the team will never see. Guy Weiss, co-founder and CEO of Zenzap, has spent the last three years building the solution — a purpose-built work communication platform designed specifically for the operational realities of high-turnover, always-on industries like hospitality. He sat down with Simone Puorto to make the case that what the industry needs is not another tool to add to the stack, but a fundamentally different category of communication infrastructure. The conversation covers the hidden security and privacy risks of personal messaging apps in hospitality operations, the work-life separation problem that WhatsApp-based operations create for frontline employees, how response time data can serve as an early predictor of employee burnout and attrition, and why AI in hospitality should be understood as a noise-canceling layer rather than a job-disrupting force. The WhatsApp problem nobody names Weiss opens with an analogy that reframes the entire conversation. "Think about running your entire operations with hundreds of employees where everyone is using their personal Gmails," he says. "Sounds crazy, right?" The reason companies moved to corporate email was precisely to separate business communication from personal infrastructure — to retain data, manage access, and maintain control. Chat has never made that transition. The default for operational communication in hospitality remains the personal messaging app, with all the structural vulnerabilities that implies. The most obvious risk is data loss at the moment of employee departure. Every recipe shared in a group chat, every supplier contact, every price negotiation conducted over WhatsApp leaves the building with the employee who held it on their personal device. "If you have a chef working for you, all the recipes — this data is gone," Weiss says. "If you have suppliers, phone numbers and prices — this data is gone." Intellectual property walks out the door not through malicious intent but through structural design: the data was never the company's to begin with. The second risk is less discussed but, in Weiss's telling, equally serious: privacy. When personal phone numbers circulate in a group chat of a hundred employees, access to those numbers is uncontrolled. Weiss describes a pattern that Zenzap's customers have reported with uncomfortable frequency — employees receiving harassing messages from colleagues who obtained their personal numbers through a shared work group chat. "It's a whole new section of security and cybersecurity which people don't really think of," he says, "but it happens on a daily basis." The feature that emerged from this feedback — the ability to hide personal phone numbers within the platform — was not part of Zenzap's original product vision. It became one because customers asked for it. The third risk is operational: physical security.

The hospitality industry has a communication problem that nobody talks about openly, but everyone experiences daily: operations running across a patchwork of personal WhatsApp groups, text threads, and informal messaging apps, with sensitive data leaking out the door every time an employee leaves, and shift managers sending critical messages into the void of a hundred-person group chat that half the team will never see. Guy Weiss, co-founder and CEO of Zenzap, has spent the last three years building the solution — a purpose-built work communication platform designed specifically for the operational realities of high-turnover, always-on industries like hospitality. He sat down with Simone Puorto to make the case that what the industry needs is not another tool to add to the stack, but a fundamentally different category of communication infrastructure. The conversation covers the hidden security and privacy risks of personal messaging apps in hospitality operations, the work-life separation problem that WhatsApp-based operations create for frontline employees, how response time data can serve as an early predictor of employee burnout and attrition, and why AI in hospitality should be understood as a noise-canceling layer rather than a job-disrupting force. The WhatsApp problem nobody names Weiss opens with an analogy that reframes the entire conversation. "Think about running your entire operations with hundreds of employees where everyone is using their personal Gmails," he says. "Sounds crazy, right?" The reason companies moved to corporate email was precisely to separate business communication from personal infrastructure — to retain data, manage access, and maintain control. Chat has never made that transition. The default for operational communication in hospitality remains the personal messaging app, with all the structural vulnerabilities that implies. The most obvious risk is data loss at the moment of employee departure. Every recipe shared in a group chat, every supplier contact, every price negotiation conducted over WhatsApp leaves the building with the employee who held it on their personal device. "If you have a chef working for you, all the recipes — this data is gone," Weiss says. "If you have suppliers, phone numbers and prices — this data is gone." Intellectual property walks out the door not through malicious intent but through structural design: the data was never the company's to begin with. The second risk is less discussed but, in Weiss's telling, equally serious: privacy. When personal phone numbers circulate in a group chat of a hundred employees, access to those numbers is uncontrolled. Weiss describes a pattern that Zenzap's customers have reported with uncomfortable frequency — employees receiving harassing messages from colleagues who obtained their personal numbers through a shared work group chat. "It's a whole new section of security and cybersecurity which people don't really think of," he says, "but it happens on a daily basis." The feature that emerged from this feedback — the ability to hide personal phone numbers within the platform — was not part of Zenzap's original product vision. It became one because customers asked for it. The third risk is operational: physical security.

SAN ANTONIO — Revinate, hospitality's leading direct booking platform, today introduced Ivy, the artificial intelligence built across its entire platform. Unveiled at HITEC 2026 in San Antonio, Ivy is the decision intelligence layer that understands a hotel's guests, property, and brand voice - and acts on that understanding to drive direct revenue. Ivy is not a bolt-on chatbot or a generic model with a hospitality label. She is trained on 17 years of hospitality data and 1.1 billion Rich Guest Profiles, giving her a depth of understanding of guest behavior that no general-purpose AI can match. That scale is the mechanism: the more hospitality context Ivy learns from, the sharper her decisions become for every hotelier on the platform. "Hoteliers have always been the heroes of their properties - Ivy is the sidekick that sees what they can't," said Bryson Koehler, CEO of Revinate. "Generic AI can write a generic email. Ivy understands the guest behind it, because she's built on the deepest, cleanest hospitality data in the industry. We're not selling AI as a buzzword. We're delivering the outcomes that AI makes possible." Working today across the platform Ivy is already at work in two areas that hoteliers use every day: Revinate Chat resolves up to 80% of routine guest questions automatically, freeing staff for high-value guest interactions while capturing more direct revenue. Call scoring with Ivy evaluates reservation agent calls against hospitality service standards, returning more than 30 hours a month to supervisors and turning call reviews into timely, objective coaching. Both are powered by the same underlying intelligence. As Ivy does more across the platform, each capability compounds the value of the others. What's ahead: from assistant to strategist Today, Ivy handles defined tasks. Revinate intends to evolve her into a teammate that anticipates a hotelier's needs - surfacing revenue opportunities hidden in the data and, over time, executing personalized guest communication at scale, automatically and aligned to each hotel's goals. The aim is to move hoteliers from managing software to directing outcomes: Ivy is designed to handle the digital labor so teams can focus on strategy and guests. I've spent two decades watching this industry try to turn guest data into guest relationships, and the gap has always been execution. What makes Ivy different is that she's built inside the system of record hoteliers already trust, on data they already own. That's what lets us move from suggesting what a hotelier should do to doing it with them - at a scale no team could reach by hand. Frank Trampert, Chief Revenue Officer of Revinate Ivy is on display at Revinate's HITEC booth 3418 in San Antonio, June 16–18, 2026.

SAN ANTONIO — Revinate, hospitality's leading direct booking platform, today introduced Ivy, the artificial intelligence built across its entire platform. Unveiled at HITEC 2026 in San Antonio, Ivy is the decision intelligence layer that understands a hotel's guests, property, and brand voice - and acts on that understanding to drive direct revenue. Ivy is not a bolt-on chatbot or a generic model with a hospitality label. She is trained on 17 years of hospitality data and 1.1 billion Rich Guest Profiles, giving her a depth of understanding of guest behavior that no general-purpose AI can match. That scale is the mechanism: the more hospitality context Ivy learns from, the sharper her decisions become for every hotelier on the platform. "Hoteliers have always been the heroes of their properties - Ivy is the sidekick that sees what they can't," said Bryson Koehler, CEO of Revinate. "Generic AI can write a generic email. Ivy understands the guest behind it, because she's built on the deepest, cleanest hospitality data in the industry. We're not selling AI as a buzzword. We're delivering the outcomes that AI makes possible." Working today across the platform Ivy is already at work in two areas that hoteliers use every day: Revinate Chat resolves up to 80% of routine guest questions automatically, freeing staff for high-value guest interactions while capturing more direct revenue. Call scoring with Ivy evaluates reservation agent calls against hospitality service standards, returning more than 30 hours a month to supervisors and turning call reviews into timely, objective coaching. Both are powered by the same underlying intelligence. As Ivy does more across the platform, each capability compounds the value of the others. What's ahead: from assistant to strategist Today, Ivy handles defined tasks. Revinate intends to evolve her into a teammate that anticipates a hotelier's needs - surfacing revenue opportunities hidden in the data and, over time, executing personalized guest communication at scale, automatically and aligned to each hotel's goals. The aim is to move hoteliers from managing software to directing outcomes: Ivy is designed to handle the digital labor so teams can focus on strategy and guests. I've spent two decades watching this industry try to turn guest data into guest relationships, and the gap has always been execution. What makes Ivy different is that she's built inside the system of record hoteliers already trust, on data they already own. That's what lets us move from suggesting what a hotelier should do to doing it with them - at a scale no team could reach by hand. Frank Trampert, Chief Revenue Officer of Revinate Ivy is on display at Revinate's HITEC booth 3418 in San Antonio, June 16–18, 2026.

SAN ANTONIO — Revinate, hospitality's leading direct booking platform, today introduced Ivy, the artificial intelligence built across its entire platform. Unveiled at HITEC 2026 in San Antonio, Ivy is the decision intelligence layer that understands a hotel's guests, property, and brand voice - and acts on that understanding to drive direct revenue. Ivy is not a bolt-on chatbot or a generic model with a hospitality label. She is trained on 17 years of hospitality data and 1.1 billion Rich Guest Profiles, giving her a depth of understanding of guest behavior that no general-purpose AI can match. That scale is the mechanism: the more hospitality context Ivy learns from, the sharper her decisions become for every hotelier on the platform. "Hoteliers have always been the heroes of their properties - Ivy is the sidekick that sees what they can't," said Bryson Koehler, CEO of Revinate. "Generic AI can write a generic email. Ivy understands the guest behind it, because she's built on the deepest, cleanest hospitality data in the industry. We're not selling AI as a buzzword. We're delivering the outcomes that AI makes possible." Working today across the platform Ivy is already at work in two areas that hoteliers use every day: Revinate Chat resolves up to 80% of routine guest questions automatically, freeing staff for high-value guest interactions while capturing more direct revenue. Call scoring with Ivy evaluates reservation agent calls against hospitality service standards, returning more than 30 hours a month to supervisors and turning call reviews into timely, objective coaching. Both are powered by the same underlying intelligence. As Ivy does more across the platform, each capability compounds the value of the others. What's ahead: from assistant to strategist Today, Ivy handles defined tasks. Revinate intends to evolve her into a teammate that anticipates a hotelier's needs - surfacing revenue opportunities hidden in the data and, over time, executing personalized guest communication at scale, automatically and aligned to each hotel's goals. The aim is to move hoteliers from managing software to directing outcomes: Ivy is designed to handle the digital labor so teams can focus on strategy and guests. I've spent two decades watching this industry try to turn guest data into guest relationships, and the gap has always been execution. What makes Ivy different is that she's built inside the system of record hoteliers already trust, on data they already own. That's what lets us move from suggesting what a hotelier should do to doing it with them - at a scale no team could reach by hand. Frank Trampert, Chief Revenue Officer of Revinate Ivy is on display at Revinate's HITEC booth 3418 in San Antonio, June 16–18, 2026.

SAN ANTONIO — Revinate, hospitality's leading direct booking platform, today introduced Ivy, the artificial intelligence built across its entire platform. Unveiled at HITEC 2026 in San Antonio, Ivy is the decision intelligence layer that understands a hotel's guests, property, and brand voice - and acts on that understanding to drive direct revenue. Ivy is not a bolt-on chatbot or a generic model with a hospitality label. She is trained on 17 years of hospitality data and 1.1 billion Rich Guest Profiles, giving her a depth of understanding of guest behavior that no general-purpose AI can match. That scale is the mechanism: the more hospitality context Ivy learns from, the sharper her decisions become for every hotelier on the platform. "Hoteliers have always been the heroes of their properties - Ivy is the sidekick that sees what they can't," said Bryson Koehler, CEO of Revinate. "Generic AI can write a generic email. Ivy understands the guest behind it, because she's built on the deepest, cleanest hospitality data in the industry. We're not selling AI as a buzzword. We're delivering the outcomes that AI makes possible." Working today across the platform Ivy is already at work in two areas that hoteliers use every day: Revinate Chat resolves up to 80% of routine guest questions automatically, freeing staff for high-value guest interactions while capturing more direct revenue. Call scoring with Ivy evaluates reservation agent calls against hospitality service standards, returning more than 30 hours a month to supervisors and turning call reviews into timely, objective coaching. Both are powered by the same underlying intelligence. As Ivy does more across the platform, each capability compounds the value of the others. What's ahead: from assistant to strategist Today, Ivy handles defined tasks. Revinate intends to evolve her into a teammate that anticipates a hotelier's needs - surfacing revenue opportunities hidden in the data and, over time, executing personalized guest communication at scale, automatically and aligned to each hotel's goals. The aim is to move hoteliers from managing software to directing outcomes: Ivy is designed to handle the digital labor so teams can focus on strategy and guests. I've spent two decades watching this industry try to turn guest data into guest relationships, and the gap has always been execution. What makes Ivy different is that she's built inside the system of record hoteliers already trust, on data they already own. That's what lets us move from suggesting what a hotelier should do to doing it with them - at a scale no team could reach by hand. Frank Trampert, Chief Revenue Officer of Revinate Ivy is on display at Revinate's HITEC booth 3418 in San Antonio, June 16–18, 2026.