Innovation

How AI can identify revenue opportunities and leakage — then recommend the actions a hotel should take

This post was originally published on this site. ​ Anastasia: Brett, let’s start with the belief that holds most small operators back. They think PR is for big brands with big…

LAS VEGAS - BirchStreet Systems , a global provider of the complete hospitality operations platform, has announced the launch of BirchStreet Smart AP ™ , a next-generation solution that automates the entire accounts payable process, from invoice capture to payment execution​. Powered by advanced AI that manages both header and line‑level exceptions, Smart AP allows for faster, more accurate invoice processing with stronger control, higher efficiency, and real-time visibility. As a result, customers will incur significantly reduced manual workloads, faster payment cycles, virtually eliminated processing errors, and robust fraud prevention. Key features of BirchStreet Smart AP ™ include: Touchless Invoicing: automated invoice ingestion through multiple digital formats, including AI-capture technology, electronic invoicing/EDI, or flexible third-party integrations, the solution is designed for high accuracy and unlimited capacity invoice extraction, while minimizing workflow inefficiencies and environmental waste. In international markets, touchless invoicing allows hotels to be fully compliant with government regulations. 3-Way Match Automation : embedded Agentic logic identifies discrepancies between Purchase Orders, Receiving and Invoices, and manages exceptions at both header and line-item level leveraging AI-powered workflows, resulting in accurate reconciliation and accelerated processing. BirchStreet SmartPay: embedded workflows trigger payment (ACH, enhanced ACH, virtual card or check) within the platform and automatically generates and sends payments to vendors, preventing fraud and reducing cost and improving visibility to suppliers and team members. The hospitality industry has long struggled with the inefficiencies of manual accounts payable processes, which drain valuable time and resources from operations teams. Our Smart AP solution transforms this entirely by automating invoice processing with touchless ingestion and line-level three-way matching—the only technology in hospitality that delivers this capability. This allows operational and finance teams to shift from transactional work to strategic value creation, while ensuring vendor relationships remain strong through timely, accurate payments. Valerie Layman, Chief Product Officer at BirchStreet With Smart AP, hospitality properties gain unprecedented control over their financial operations through a unified platform that eliminates bottlenecks across the entire procure-to-pay lifecycle. The solution's AI-driven exception management intelligently resolves discrepancies that previously required hours of manual investigation, while comprehensive dashboards provide finance leaders with complete visibility into invoice status, payment timing, and vendor performance metrics. By automating up to 95% of invoice processing tasks, Smart AP frees accounting teams to focus on more strategic initiatives. As labor costs continue to rise and operational complexity increases across multi-unit hospitality organizations, Smart AP delivers the scalable automation needed to maintain profitability, while strengthening vendor partnerships through consistent, accurate, and timely payments. For more information, please visit www.birchstreetsystems.com .

Monday moved the agentic booking question from argument to plumbing. Google's live test now has a confirmed GDS partner, which reshapes the problem for independent hotels rather than solving it. IHG signed one of the largest conversion portfolios Japan has seen in years, and Expedia Group's quarterly data showed European travellers booking later than they have all year while Asia Pacific plans further ahead than anyone. Google's Agentic Booking Test Now Runs on the Rails the Industry Already Uses Google has begun a limited United States test of agentic hotel booking, and the companies wired into it already control distribution: Booking, Expedia, Marriott, Wyndham and IHG. Booking's Glenn Fogel told investors his company sits inside the test. Marriott said in February it was building a priority search experience to push bookings through Google's AI. Every name on that list either resells rooms or flies its own flag. The more consequential detail arrived last week. Amadeus says it is the first infrastructure partner Google has wired into the protocol that lets an agent complete a hotel booking, and Sabre's Kurt Ekert said his company could hand Google the same capability at scale immediately. That ties the newest front end in travel to the oldest back end, and it gives independents a second gateway into the agent that skips the OTA. Shopping is the easy half. Holding the reservation, taking the money and fixing it when it breaks is the half Google cannot do alone, and whichever pipe carries the transaction decides who owns the guest afterwards. Read the analysis → IHG Takes 14 Kyoto Hotels in One Conversion Deal IHG has signed a 14-hotel, 1,063-room portfolio with GCP Hospitality, the hospitality arm of Gaw Capital. It covers 12 Garner hotels, one Holiday Inn Express and one currently unbranded property, all in Kyoto around the station, Shijo and Gojo districts, converting in phases over the next 12 months. GCP Hospitality will manage the portfolio. The deal makes IHG one of the largest international operators in the city and ranks among the biggest conversion agreements signed in Japan in recent years. The brand doing the work is the part worth watching. Garner launched in August 2023 and has already passed 100 open hotels, the fastest IHG has scaled anything. Japan's business hotel segment is large, standardised and dominated by domestic operators, which is precisely the profile a midscale conversion brand is built to attack. Abhijay Sandilya, who runs IHG's Japan business, said the company is ready to work on more portfolios of this kind. Read the announcement → European Booking Windows Compressed Sharply in the Second Quarter Expedia Group's quarterly traveller data shows confidence returning unevenly after a soft start. Asia Pacific grew fastest at 20% year on year, Latin America recovered in late June with international searches up as much as 15%, and EMEA managed 5%. North America still accounts for 75% of global search volume. The behavioural shift matters more than the growth: 20% of all searches fell into a zero

Atlanta, GA — HotelIQ , a provider of business intelligence and decision-intelligence solutions purpose-built for hoteliers, today announced a direct integration between HotelIQ Decision Cloud and Shiji’s Daylight PMS. The integration brings reservation data from Daylight PMS directly into HotelIQ, helping shared customers centralize, standardize, and manage data and analytics across their portfolios while reducing manual data handling and creating a more reliable foundation for commercial planning, forecasting, and performance reporting. Hotels increasingly rely on multiple systems across operations, revenue, sales, marketing, and reporting. Bringing that information together can require manual exports, spreadsheets, and reconciliation before commercial teams can establish a clear view of performance. By connecting directly with Daylight PMS, HotelIQ is helping remove that friction, giving hotel teams a more streamlined path from property-level reservation data to portfolio-wide analysis and decision-making. “Making confident business decisions starts with having the right data at your fingertips. By integrating with Shiji’s Daylight PMS, we’re enhancing the capabilities of our shared customers to integrate and manage their portfolio data in a central environment, creating a central decision intelligence hub that gives them the insights they need to run their business,” said Sameer Umar, COO, HotelIQ. Through the integration, hotels using Daylight PMS and HotelIQ Decision Cloud can bring reservation data into HotelIQ’s environment and use HotelIQ’s analytics, data management, and forecasting capabilities without relying on manual data transfers between the two platforms. This gives sales, marketing, and revenue teams a more consistent data foundation from which to understand performance and make decisions across their portfolio. “We’re always looking for ways to help hoteliers get more value from the data already flowing through Daylight PMS. This integration with HotelIQ gives our mutual customers a direct path from operational data to actionable business intelligence, without the manual handoffs,” said Simon Le Touze, Senior Director for Partnerships, Shiji. The integration reflects HotelIQ’s focus on giving hotel organizations a centralized environment in which to bring together the data they need to understand performance and make informed business decisions. Connecting directly with platforms such as Shiji Daylight PMS helps reduce data fragmentation while allowing hotel teams to spend less time moving and reconciling information and more time acting on it. The integration is now available to hotels using both Shiji Daylight PMS and HotelIQ Decision Cloud. About HotelIQ HotelIQ Decision Cloud, a leading hospitality decision intelligence platform for the global hotel industry, empowers hoteliers to make faster, data-driven decisions across departments. By providing insights into key performance metrics, AI-powered predictive models for forecasting and budgeting, and tools to identify revenue opportunities, the platform streamlines operations and eliminates time-consuming manual data analysis. With user-friendly dashboards and reports, Decision Cloud ensures sales, marketing, and revenue teams have consistent access to high-quality property data, fostering collaboration and unlocking new revenue streams within a unified digital workspace. Learn more at hoteliq.io About Shiji Shiji is a global technology company dedicated to providing innovative solutions for the hospitality industry, ensuring seamless operations for hoteliers day and night. Built on the Shiji Platform

Google confirmed to Skift last week that it has begun a limited test of agentic hotel booking in the United States — the AI search that lets a traveler describe a trip, compare hotels, and book without leaving the page. On Booking's earnings call, CEO Glenn Fogel put his company inside it: "a small percentage of their traffic seeing their agentic booking … we are one of the first with them." The thing the industry has spent a year calling "coming" is now running, on a sliver of the world's largest search engine. Who's wired in. The companies Google has worked with on agentic travel booking are chains and OTAs — Booking, Expedia, Marriott, Wyndham, IHG. Marriott's Anthony Capuano told investors in February the chain was designing a "priority search experience" to push bookings through Google's AI, processed there. Every name on that list either resells rooms or flies its own flag. The independent hotel is not among them. The GDS just entered the frame. The more telling confirmation is easy to miss. For all the talk of Google, the OTAs and new AI protocols, the agentic story had skipped the pipes the whole industry already runs on. Last week ended that. Amadeus says it is the first infrastructure partner Google has wired into the new protocol it built to let an AI agent complete a hotel booking. Sabre's Kurt Ekert was blunter: Google "does shop very well. It doesn't do book or service" — and his company, he said, could hand it that ability "en masse tomorrow." It is the first time Google has tied its agentic hotel booking, on the record, to the global distribution systems — the rails that already carry hotels into airline, corporate and travel-agent channels. The newest front end in travel is being wired to its oldest back end. And that back end is the one rail an independent can ride into the agent without an OTA in between. Where that leaves the independent. Shopping is the easy half; the booking is the hard one — the half Google can't do alone. To hold the reservation, take the money and fix it when it breaks, it needs a partner that completes and services the sale. The chains have their own connections. The independent does not — it reaches the agent only if a pipe carries it there: the OTA it already sells through, or the GDS. Present, but by proxy — never with the direct line the chains built for themselves. {{cta id="20"}} The catch. This is a test on a fraction of traffic, and the details are thin. Google will not say whether the protocol that actually transacts is even part of it, and it still describes finishing a hotel booking inside AI search as a future step — the booking may still hand off to a partner's own site for now. Google has said it has no ambition to become an OTA. The point is narrower — the wiring: the pipes going

Bangkok, Thailand, August 24, 2026 – Shiji, the global leader in hospitality technology, today announced that Wyndham Garden Phuket Kamala has successfully deployed Infrasys POS , Shiji’s cloud-based point-of-sale platform. The implementation supports the resort’s operational requirements across its food and beverage venues, enabling more connected service workflows while maintaining a consistent, guest-focused experience. Located on Kamala Beach in Phuket, Wyndham Garden Phuket Kamala operates multiple dining outlets alongside poolside service, in-room dining, and event spaces. To support this operational environment, the resort selected Infrasys POS to unify food and beverage operations across service points while ensuring ease of use for staff and consistency in guest interactions. Designed for cloud-first hospitality environments, Infrasys POS enables real-time transaction processing, centralized menu and pricing management, and integration with wider hotel systems. These capabilities allow service teams to operate with greater mobility and visibility, reducing manual processes and supporting faster service during both peak and seasonal demand periods. “Infrasys POS is designed to support hospitality operations where service is delivered across multiple venues and guest touchpoints,” said James Liaw, General Manager for Singapore and Thailand of Shiji Group. “By deploying a cloud-based POS platform, Wyndham Garden Phuket Kamala has established a flexible operational foundation that supports efficient service delivery while remaining adaptable to future needs.” Through the implementation, Wyndham Garden Phuket Kamala gains centralized control over menus and pricing, improved operational insight, and the ability to manage seasonal menu changes and high-volume service periods. These capabilities are particularly relevant in Phuket, where guest demand fluctuates throughout the year and service teams must respond quickly to changing volumes. “We required a POS system that could support seamless food and beverage service across the resort without adding complexity for our teams,” said James Yang, Assistant Hotel Manager of Wyndham Garden Phuket Kamala. “With Infrasys POS, we are able to operate more efficiently across outlets while continuing to deliver the level of service our guests expect.” The deployment at Wyndham Garden Phuket Kamala reflects a broader shift among resort and upscale hospitality operators in Southeast Asia toward cloud-native technology platforms that support connected operations and real-time decision-making. As hotels continue to modernize their technology ecosystems, POS systems such as Infrasys play a key role in linking food and beverage operations with the wider guest journey. About Wyndham Garden Phuket Kamala Wyndham Garden Phuket Kamala is a contemporary beachfront resort located along the tranquil shores of Kamala Beach, offering guests a relaxed tropical escape with modern comforts, curated dining experiences, and a focus on approachable luxury. Designed for both leisure travelers and families, the resort blends international hospitality standards with the natural beauty and cultural richness of Phuket.

A few weeks ago I was on an intake call with a potential coaching client. She is a Director of Rooms at a luxury property in the far east, mid-thirties, sharp and hungry for her next move. Director of Operations, maybe a GM seat down the road. Like every intake call, I asked my standard opening question: how did you find me? Her answer stopped me cold. She asked ChatGPT. Not "who is David Lund" – she had never heard of me. She asked something more like, "I’m a Director of Rooms at a luxury hotel and I want to grow my career, but I’m weak on the financial side. Who can help me?" And the machine gave her my name. Some of you may remember my story about being recognized in a castle hotel in Portugal – my 15 seconds of fame, courtesy of a General Manager named Carlos who reads my weekly blog. That was fun, but this is different, and I think much more important. Carlos already knew me. This lady did not. A machine introduced us. So I did some digging into how this actually works, because if it happened to me, it can happen to you, and I think every hospitality professional should understand it. The brochure rack and the concierge Think about the difference between Google and AI the way you would think about two fixtures in any hotel lobby. Google is the brochure rack. You walk up, you flip through, and it hands you ten options ranked by whoever played the ranking game best. You still have to sort through them yourself. AI is the concierge. You do not ask the concierge for a list. You tell the concierge your problem – "I need a quiet dinner spot where I can actually talk business" – and a good concierge gives you a name. "Call Maria at the little place on the corner. Tell her I sent you." One answer, matched to your problem. Here is the part most people get wrong. These AI systems do not keep a list of approved experts. Nobody registered me. Nobody paid a fee – you cannot, at least not yet. What the machine did was read. It read an almost unimaginable amount of the internet before anyone ever typed a question into it. And somewhere in all that reading, one association got made over and over: this name, this subject. A weekly blog, a book, articles in the industry press, a LinkedIn feed – all saying the same thing, year after year. The machine learned to connect a name with a problem the same way you learned that a high labor cost flows straight through to the bottom line. It saw it enough times that the connection stuck. Google asks: which webpage should I show first? AI asks a very different question: who or what is most associated with solving this problem? Those are two different games, and the second one heavily rewards specialists. Ask "who is

Cast: Rajeev Ratti, Niale McLoughlin, and me — Terence Ronson. Mission: fill the hotel, keep the guests happy, and — most days — stay sane. When we first arrived, we were not exactly overqualified for the role. None of us spoke a word of Cantonese. Niale had no previous Front Office experience, having mostly worked in restaurants. My own background was as a trained chef, though I'd been fortunate enough to pick up a couple of years of Front of House experience before wading into this enormous bed factory. My own background was as a trained chef, though I'd been fortunate enough to pick up a couple of years of Front of House experience before wading into this enormous bed factory. Terence Ronson RAJEEV: I'd just graduated from the Institute of Hotel Management in New Delhi when Hong Kong came calling. A few months later, I joined Terence and Niale as a fellow Lobby Boy — officially, Assistant Manager — and never looked back. Terence and I share a birthday, a year apart, which we always felt made the arrangement official — the Three Musketeers, one for all and all for one, minus the swords. Read the full story of The Lobby Boys. Available now. By Terence Ronson, on behalf of The Lobby Boys — Niale, Rajeev, and Terence