Innovation

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Most independent hoteliers (rightly) don’t question whether pricing matters. Two of the most pertinent questions you probably do find yourself asking are what does AI-powered pricing software actually do once it’s switched on and can it be trusted to make good decisions without taking away my control? If you run a lean property, your pricing process may still involve checking competitor pricing, logging into multiple OTA extranets and making manual updates whenever demand changes. This all makes sense. But it takes time. And without dedicated hotel revenue management expertise and experience of more sophisticated software, it’s easy to wonder what an automated system is really doing behind the scenes. This guide explains it in plain English. We’ll walk through the demand signals that dynamic pricing software monitors, how it turns those signals into rate decisions, what you still control and how updates reach your booking channels. When you understand the mechanics – which we hope you will do much more after reading this blog post – dynamic pricing becomes much easier to trust and much more likely to save time in your pursuit of increased RevPAR, ADR and profitability. Key takeaways Hotel dynamic pricing software reads live signals like competitor rates, pickup pace, local events and seasonality to help independent hotels price more accurately each day. With hotel dynamic pricing software, the AI can recommend or apply rate changes automatically, while you still set the price limits and final guardrails. Hotel dynamic pricing software becomes far more useful when it connects to your channel manager, so updated rates reach OTAs and direct channels at the same time. For lean hotel teams, hotel dynamic pricing software can replace hours of manual rate checks with a simpler daily workflow built around review, oversight and exceptions. Understanding pickup pace helps explain why hotel dynamic pricing software may raise rates early on fast-booking dates or lower them when demand looks softer than expected. What hotel dynamic pricing software actually does, step by step Dynamic pricing software, often delivered through a revenue management system (RMS), follows a simple process: it reads what’s happening in the hospitality industry market; decides whether your rates should change; and updates them where guests can book. Think about the difference between a typical day before and after automation. Without dynamic pricing software, you might spend the morning checking competitor websites, reviewing occupancy , scanning local events and logging into multiple systems to update rates manually. With AI-assisted pricing , those market signals are monitored continuously, routine rate changes happen automatically within your chosen rules, and your time shifts from making every adjustment yourself to reviewing exceptions and refining your overall strategy. In the next three sections, we break down that workflow step by step, so you can see exactly how a pricing decision moves from live market data to the rates your guests see online. Reading the market: the signals the software monitors in real time Dynamic pricing software works by monitoring multiple market signals at the same time, rather

🏠 UnderTheDoormat Group, a London-based hospitality operator, expanded TrustedStays into France, integrating serviced apartments into corporate travel systems via Amadeus. In 2025, French business travel spending reached €30.9bn, projected to grow 2.2% to €31.6bn by 2026. Serviced apartments, growing at 5.9% annually since 2019, represent just 8% of Europe's accommodation supply. The expansion addresses corporate demand for flexible options amid global business travel spending forecasts of $1.71tn in 2026.

SAN FRANCISCO - Canary Technologies, the leading AI platform for hotel and guest management, has been named to the 2026 Inc. 5000 , the prestigious annual ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in America. The distinction recognizes Canary's leadership in hotel technology innovation and highlights the hospitality industry's rapid acceleration in adopting AI solutions. The Inc. 5000 celebrates the nation's most successful independent and entrepreneurial businesses that have achieved remarkable growth while driving innovation, creating jobs and shaping the future of the economy. Past honorees include Microsoft, Meta, Chobani, Oracle and Patagonia. Hospitality has always been about creating exceptional experiences, and technology continues to give hotel teams new ways to deliver on that promise. AI is reshaping what's possible across the industry, as hotels embrace new technology to better serve guests, run smoother operations and unlock new revenue opportunities. We're proud to serve more than 20,000 hotels and keep them at the forefront of that evolution. This recognition is a testament to the commitment, hard work and relentless focus of the Canary team, and their unwavering dedication to delivering meaningful outcomes for hoteliers and their guests. Harman Singh Narula, Co-Founder and CEO of Canary Technologies Canary's growth reflects the tangible value it delivers to hotels. At a time when hotel teams are lean and guest expectations are high, Canary's agentic AI suite drives operational, revenue and guest experience gains by automating administrative tasks and workflows from booking through post-stay. Guests receive faster, more personalized service, while hotel teams save time and redirect focus toward exceeding service standards. That impact is emblematic of a broader industry shift toward AI adoption. Eighty-five percent of hoteliers are allocating at least 5% of their IT budget to AI solutions this year. Hoteliers are prioritizing trusted platforms that deliver measurable business impact. Canary facilitates tens of millions of agentic interactions between guests and staff each year and continues to advance hospitality-specific solutions for hoteliers. Every company on the Inc. 5000 has a story of perseverance, smart decision making, and a refusal to sit still. Their growth reflects more than strong financial performance–it reflects creativity, resilience, and the customer focus required to build companies that make a lasting impact. We congratulate all honorees on this significant achievement. Mike Hofman, editor-in-chief of Inc. For the full Inc. 5000 list, honoree company profiles and a searchable database by industry and location, please visit: www.inc.com/inc5000 . Inc. 5000 List Methodology Companies on the 2026 Inc. 5000 are ranked according to percentage revenue growth from 2022 to 2025. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2022. They must be U.S.-based, privately held, for-profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2025. (Since then, some on the list may have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2022 is $100,000; the minimum for 2025 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons.

Imagine a guest beside a remarkable view. Breakfast has arrived and the family is together. Yet one phone vibrates, another records the moment and a third brings work into the room. This scene is so familiar that we rarely question it. Hotels have spent years making the guest journey more connected and convenient. Mobile check-in, digital keys, messaging platforms and QR-code menus are designed to remove friction. But if every moment remains open to work, alerts and digital demands, what exactly has the guest escaped from? This is not an argument against smartphones. They are useful and, for many guests, essential. The more useful question is whether luxury hospitality should help guests recover control over time and attention: the freedom to connect when needed and step away without losing necessary services. When time becomes the rarest amenity A guest may reach the resort while the mind remains in meetings, messages and unfinished tasks. The body has travelled, while attention has not. Luxury cannot solve that problem simply by adding more amenities. Rudd et al. (2019) reviewed three decades of research on time and meaning. They treat time as a precious, finite resource and organise research on how people spend and construe it around three dimensions of meaning: purpose, mattering and comprehension. Their review does not show that hotels create meaning. It raises a practical design question: does a stay leave room for a guest to be fully present, or fill every pause with another prompt, activity or transaction? Research by Whillans and colleagues adds a practical layer. Across surveys in four countries, time-saving purchases were associated with greater life satisfaction; in a preregistered within-subjects field experiment, such a purchase improved daily mood partly by lowering perceived time pressure (Whillans et al., 2017). In a separate preregistered longitudinal study, graduates who valued time over money were more likely to pursue intrinsically motivated activities and reported greater well-being one year later (Whillans et al., 2019). These are not hotel studies, but they suggest a service-design principle: value can come from giving time back, not only from adding things. Malone et al. (2023) bring the argument closer to luxury tourism. At a luxury ecocamp in Kenya, the reappropriation of time was central to the transformational effects participants described and occurred through appreciation, learning and rediscovery. The study used a small, context-specific sample, so its findings should not be generalised to hotel guests broadly. It does, however, raise a useful hypothesis: some luxury guests may value experiences that let them experience time differently. The smartphone is not the enemy Protected attention should not become a fashionable argument for banning phones. Tourism research shows why. Using cross-sectional survey data from 304 working adults in Beijing and Shanghai, Kirillova and Wang (2016) found that more frequent work-related smartphone-facilitated social presence weakened the relationship between destination restorative qualities and vacation recovery, while higher-quality work-related and non-work social presence strengthened it. The findings therefore do not support a simple connected-versus-disconnected rule: the relationship differed by frequency, quality and

Right now, somewhere in your market, a buyer is comparing your hotel to two hundred others. It is weighing your rate. Scanning your reviews. Checking your availability. And it will decide in less time than it took you to read that sentence. It will never call your sales office. It will never open your website. And increasingly, it isn't a person at all. For two years, every hospitality conference repeated the same comfortable line about artificial intelligence: use it to personalize, use it to predict, use it to serve the guest better. All true. All safe. And all built on the assumption that a human still does the searching, the comparing, and the booking. That assumption is now obsolete. Here is the shift almost no commercial leader has fully absorbed: the buyer is no longer always a person. Increasingly, the buyer is an agent acting on a traveler's behalf an AI that searches, compares, evaluates, and very soon completes the reservation without the guest ever touching your funnel. This is not a forecast. It is already happening. In January 2026, Google's Universal Commerce Protocol went live for retailers, with travel named as the next priority vertical ( O'Rourke Hospitality ). By spring, Google had confirmed hotel booking as its next vertical for agentic shopping, backed by an Agent Payments Protocol built to let an agent complete a purchase inside the conversation ( Skift ). Weeks earlier, Sabre, PayPal and Mind Trip announced an end-to-end agentic booking pipeline spanning more than 400 airlines and two million properties, with a launch planned for Q2 2026 ( OAG ). And Perplexity, Claude and ChatGPT are already measurable sources of inbound bookings for the hotels disciplined enough to track them ( Digital Applied ). Read that again. Not will . Already. So the question is no longer whether an algorithm sits between your property and your guest. It does. The only question left is whether your hotel is built to be chosen by it. Most are not. And here is the uncomfortable part: nobody on the commercial team owns this. The problem we have mislabelled For thirty years, "being found" was a marketing problem. SEO, metasearch, OTA placement, paid spend. The commercial leader's job began after the lead arrived. Agentic discovery shatters that handoff. When an agent decides which three hotels to surface out of two hundred in the market, it is making a commercial decision on your behalf. It uses your rates, your parity, your availability, and your reputation as its raw inputs. By the time a human ever sees a shortlist, the single most important commercial event has already happened: silently, in a layer your team does not manage and usually cannot see. We keep filing this under IT. Under marketing. Under distribution. It belongs to none of them in isolation. It is a commercial leadership problem wearing a technical costume. The analysts are blunt about the stakes. By 2026, discovery, comparison and booking will be mediated by agents acting for the

Workforce planning and labor sources have been key discussion points for some time. The workforce today is reorganizing because of the pandemic, technology innovations, workforce skill base, education, training, and professional development availability and options. Industries like the hospitality sectors are adjusting to a new business world. Hospitality, for example, is significantly more technologically adapted than in the immediate past. For example, Mobile Apps became the common place during the pandemic, remote check-in, check-out and more became the standards to utilize, and helped avoid close contact with guests and between employees. The hospitality industry has also capitalized on technology and artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce repetitive tasks and allow employees more time for guest service. What is The Function of The Workforce? Is it to accomplish a task, is it to make the hospitality (service) factory run smoothly or is it to serve and satisfy guests? I have been in and or aligned with the hospitality industry for many years and remain connected to it through hospitality business education. We are all in the business of service. The world economy continues to grow into a service economy. Per Statista almost 80% of the United States work force are in the service sector. The act of service provides guest satisfaction and a reason to return to a restaurant, a hotel, a retail store, or other service providers. One issue in service and the workforce in general is that the skill levels are varied and diverse. Service could be as simple as pouring a drink, to managing guest or customer problem and complaints, or making budget and other financial decisions. The iterations of service actions are many and the speed of making service decisions can be daunting. There are often limited opportunities to take time for consider options. Film searches will identify numerous workforce films that are inclusive of manufacturing, service, and agricultural sectors, all with their own workforce needs and challenges. Films and stage performances like , 9 to 5 , Norma Rae, The Devil Wears Prada, (the sequel is out now), Death of a Salesman , Working Girl , Up in the Air , the Intern , and How Green Was My Valley to name a few. The themes of the movies differ but look at the struggles and difficulties of working and the environments (cultures) people are working in. Some highlight labor unions, others focus on the management and supervision, and bosses of all kinds. Other films examine company downsizing and layoffs, working conditions (coal mines offer that setting), and some offer progressive workforce ideas, looking at seniors as interns. Films specifically focused on hospitality include Hotel Rwanda, Maid in Manhattan , Casino , Chef , Waitress, and more. The hospitality themes in these films focus on workplaces and a workforce that needs to be proactive in the environments where businesses are located. Some films examine career pathways and the opportunities for careers, entrepreneurism, and employees sharing workplace skills, training, education, often highlighting a common desire for advancement. Film

The chat assistant it launched this week reads your rate plans, asks the traveler what she wants, and names a Best pick by criteria nobody has published Aug 14, 2026…

Accor will hand its hotels AI-generated prices for their corporate bids from next year — leaving the hotel that still sets its number by hand bidding against one that doesn’t…

When they add dates - we suddenly can present the whole picture to anyone who has the ability to quote the whole trip..