Innovation

In early July, Rocco Forte Hotels became the first luxury hotel brand to adopt Sion, a platform created to manage and pay travel advisor commissions. While the announcement was covered as a payment upgrade, there is something larger at play. When Sir Rocco Forte stated that travel advisors are fundamental to the group’s business and deserve a payment process that reflects their value, and that his aim is to make Rocco Forte Hotels one of the easiest luxury brands for advisors to work with, it showcases the fact that the company understood immediately that commission settlement affected its relationships with partners. And yet, a month later, no other major hotel group appears to have followed. Why? Hotel brands already spend heavily on agency relationships, and the technology to shorten payment cycles already exists. But for some reason, commissions remain buried in finance departments, disconnected from the commercial value of their most important channel. The channel keeps growing, even without being repriced The agency channel is growing at roughly twice the rate of the two online groups that still dominate the hotel distribution conversation. According to figures Onyx CenterSource provided to Hospitality.today , commissionable room nights rose 11.8% year over year in the first half of 2026. Over the first quarter, Booking Holdings and Expedia Group each reported 6% growth in room nights. Hotels achieved that growth with almost no increase in unit cost. Average commission per commissionable room night rose 0.8%, while the average daily rate on those nights increased 1.4%. Total commissions were approximately 13% higher, almost entirely because agencies generated more bookings . The economics look very different elsewhere in distribution. Hotels can pay a higher commission to improve their position on Expedia. Booking.com sells additional exposure through its Visibility Booster and Preferred Partner Program. In both cases, additional demand carries a higher unit cost. On the other hand, agencies delivered close to 12% more room nights while the average commission per night rose by less than 1%. For hotels accustomed to paying progressively more for growth, that alone should command their attention. As said earlier, luxury hotel groups already spend heavily on the relationships generating this business. They participate in roadshows, host dinner, organize activations at trade shows, and invite agency partners to sporting events and concerts. Luxury travel runs on personal relationships, and brands understand the value of remaining close to the people who advise their clients. Commission settlement forms part of that relationship. Flawless execution for the client, followed by prompt and trouble-free payment, gives the agency team confidence in the partnership. Hotels are already paying for that loyalty, and paying well. Settling commissions on time produces the same effect at no additional cost. Millions earned and still outstanding For an agency, the booking does not always end when the client checks out. It can enter a second life as a receivable. During the first quarter of 2026, the average hotel commission reached the agency 39 days after checkout. Each commission averaged $21.50 per room

The resort is full this week. Every suite turned, the club floor busy past midnight, the late check-outs stacked the way they always are in August. It reads like a good problem to have. Then look down the arrivals list and ask something the occupancy report never answers: of all the people walking in today, how many could you reach again next spring without paying a third-party for the introduction? Not many. You own the rooms. The guests you mostly rent — from a landlord who keeps the part of her that matters long after she checks out. For a year the pitch ran the other way. Artificial intelligence, the story went, would finally cut the middleman out. A traveler would ask a chatbot for a quiet beach hotel with a serious kitchen, and the machine would send her straight to you — no commission, no consortia, no platform skimming the top. Then the company at the center of that story did the opposite. In March, OpenAI pulled back from letting people buy inside ChatGPT and said it would concentrate on search and product discovery, with its commerce protocol handing the actual booking off to someone else's checkout. The machine kept the part where it decides which hotel to name. It gave away the part where you'd have met the guest. That is the whole map in a single move. Four parties now stand between your resort and the person sleeping in it, and each one keeps the piece that matters. The landlords you already know The OTA owns the data. You know this one from the folio — the booking lands under a masked email, the guest's real address parked behind the platform, the relationship you thought you'd bought with that commission sitting on the channel's balance sheet, not yours. She had a wonderful stay. Next spring the ad that pulls her back points at the OTA, and you pay a second time for a guest you already hosted, fed, and upgraded. The wholesaler owns the margin. Your static contract was written for a world where the room went into an opaque package a tour operator resold exactly once. At API speed it leaks — your own rate turning up in windows you never approved, undercutting the price on your own site. We've traced those mechanics before; the short version is that the discount you extended to reach a market you couldn't reach now competes with you for a guest who'd have booked direct. Two landlords, both familiar, both taking something real on the way to handing you a reservation. You've made your peace with them, more or less. It's the next two that most resorts haven't priced yet. Her advisor, not you The luxury guest came back to the human advisor, and the advisor kept her. She doesn't rebook because she loves your resort. She loves it — that's simply not the thing that moves her in November when she's deciding on next summer. She rebooks because her

SAN DIEGO, CA — The AI Hospitality Alliance (AIHA) today announced the launch of Mastering AI for Hospitality: From Beginner to Builder , a free eight-part workshop series designed to help hospitality professionals understand, use and ultimately build with artificial intelligence. The live online series will be taught by Ira Vouk , Founder of the AI Hospitality Alliance, hospitality technology and AI strategist, author and professor at the San Diego State University L. Robert Payne School of Hospitality & Tourism Management . Presented by the AI Hospitality Alliance in partnership with the SDSU L. Robert Payne School of Hospitality & Tourism Management, the program adapts the AI curriculum Vouk teaches at SDSU for working hospitality professionals and makes it available free to the broader industry. The first workshop, “ 50 Shades of Intelligence: What AI Is — and What It Means for Hospitality ,” will kick off Thursday, September 3, 2026, from 8:00-9:00 AM PDT . Additional workshop dates will be announced throughout the series. “AI is moving so quickly that there is a growing gap between hearing about these technologies and actually understanding how to use them,” said Vouk. “The goal of this series is to close that gap for hospitality. We’re starting with the fundamentals, but we’re not stopping there. By the end, participants will have gone from understanding what AI is to working with agents, creating digital products and even building software with AI.” From AI Beginner to Builder Each workshop is approximately one hour and focuses on practical application rather than theory alone. No technical or coding experience is required. Participants may attend individual workshops based on their interests, while the full curriculum is intentionally structured as a progression from Beginner - AI User - Power User - Builder. The eight workshops include: 1. Fifty Shades of Intelligence: What AI Is - and What It Means for Hospitality An introduction to AI, machine learning, generative AI, LLMs, predictive AI, agentic AI and the ways these technologies are being applied across hospitality. 2. The LLM Toolkit: Mastering Text GenAI Hands-on use of tools including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, NotebookLM and others for prompting, research, analysis, writing, document interrogation and problem-solving. 3. From Prompt to Picture: Images, Design & Presentations with AI Using generative AI to create and edit images, presentations, infographics, marketing materials and other visual content. 4. Give AI a Voice: Music, Speech, Podcasts & Audio Generation Exploring AI-generated music, realistic speech, podcasts, voiceovers, audio enhancement, translation and synthetic voice technology. 5. Lights, Camera, AI: Video Generation & Digital Avatars Creating video from text and images, working with digital avatars, synthetic voices, translation and AI-assisted video production. 6. From Assistants to Agents: When AI Starts Doing the Work Moving beyond chatbots into AI assistants and agents that can access tools, work with files, interact with applications and complete multi-step tasks, combined with practical AI productivity workflows for everyday work. 7. Build It Yourself: Websites, Web Apps & Dashboards with AI Using natural language to move from an

This post was originally published on this site.Alessandra Leoni, head of hospitality at Focus Group, discusses why a robust and integrated IT infrastructure matters more than ever As a hotelier…

A guest named Rebecca booked your hotel on Tuesday. The moment she books, your pricing system, which now has AI in it, decides she looks like a high-value guest and flags her for a premium upsell. An hour later, your guest messaging tool, which also has AI in it, sends her a cheerful automated note offering her a discount code to encourage a longer stay. The next morning, your booking engine's AI assistant answers her question about early check-in with a confident yes. When she arrives, the front desk has no record of any of it, tells her early check-in is not available, and looks blank when she mentions the discount. Rebecca is not angry. She is something worse for you. She is confused, and slightly unsettled, because the hotel just spoke to her in four different voices, made three different promises, and remembered none of them. Every one of those systems was working correctly. Every one of them was individually smart. And together they made your hotel feel less coherent than it did five years ago, when it had no AI at all, and one tired human simply remembered her. I want to talk about this, because it is the problem almost no one in hospitality is naming yet, and it is arriving fast. We solved the wrong problem, brilliantly. For the last two years, the whole industry has been focused on a single question: how do we add AI? Add it to pricing. Add it to messaging. Add it to the booking engine, the upsells, the reviews, the operations. And it worked. AI is no longer an experiment sitting off to the side. It is embedded into the core systems that run your property, one workflow at a time, exactly as promised. But we added it the way you would add any tool, one system at a time, each chosen on its own merits, each impressive in its own demo. And in doing that, we quietly created a new problem that did not exist before, because when AI lived in only one place, it could not contradict itself. Now it lives in five places, and each one is making confident decisions about the same guest with no idea what the others have decided. Your pricing AI does not know what your messaging AI just promised. Your upselling engine does not know what your front desk already handled. Each system holds a sliver of the guest, acts on it intelligently, and has no awareness of the whole. Individually smart. Collectively incoherent. And the guest, who experiences your hotel as one place, feels every single seam between them. This is the part that should stop you, because it reverses something we all assumed. We assumed more AI meant a smarter hotel. But past a certain point, more AI without coherence means a more fragmented hotel, one that is simultaneously more automated and less able to tell a guest a single, consistent story. You can now be higher-tech and more disjointed

This article was written by Lodging Magazine. Click here to read the original article Photo Credit: PPDS AMSTERDAM—PPDS, the exclusive global provider of Philips Professional Displays, announced the new Philips…

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