Innovation

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Innspire , a leading provider of digital guest engagement and hospitality technology solutions, announced its integration with Toast Point of Sale (POS). As a Toast integration partner, Innspire will help enable hotels and resorts to offer seamless mobile food-and-beverage ordering to enhance the guest experience. Innspire's solution was purpose-built for hospitality environments, supporting a wide range of hotel dining experiences including in-room dining, poolside food and beverage service, lobby lounges, rooftop venues, beach service, and other on-property outlets. Through Innspire, Hotels can extend service well beyond traditional restaurant spaces without increasing operational complexity. Because the ordering experience is fully branded, hotels maintain ownership of the guest relationship throughout the dining experience while providing guests with the flexibility to order whenever and wherever they choose. Whether relaxing by the pool, enjoying their guestroom, or gathering in public spaces, travelers can quickly place orders without waiting in line or calling hotel staff. Toast is a cloud-based, all-in-one digital technology platform purpose-built for the entire hospitality community. Through the Toast Partner Ecosystem , Innspire joins a network comprised of over 200 technology partners who deliver specialized technology and services to help business operators increase sales, engage guests, and keep employees happy. Hotels are looking for technology that works together seamlessly behind the scenes. We're pleased to welcome Innspire to the Toast Partner Ecosystem to help hotels connect Toast POS with the digital experiences guests use every day. The integration reduces manual steps for staff while ensuring orders move quickly and accurately from the guest's device to the kitchen. Rick Hertan, Director of Hotels at Toast The integration connects Innspire's hospitality platform with Toast POS, allowing guests to browse menus, view daily specials, and place orders directly from a hotel's branded mobile app, web-based ordering experience, QR codes located throughout the property, or Innspire's in-room tablets. Orders are transmitted directly into Toast POS, creating a more efficient workflow for hotel F&B operations while delivering a convenient experience for guests. The Toast POS integration further expands Innspire's growing ecosystem of hospitality technology integrations, allowing hotels to connect guest-facing digital experiences with the operational systems that power day-to-day service delivery. Innspire’s integration with Toast is designed to be a natural extension of Innspire's comprehensive digital guest journey platform. Guests can access dining services, mobile check-in, digital room keys, messaging, concierge services, and other hotel experiences through a consistent branded interface. For hotel operators, the result is a unified guest engagement platform that improves operational efficiency while encouraging greater utilization of on-property amenities. Today's guests expect the same convenience from hotel dining that they enjoy in their everyday digital experiences. Our integration with Toast enables hotels to meet those expectations while creating new opportunities to increase F&B revenue. By making ordering simple and accessible from anywhere on the property, hotels can enhance guest satisfaction while streamlining service for their operations teams. Anne Frye, President of Innspire For more information about Innspire's hospitality technology platform, visit www.innspire.com .

Hotels have spent years thinking about how travelers find them on Google, compare them on an OTA, browse their website, and eventually make a reservation. There is a new participant in that process. It is not human. Deloitte’s 2026 Summer Travel Survey found that 43% of U.S. travelers with household incomes of $100,000 or more now use generative AI in trip planning. That same income group is expected to represent 55% of the traveling public this summer. Travelers still use traditional channels: Google, Expedia, Booking.com , hotel websites, and the rest of the familiar options. Increasingly, though, AI is intervening between the traveler and those channels. In some cases, those channels are putting AI between the traveler and the booking process themselves. Travelers are asking ChatGPT where to stay. They are using AI to build itineraries. Agents can now browse websites and perform tasks on a user’s behalf. The logical next step is for those agents to complete more of the transaction. I see this evolution happening on three fronts. 1. AI Is Becoming A Hotel Discovery Channel This is where we are now. A traveler planning a weekend in New York does not need to search Google for “best boutique hotels in SoHo,” open several results, and build a shortlist. They can ask an AI: “I’m taking my wife to New York for our anniversary. We want a boutique hotel in or near SoHo, somewhere quiet enough to sleep but within walking distance of restaurants and shopping. We’d like to stay under $600 a night. What would you recommend?” I did a version of this for my wife and I’s 20th anniversary trip to France. We leaned heavily on ChatGPT to plan the details of a ten-day trip to Paris, including three hotels, nearly a dozen dinner reservations, and tourist attraction planning. We supplied preferences, constraints, and context that would have previously required several searches and filters. The AI interpreted those requirements and returned a shortlist. More importantly for hospitality groups, those recommendations now produce real website traffic. Adobe Analytics reported that traffic from AI sources to U.S. travel sites increased 194% year over year in May 2026. Adobe’s analysis covered more than 8 million visits to U.S. travel sites. AI referrals remain much smaller than traditional search but if they hold onto year over year tripling, you may not want to ignore them too much. Hotels should start asking a question they have not traditionally had to ask: If a traveler asks an AI for a hotel like mine, does the AI understand enough about my property to recommend it? 2. The AI May Do The Browsing, Too Discovery is only the first change. The second is the move from AI answering questions to AI performing work. Expedia Group’s 2026 research found that 40% of surveyed travelers use AI to help build itineraries. Another 53% said they were comfortable letting AI suggest travel options. Instead of only asking an AI to recommend a hotel or outline a trip

The hotel industry has good reasons to move toward mobile-first experiences. Digital keys can reduce dependence on front-desk transactions, integrate room access into existing hotel apps, and give guests another way to access their rooms without carrying a traditional key card. But the growing adoption of digital keys does not necessarily make physical key cards obsolete. The reason is simple: hotel access is not a one-user, one-device problem. A hotel room is shared, guests arrive in different circumstances, and the process of accessing a room involves more than the technology used to unlock the door. 1. The Sharing Problem: A Room Does Not Equal One User One of the basic assumptions behind mobile credentials is that access is associated with an individual guest and an individual device. Hotel rooms, however, are frequently shared. Couples, families, colleagues, and groups may all need independent access to the same room or suite. A parent may want to give a child access without giving them control of a phone or hotel account. An elderly family member may not have the relevant app installed. Even between two technically capable users, sharing a digital credential can require additional authorization, account setup, device compatibility, connectivity, and other steps that do not exist with a physical card. This is an important distinction between the digital and physical models. If two guests need access, the front desk can simply issue two cards. There is no need to establish a digital relationship between two accounts or devices. Digital systems can certainly provide shared access, but the more people involved, the more dependencies the process introduces. When shared digital access does not work as expected, the operational solution is often to issue a physical card anyway. This makes the physical key card more than a backup for technical failure. It addresses a structural characteristic of hotel stays: the person who books a room and the people who use the room are not necessarily the same person. 2. The Friction Transfer: Digital Does Not Always Mean Frictionless Digital technology is often described as a way to remove friction from the guest journey. In practice, however, it can also redistribute that friction from the hotel to the guest. Depending on the system, using a digital key may involve downloading an app, creating an account, logging in, activating the credential, enabling Bluetooth, maintaining sufficient battery power, ensuring connectivity, or dealing with compatibility and software updates. The timing is particularly important. Many of the potential friction points of a digital key appear at arrival, when guests may already be tired from travel and least interested in troubleshooting technology. A physical card transfers most of the work to the hotel before the guest leaves the front desk. In this sense, the value of a physical key card removes technology from a moment when technology may not be necessary. 3. The Trust Anchor: Access Is Also a Physical Transfer When a receptionist hands a guest a key card, the hotel is physically completing the transition from hotel-controlled

🎾 Howard Brody, a renowned physicist, discovered that looser strings give tennis rackets more power, contrary to popular belief. Larger racket heads bring the percussion center closer to the middle, simplifying the game for recreational players. Brody authored "Tennis Science for Tennis Players" and co-authored "The Physics and Technology of Tennis." He advised the US Tennis Association and was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, not as a player or coach, but as an educator.

What can a tour operator actually do with AI right now — not in five years, not in theory, but today?

This article was written by New Dog PR. Click here to read the original article Back in the day, when we were still saying ‘online travel agents’ and not OTAs,…

This article was written by Lodging Magazine. Click here to read the original article SEOUL, South Korea—Yanolja announced the global rollout of an AI concierge solution developed by its hospitality…

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