Innovation

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?

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