Innovation

54% of travelers have already used AI to plan a trip. 22% of destinations offer an AI trip planner on their website. Same study, same month, two …

An AI travel agent, unlike a human, never gets tired of searching for perfect flight combinations. But someone needs to pay for the endless …

Hotels do not lack technology. The challenge is making that technology work together. Revenue management, CRM, payments, distribution, POS, guest messaging, and mobile applications all compete for a place in…

CARROLLTON, TX, Aug 20, 2026 - HotelKey is expanding the rollout of its self-check-in kiosk following strong guest satisfaction and impressive performance metrics. Delivering round-the-clock service with the potential to save each property over 2,000 labor hours annually, the kiosk is rapidly emerging as a leading solution for modern hotel operations. Building on this momentum, NSR Hotel Group selected HotelKey as the exclusive kiosk provider for its G6 portfolio which includes 20+ properties across the United States. NSR also has properties across major brands like Wyndham, Choice, Marriott, Hilton, and Red Roof. "Integrating HotelKey's kiosk technology allows us to elevate the overall guest experience for every traveler," said Himanshu Sarvaiya, Founder and President of NSR Hotel Group. "The self-service option provides seamless flexibility, enabled by the friction-less integration into the HotelKey PMS and other on-property systems. Having the option to enable an on-camera agent to handle broader operational tasks acts as a powerful extension of our on-site teams." Shyamal Patel, President & CEO of Infinity Management Group, also recognizes the value of this operational shift. "I truly believe self-service technology is the future of the hotel industry, and owners who embrace it early on allow a competitive advantage. Every successful self-check-in reinforces that we made the right decision, the right investment." Infinity Management is also rolling out the kiosk at their California locations after a successful pilot at their Motel 6, Anaheim Convention Center. Engineered to complement property staff, the HotelKey Kiosk absorbs routine transactions. By handling automated identity verification, secure payments, room assignment, and instant keycard dispensing, the solution empowers teams to focus on high-value guest interactions. "We view our technology as a critical layer of operational support," said Aditya Thyagarajan, Co-Founder and President of HotelKey. "By automating routine administrative tasks, we help hoteliers optimize shift coverage, smooth out bottlenecks, and sustainably manage rising overhead costs." As the technology evolves, HotelKey continues to push the boundaries of what a hospitality platform can achieve to support on-site staff. "The HotelKey Kiosk is built to serve as a comprehensive front-desk support agent, ensuring a frictionless arrival experience from start to finish," said Fareed Ahmad, Co-Founder and CEO of HotelKey. "While we currently provide properties with the flexibility to leverage dedicated live support agents, our product roadmap includes upcoming agentic AI functionality capable of managing complex workflows, such as rate negotiations and customized guest requests. We are committed to providing hoteliers with robust, 24/7 intelligent infrastructure." Talk to Our Team Today! Visit www.hotelkeyapp.com or contact [email protected] to learn more. About HotelKey The HotelKey suite of products is a cutting-edge, cloud-based property management platform built on proven industry innovations. These advancements enable HotelKey to deliver a true plug-and-play solution that enhances revenue growth, streamlines operations, and simplifies guest interactions, empowering hotels and enterprise groups to succeed at scale. Today, HotelKey supports more than 25,000 contracted hotels, with over 15,000 live on its Hospitality Management Platform. HotelKey's customer base includes 10 enterprise hotel chains and more than 800 independent properties worldwide. About NSR Headquartered

💰 ChatGPT Ads launch today for European advertisers across 31 markets, including Finland. CPC rates are €3-5, cheaper than Google Search (€7-18), Meta (€2-4), and LinkedIn (€9-16). Cost per qualified lead is estimated at €45-110, making ChatGPT Ads the most cost-effective option currently. Testing with €200-300 is recommended to learn the channel before it becomes crowded, reminiscent of early Google and Meta ad pricing.

By the time a traveler reaches the booking page, most of the decision is already made. Here's what that means for hotels — and for the partners that support them. For a long time, the question everyone in the hospitality industry was trying to answer was the same: how do you get a traveler to book? A booking used to follow a predictable process. A traveler searched for hotels in a destination, compared a handful of options, read a few reviews, and clicked confirm. Hotels competed on price, location, and availability. The path from searching to booking was predictable. What I find most interesting — and most important for our industry to understand — is that this model no longer reflects how decisions are actually made nowadays. Hospitality is evolving before our eyes. Traveler expectations are shifting, technological change is accelerating, and economic uncertainty is reshaping how hotels and destinations compete. The Travel Dreams 2026: From data to delight report — drawing on the views of 500 leading hoteliers and 6,000 leisure and business travelers from the largest global travel markets — makes this shift impossible to ignore. For hoteliers, the question is no longer simply "how do I get booked?" It is: "where does the decision to book my property actually begin — and am I present there?" The decision moves earlier AI is influencing decisions throughout the process, but one of the most striking findings in the research is just how early in the journey travelers are forming their preferences. In many cases, shortlists are determined long before a traveler reaches any booking platform. Today, travelers are most likely to find AI helpful during the planning stage (42%), using it to research options, compare prices, and read reviews. This is followed by the inspiration and discovery stages (36%), while 32% find AI most useful at the booking stage itself. That order is significant: it suggests that by the time a traveler reaches a booking page, much of the evaluation and decision-making has already taken place. Travelers are increasingly using chatbots earlier in the journey to explore destinations and travel ideas. Five years ago, only 6% of travelers surveyed used chatbots to inspire their journeys – while today that figure has tripled to 18%. In fact, chatbots are now on par with celebrities and travel influencers and have bypassed actual travel agents when it comes to influencing voyagers’ travel decisions. Getting generative engine optimization (GEO) and search engine optimization (SEO) right, appearing in AI summaries, and reaching people online is now the most critical part of the strategy to drive customer demand in 2026, according to hoteliers and DMOs surveyed. What happens if your hotel is overlooked before the search even begins? If you're not on the shortlist before the traveler starts searching, you may never be on it at all. The real decision point Travel Dreams 2026 data shows us that traveler fundamentals have not actually changed that much. Travelers are still focused on factors such as price,

This article was written by Lodging Magazine. Click here to read the original article KIRKLAND, Washington, and KIHEI, Hawaii—Staypineapple announced a partnership with Abra Hospitality. Following the successful rollout of…

A curious click on your website, the specific room type a guest has chosen, a recurring order in your restaurant, or a detailed online review — every interaction is an…

There is a lot of thinking going into predicting what AI will look like in our industry. I think that is mostly futile. Ten years ago, very few people would have accurately described today’s AI, and there is little reason to believe we’ll do better predicting 2036. But preparing for that future is actually much easier than predicting it. Whatever future AI looks like, it will need two things: inputs and outputs. It needs to understand what is happening, which means data. And if it is going to be genuinely useful rather than just an impressive advisor, it needs to be able to do things. For hotels, the input side (to AI) is relatively straightforward: accessible, structured, reliable, sufficiently real-time data. The output side (from AI) means APIs that allow another system to modify inventory, update a reservation, create a task, communicate with a guest, move a room, trigger a workflow, and eventually do things we haven’t thought of yet. We have been talking about accessible data and APIs for years. AI just makes the reason for having them much more obvious. [Some have said that signing up for my newsletter is obvious as well.] There is a third piece too: control. A hallucinating chatbot is annoying. An AI with permission to change reservations, rates or payments can be expensive. Once AI moves from “tell me what I should do” to “do it for me,” permissions, security, auditability, reversibility and guardrails become dramatically more important. This is why I think the PMS becomes more important in an AI world, but perhaps not for the reason PMS companies would like. The PMS doesn’t necessarily need to contain the intelligence. But it sits close to the operational heart of the hotel. Future intelligence needs a reliable way to understand that environment and safely act upon it. So, instead of asking, “Which PMS has the best AI?” perhaps hotels should ask, “Which PMS gives me the greatest freedom to use whatever turns out to be the best AI?” That means APIs and support may ultimately matter more than today’s collection of AI features. And support is going to matter more, not less. This is slightly counterintuitive. We tend to assume better technology means less human support. But experimentation means things will break. Integrations will fail. Vendors get acquired. APIs change. Hotels are strangely allergic to technology failure, yet great hoteliers are incredibly good at operational failure (probably the best). Something goes wrong in hotels every day. The skill is fixing impossible problems while making everything appear smooth to the guest. Perhaps we need to bring more of that mentality into technology. The objective shouldn’t be to build a stack where nothing fails. If you are seriously experimenting with rapidly developing technology, that probably means you aren’t experimenting enough. The objective is to build one where failures are contained, recoverable and informative. We cannot predict the winning AI. But we can build a hotel tech stack that is ready to use it when it

The first integrated deployment in the Americas shows how hotel self-service can improve convenience without sacrificing the human experience. Atlanta, Georgia, USA, August 25, 2026 — Shiji and Rivalry Tech…