Innovation

Driving the news. On Alphabet's second-quarter earnings call, Google said its AI-powered ad system, AI Max, is out of beta and running for more than 500,000 advertisers, and that it now opens "billions" of searches to ads that keyword targeting could never reach. Then came the part that lands on hotels. Google is testing Highlighted Answers — labeled sponsored links placed inside the AI's own list of recommendations — and Direct Offers, which drop a brand's promotion into a traveler's planning conversation. The first hotel name attached to Direct Offers is IHG. Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler framed AI Max plainly: a way to turn more of what people ask into inventory Google can sell. The lift figures Google quoted alongside it — a 15 percent bump in conversions, a 20 percent gain in ad relevance from Gemini — are Google's own numbers, and read better as marketing than as proof. The call we made, and where it bent. We said in May this was coming. "Placement, not commission" argued Google would stop taking a cut of the booking and start charging for the spot inside the AI answer, the recommendation itself becoming rented space. That much was right. What we pictured was an auction — "everyone who wants to be recommended becomes a potential advertiser: the OTA, the chain, the independent." That part bent. Direct Offers did not open as an auction anyone could enter. It opened as a partner program, and IHG walked in first. AI Max reached travel months ago ; the answer-slot is the new ground, and it's being handed out by invitation. {{cta id="20"}} What it means for hotels. Read where the door is, and who holds the handle. You can bid on a Google ad all day — that market is open, if unwinnable at your budget. You cannot bid your way onto the Direct Offers launch list. IHG can. And that seat is worth more than the ad slots you already know — the AI answer is where the choice now forms, so a place inside it outweighs any position beside it. The paid seat inside the AI answer is opening chain-first, allocated by a deal you are not party to. And the one rule that used to hold — you can't buy the recommendation — now carries an asterisk. You still can't buy the organic pick. But a chain can buy a promotion that sits right beside it, in the same answer, wearing the same clean label, and you can't. The catch. This is early, and the piece won't pretend otherwise. IHG is named as an upcoming partner, not a live one; Highlighted Answers is a test Google says is showing "early traction," which is Google grading its own homework. And the shape can still change: AI Max itself started in beta and now runs for more than half a million advertisers, so the invitation-only lane could widen to self-serve later. What's reported today is the direction of travel and the first

Everyone knew AI would dominate the conversation at HITEC 2026 in San Antonio. What surprised me was how quickly the discussion has moved beyond chatbots, virtual concierges and one-off productivity tools. The real story is now governance. As hotels begin deploying dozens of AI-powered workflows across revenue management, marketing, reservations, maintenance, finance and guest communications, the challenge is taking stock and reining in all these agents. In this sense, HITEC 2026 felt like the moment the industry began realizing that AI agents are becoming operational infrastructure, which screams for more transparent oversight. The Rise of the Agent Management Platform The most important emerging software category I observed at the show is what I would call the Agent Management Platform (AMP). Think of it as the governance layer for an organization’s AI agent ecosystem. Today, a hotel may have one workflow using a frontier model, another powered by a small language model (SLM) and a third embedded within a vendor platform. Each agent accesses different data, operates under different permissions and incurs different costs. That complexity compounds rapidly. Which models are being used? What guest data can they access? What actions are they authorized to take? What happens if an agent fails? Is there an audit trail? Can personally identifiable information be scrubbed before processing? These questions are important today. They become mission-critical once hundreds of agents are operating simultaneously across a hotel portfolio. The AMP becomes the control center that governs permissions, monitoring, security, performance and cost. Token Creep Is Coming Token costs are about to become a very real part of the tech stack opex budget. At present, AI remains relatively inexpensive compared to labor, distribution costs or technology licensing. Many organizations treat token consumption as an afterthought. These things have a tendency to creep upward once embedded. As AI adoption accelerates, hotels will discover that thousands of automated decisions, guest interactions, forecasts, reports and content generation tasks create a new operating expense category. The industry will eventually scrutinize token consumption the same way it analyzes labor costs, OTA commissions or payment processing fees. Expect that ‘token spend optimization’ will become a standard management discipline within a few years. Not every task requires the most expensive model available. A simple guest inquiry may only need a lightweight, low-cost model. A strategic pricing recommendation or investment analysis may justify a more sophisticated system. The ability to route tasks intelligently based on performance requirements and cost considerations will become a competitive advantage. This is where the AMP becomes the hub. Beyond governance, it becomes a budgeting tool that continuously arbitrages AI workloads amongst different models to maximize return on every token consumed. Managers Must Learn Loop Engineering Loop engineering is the design of self-improving operational cycles where AI observes, recommends, acts and learns from outcomes. Similarly, harness engineering is the discipline of constraining and governing those systems so they remain aligned with business objectives. For hotel leaders, this represents a profound shift in how work gets done. Rather than personally managing

“We want one seamless guest journey.” Few expressions have become as popular in hospitality strategy. Whether discussing integrated resorts, mixed-use developments, smart destinations or digital ecosystems, the ambition is remarkably similar: to create one connected experience where every interaction feels effortless, consistent and unified. At first glance, it sounds unquestionably positive. Who would not want a seamless experience? The question came into sharper focus recently while I was discussing an applied research project with a group of Executive MBA participants. As we explored how different hospitality businesses might work together within one interconnected development, I found myself returning to a broader question. As hospitality becomes increasingly connected, are we focusing so much on integration that we risk overlooking the value of difference? Consider a familiar scenario. A business traveller arrives at a mixed-use hospitality development for a two-day conference. By this, I mean a planned development that brings together a hotel with several other uses—such as residences, offices, retail, restaurants, wellness facilities, entertainment venues and public spaces—within one interconnected environment. The hotel app has already suggested the fastest route from the airport, the room is ready, the conference venue is easy to find, and payment works smoothly across the hotel, cafés and retail outlets. Every transition is simple. Nothing is lost, repeated or unnecessarily complicated. Then, after the conference, the same guest walks into a restaurant presented as a distinctive concept within the development. The welcome, language and recommendations feel almost identical to those received at the hotel and café earlier that day. The system is efficient, but the experience begins to feel somewhat rehearsed. The guest is moving smoothly through the development, yet each encounter is becoming less distinctive. This is not an argument against integration. Fragmented systems frustrate guests. Poor coordination between hotels, restaurants, attractions, retail, mobility providers and residential services creates unnecessary friction that benefits no one. The more interesting question is this: how much integration is enough? The appeal and limits of seamlessness The case for coordination is clear. Guests should not have to explain the same request repeatedly, struggle to navigate a complex development or feel abandoned when moving from one operator to another. Shared information, intuitive wayfinding, connected technology, accessible booking systems and consistent service recovery can make the entire experience feel more coherent and considerate. In an increasingly complex hospitality environment, these are not minor details. They shape how easy a stay, visit or event feels. Yet seamlessness can become an end in itself. When every outlet follows the same service script, every space looks and sounds alike, and every interaction is shaped by one centralised logic, coordination can start to resemble uniformity. The objective should not necessarily be to create one journey. It may be to coordinate multiple journeys without losing what makes each one distinctive. One development, many journeys This matters particularly in mixed-use developments, where hotels coexist with branded residences, apartments, offices, retail, restaurants, entertainment venues, wellness facilities, attractions and public spaces. These components are expected to operate as an

Walk into a great hotel and you’ll notice remarkably little. The check-in is effortless. The room is exactly what you expected. The payment is seamless. The directions were accurate. The photos matched reality. Everything simply works. That experience feels simple. It isn’t. Long before you arrived, dozens of systems quietly worked together behind the scenes. Distribution platforms exchanged reservation data. Content flowed across digital channels. Payment systems authenticated transactions. Reviews built confidence before you ever clicked “Book Now.” Internal workflows synchronized operations. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is beginning to orchestrate many of these interactions as well. Guests rarely think about any of it. Nor should they. The highest compliment an operating system can receive is complete invisibility. Ironically, that’s also its greatest vulnerability. The moment one of those invisible systems fails, it becomes the only thing anyone remembers. A guest is given the wrong room. Google Maps sends them to the wrong entrance. The website promises amenities that no longer exist. A reservation disappears. An AI assistant confidently recommends outdated information. Customers don’t care which system failed. They simply know the experience failed. The better your infrastructure becomes, the less anyone notices it exists. We Celebrate the Visible Business has always been drawn to visible transformation. We celebrate the new website, the redesigned logo, the AI chatbot, the mobile app, the marketing campaign, and, of course, the rebrand . These are tangible signs of progress. They create excitement inside the organization and headlines outside of it. There is nothing wrong with investing in those things. The problem begins when perception starts moving faster than reality. Behind every polished customer experience sits an operating system composed of data governance, content accuracy, distribution, payment systems, integrations, operational workflows, and countless other disciplines that customers will never see. Those investments rarely receive applause. Instead, they create something far more valuable. Consistency. Customers rarely remember flawless infrastructure. They simply remember that everything worked exactly as expected. AI Didn’t Create the Problem Artificial intelligence has changed many things. One of them is how quickly weak infrastructure gets exposed. For years, fragmented systems could quietly coexist because humans rarely examined every piece of information. AI does. It doesn’t politely overlook inconsistencies. It surfaces them. Then it amplifies them. An outdated address becomes an inaccurate recommendation. Duplicate listings become conflicting answers. Incorrect amenities become confidently delivered misinformation. AI isn’t creating these problems. It’s revealing them. Organizations with strong operating systems will benefit enormously because AI has reliable information from which to reason. Organizations with weak operating systems will simply automate their own inaccuracies faster than ever before. The invisible operating system creates every visible outcome. Trust Is Built Operationally One theme has quietly woven itself through nearly every essay I’ve written over the past year. Trust. We often think of trust as a branding exercise. It isn’t. Customers don’t decide whether they trust your organization after reading your mission statement. They decide after thousands of small interactions. Was the information accurate? Did the booking process work? Did reality

The Lancaster Landmark Hotel Company has rebranded itself as The Landmark Collection . The move brings together six world class properties: The Landmark London, Royal Lancaster London, 15 Basil Street and Hotel Indigo London K West Shepherd’s Bush alongside The Landmark Bangkok and Lancaster Bangkok, under one umbrella. Central to this unification is the group’s significant spa and wellness portfolio, which operates at an impressive scale across both London and Bangkok, offering world-class facilities and expert-led treatments that define the collection’s holistic approach to luxury. This transition and new identity represents a fundamental shift for the group, moving from a traditional hotel operations team into a growing, multi-sector hospitality management company and development platform. This evolution is designed to create a scalable foundation for future growth in the UK and globally through the acquisition of additional hotels and serviced apartments. By unifying its global assets, the group is establishing a common service ethos and shared values whilst also protecting the independent identities and micro-cultures of each individual property. In addition, the brand evolution provides more varied and dynamic career opportunities, diversity and choice for its B2B corporate partners and accommodation options at varying price points to cater for different needs and audiences. This model allows the group to provide the stability and strength of a collection while delivering the deeply personal service for which its properties are renowned. The launch of The Landmark Collection allows us to show up as one unified more powerful entity whilst still protecting each property’s individuality. By creating a scalable developer platform, we are not only streamlining our operations and improving guest servicing but also offering a varied and diverse selection of properties to a broader audience Fergus Stewart, General Manager and CEO of The Landmark London The Landmark Collection serves as the foundation for growth with plans to acquire more properties, develop a collective loyalty programme and explore opportunities within the sector.

Most independent hoteliers spend their marketing budget refining a website: sharper photography, faster load times, a cleaner booking widget. Meanwhile, Google has quietly stopped positioning itself as the place that sends travelers to that website. At Google Marketing Live this year, the company described itself not as a search engine but as an intelligent travel discovery and decision-making platform, built to understand intent, compare options, and eventually complete the booking itself. The distance between helping a guest find you and booking the room for them is closing faster than most hotel marketing plans account for. The decision is moving upstream of the click Forty percent of travelers now use an AI tool at some stage of trip planning, according to research from the International Journal of Advanced Research in Science, Communication and Technology. Similarweb's latest AI Brand Visibility Report found that consumers already rate AI tools as more useful than traditional search at the discovery stage, by a wide margin. None of this means search is finished: SiteMinder's data shows a fifth of travelers still start with a search engine, more in some markets than others. What it does mean is that a meaningful and growing share of guests are forming their shortlist, sometimes their decision, before a human ever lands on a hotel's own site. Google's own announcement of agentic hotel booking this year made the direction explicit. Instead of typing “hotels in Lisbon” and clicking through filters, a traveler can now ask for a boutique hotel in Lisbon with rooftop views, strong breakfast reviews and easy tram access under $300 a night, and let the system search inventory, compare rates and manage the reservation itself. The competition for attention used to happen on the page. Increasingly, it happens before the page exists. Direct booking gets easier, but being found doesn't The clearest fact here comes directly from Google, not from industry speculation. At Google Marketing Live this year, Vidhya Srinivasan, the company's VP and GM of Ads and Commerce, confirmed that Google's Universal Commerce Protocol is expanding to hotel booking, letting travelers complete a reservation directly inside AI Mode in Search. Google's own documentation is explicit on one point that matters for independent hotels: the property remains the Merchant of Record and keeps its own guest data and relationship. That is a genuinely reassuring detail, and a meaningful difference from the commission-driven OTA model that reshaped hotel distribution two decades ago. Here's my own reading of what that fact doesn't resolve. A 2026 audit of more than 120,000 hotel homepages found that barely one in ten had properly structured data, the kind of clean, machine-readable information an AI system needs to confidently recommend a property. OTA listings, by contrast, have always been standardized by design: the same fields, the same categories, for every hotel on the platform. An AI agent has to answer from whatever gives it a confident signal, and today that confidence still comes far more often from a listing on Booking.com or Expedia than from

Across a Copenhagen harbour, a nineteenth century spire stands in front of a power plant you can ski down. That same gap is now opening between the AI we use today and the intelligence coming next, and it is why you build for it before it arrives. Yesterday I stood across the harbour in Copenhagen and took this photograph. Look at it for a moment before you read on. In front, a 19th century building. Red tiled roofs, and at its end a dark bell-shaped spire gone almost black with age, the kind of craft that took a generation of hands to raise. Behind it, jarring against all of that, a machine of brushed steel and glass shears up into the sky like a mountain that should not be there. One was built to last a hundred years. The other looks like it landed last night. They have no business sharing a skyline, and yet somehow they belong together. The machine is CopenHill. Beneath that slope it burns much of the city's waste each year and turns it into clean power and heat for hundreds of thousands of homes. On its roof there is a ski run, hiking trails, and one of the tallest climbing walls in the world down one flank. Bjarke Ingels, who won the competition to build it in 2011, calls the idea hedonistic sustainability. A sustainable city, he says, does more than serve the planet. It is more enjoyable for the people who live in it. Here is the detail I cannot let go of. At the time, the whole idea was thought impossible. A power plant is something you hide behind a fence. Nobody climbs one for joy. They built it anyway. It opened in 2019, and years later it still stands almost alone, rarely equalled anywhere. They had nothing to copy and no proof it would hold. A power plant people would climb for joy was thought impossible. They built it, and years on it still stands almost alone. That is what being first actually costs. You move before the map exists, because you are the one drawing it. We are all standing in front of that same skyline now. In the foreground, the world we know, the craft and judgement of a career. Rising behind it, a machine most of us do not yet fully understand. Our first instinct, when the new thing appears, is to treat it as a threat to the old and to choose between them. The Danes refuse to choose. One of the happiest countries on earth, and one of the most productive. A state oil company there became the world leader in offshore wind, because it declined to accept that the two could not be one. I have spent 25 years in hospitality, an industry built on those same false choices. Cost or experience. Efficiency or warmth. A few weeks ago I wrote about four teams in one hotel who were each completely right and still lost money,

What does it really take to bring a struggling hotel back to life? Fresh paint helps. New carpets don't hurt. A refurbished reception certainly creates a good first impression. But the reality of turning around an underperforming hotel is rarely as glamorous as renovation TV shows would have us believe. More often, it must begin with what guests barely notice. New tech systems. Faster Wi-Fi. Better lighting. Electronic door locks. A stronger sales function. A team that believes in the same vision. And perhaps most importantly, a clear answer to one question. What kind of hotel do we actually want to become? A year after acquiring the Kings Court Hotel in Alcester near Stratford-upon-Avon, that question has shaped almost every decision Harpreet Singh and his team have made. Speaking on my Hoteliers' Voice podcast, Harpreet reflected on the realities of taking over a hotel that had been family-owned for 35 years, and what it really takes to transform a business from the ground up. The story, it turns out, isn't really about buildings. It's about vision. Falling in love with potential "We were looking to buy a hotel for four years," Harpreet explained. "My partners and I came to this hotel, and we all literally fell in love with this place." That feeling mattered. Dating back to the early 1900s, the Kings Court Hotel already had history, character and charm. What it also had was untapped potential. Buying a hotel is often viewed as the finish line. In reality, it's only the starting point. The temptation can be to dive straight into cosmetic improvements, but Harpreet's team took a different approach. Before thinking about repositioning the hotel in the market, they first had to make it work operationally. "When we took over the hotel, keys were missing for the manual locks, so we added electronic locks," Harpreet said. "Our infrastructure for guest Wi-Fi was poor and could hardly reach the end of the building. Now we’ve upgraded, and it’s 10 times better. There was no CCTV; now we’ve added it. Lighting was poor; we’ve improved that as well. We looked at everything, and we invested." IT has been brought in-house too, with a developer doing everything from website improvements, to building a bespoke table management system. None of these upgrades will feature in glossy marketing photography. Yet collectively, they change how the hotel functions every single day. A vision beyond the bedrooms Operational improvements may have laid the foundations, but they weren't the end goal. For Harpreet, transforming the Kings Court Hotel has always been about creating a destination that serves far more than overnight guests. Walking around the property, it's easy to see why. There are conference facilities, event spaces, wedding suites, landscaped outdoor areas and, tucked at the front of the hotel, a traditional pub called The Twisted Boot, which Harpreet has big plans for. "The idea is to separate the identity of the pub area," he explained. "People think it's a hotel bar. It isn't. It's a

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