Innovation

Recycled fibres are gaining attention as industries look for practical ways to reduce waste and use resources more efficiently. The idea is simple: materials that would otherwise be discarded, burned, or treated as low-value by-products are processed into fibres for new paper, packaging, and textile products. Paper and many fibre-based products have traditionally relied on wood pulp. Although responsibly managed forests remain an essential source of fibre, concerns over forest conservation, deforestation, and supply chain transparency have encouraged manufacturers to diversify their raw materials. Recycled fibres provide one of those options. These fibres come from various sources. Agricultural residues such as wheat straw, rice straw, and sugarcane bagasse can be converted into pulp instead of being burned or discarded. Recycled fibres also come from post-industrial and post-consumer textiles, including cotton offcuts, surplus fabric, and used clothing. After collection, cleaning, sorting, and processing, these materials are transformed into new paper, packaging, and other fibre-based products. The benefits go beyond waste reduction. Recycled fibres reduce agricultural and textile waste, expand raw material choices, and lower reliance on virgin wood pulp. A broader mix of fibre sources also strengthens supply chain resilience and supports responsible resource management. Recycled fibres are not a universal solution. Feedstocks differ in quality, availability, cleanliness, and processing requirements. Their environmental performance also depends on energy use, chemical inputs, transportation, and the intended application. Like any material, recycled fibres must meet practical requirements for quality, safety, traceability, consistency, and cost. At GCSTIMES, we view recycled fibres as an important industry development. While our sustainability strategy remains focused on FSC-certified materials, product carbon footprint management, greener transportation, and energy efficiency, we continue to follow innovations that improve material sustainability and circularity. By understanding new materials and responsible sourcing practices, we help our hospitality partners make more informed purchasing decisions. The future of sustainable materials is not simply about discovering better materials; it is about creating smarter systems where resources are used more efficiently, waste is minimised, and environmental impact is reduced throughout the product lifecycle.

🏌️ Glenn Haussman, who doesn’t play golf, keeps receiving golf deals from hotels due to disconnected systems that trap hotel data in silos. Dana Cariss, SVP of Revenue Strategy at CoralTree Hospitality, demonstrated how the industry is close to resolving this issue by integrating these systems for better data communication. This approach will enhance personalized guest experiences and improve marketing accuracy, ultimately reducing irrelevant promotions like the golf deals Glenn receives.

💻 Motel 6, October 2023, launched a plugin on ChatGPT to enhance travel planning. This integration allows users to find Motel 6 locations through natural conversation. The initiative aims to simplify the travel planning process by making it more intuitive.

IRIS , the market leader in digital ordering and guest experience solutions, has partnered with the Glasgow Marriott Hotel , one of Scotland's largest and busiest hotels, to boost its room service revenue by 24% year-on-year and fulfil demand for digital-first guest experiences. The deployment of IRIS Mobile Ordering and Digital Guest Directory solutions underscores the hotel’s strategy to deliver a seamless guest experience, drive sales and improve operational efficiency. Part of the Kingfisher Hospitality Group, the 303-bedroom Glasgow Marriott Hotel selected IRIS Mobile Ordering , fully integrated with Oracle Micros POS, alongside the IRIS Digital Guest Directory to meet rising guest expectations for digital convenience and reduce the administrative burden. Guests can browse menus, order room service, access hotel information and discover local recommendations directly from their own smartphones via QR codes in guest rooms or through the Marriott Bonvoy app. "IRIS has become an integral part of our operation with 80% of our room service orders now coming through the platform. Both guests and staff find it incredibly easy to use. We've seen significant growth in revenue and orders year after year, while also becoming much more efficient operationally,” said Bence Banati, Director of Operations, Glasgow Marriott Hotel. “The reliability of the system is particularly important for us. As a busy hotel, we need complete confidence that orders will reach the kitchen and guests will receive exactly what they've ordered, and IRIS consistently delivers that." By replacing traditional phone ordering with a mobile-first experience, order volumes have grown by 23% and it has transformed the efficiency of its room service operation. Orders flow directly into the kitchen POS, removing manual order entry, reducing errors and allowing the hotel to operate room service with fewer resources while freeing staff to focus on delivering exceptional guest service. The four-star hotel continues to optimise guest spend through intelligent merchandising, using promotional tags, featured menu items, high-quality imagery and targeted upselling recommendations that encourage guests to add complementary items or upgrade their purchases. Guests also benefit from the flexibility to pre-order breakfast, allowing kitchen teams greater visibility of demand while providing a more convenient experience for travellers with early departures or busy schedules. Darren Panto, Senior Account Manager at IRIS, adds: "Hotels are under increasing pressure to deliver exceptional guest experiences while operating with leaner teams and finding new ways to grow revenue. Glasgow Marriott Hotel is an excellent example of how the right technology can achieve both. By digitising room service and guest communications, the hotel has created a smoother experience for guests, significantly improved operational efficiency and unlocked measurable commercial growth. The results show that mobile ordering has become far more than a convenience feature; it's now a proven revenue driver that supports both guest satisfaction and operational excellence." Beyond food and beverage, the IRIS Digital Guest Directory has enabled Glasgow Marriott to eliminate printed guest directories and room service menus entirely. Guests now have instant access to hotel facilities, local recommendations and important hotel information on their own devices,

Sonder is back. Sort of. A Vancouver company called TravelAI™, An UpNext Company, just bought the Sonder name out of bankruptcy proceedings and …

Personalization has long been a key element of hospitality, but guest expectations have evolved faster than traditional service models can keep up. Today’s travelers demand that hotels recognize them, anticipate their needs and tailor experiences seamlessly across every touchpoint. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is proving a key tool in the hoteliers’ arsenal, transforming personalization from a manual, reactive process into an intelligent, predictive one. AI-driven guest technology is no longer a “nice to have”, it has become a strategic enabler for differentiation, loyalty and revenue growth. From fragmented data to a unified guest profile Historically, guest data has lived in silos: PMS, CRM, loyalty systems, POS and third-party platforms. AI changes the equation by collecting and analyzing data from multiple sources to create a unified, dynamic guest profile. Preferences, past behavior, spending patterns and contextual data can now be viewed and interpreted in real time. This intelligence allows hotels to move beyond surface-level personalization, such as remembering a birthday, towards deeper, more meaningful engagement. AI can predict what a guest is likely to want next, whether that’s a dining recommendation, a spa offer or a late check-out, and surface it at exactly the right moment. Alongside the correct digital touchpoints, we’ve seen AI dining recommendations boost revenue on in-room dining by over 650% in a six month period in properties we have worked with. Hyper-personalization across the guest journey AI-powered guest apps are at the centre of this transformation. Pre-arrival, staff can personalize communication, upsell relevant experiences and reduce friction through digital check-in and identity verification. During the stay, AI functions as a personal concierge, communicating instantly in the guest’s preferred language and channel, intelligently resolving requests, and seamlessly coordinating teams behind the scenes to deliver a smooth, efficient experience. Hudini’s chat module enables culturally nuanced messaging, personalized solutions, and tailored upselling for guests wherever they are from. As a core part of the hotel experience, chat drives meaningful engagement: some hotels have exchanged over 8,400 messages in six months, with AI helping maintain a negative tone in fewer than 3% of interactions. Post-stay, AI continues to deliver value by analyzing feedback, predicting future intent, and enabling targeted re-engagement that feels relevant rather than generic. Empowering hotel teams to personalize better Guest personalization isn’t just guest-facing. It starts with empowering hotel teams. AI-powered staff apps deliver real-time insights, alerts, and recommendations directly to employees on the move, reducing administrative burden and enabling more meaningful guest interactions. Hotels have registered up to a 40% reduction in response times and hundreds of front-desk hours saved. With AI-driven insights, staff can personalize service with confidence: welcoming returning guests with context, anticipating needs, and resolving issues proactively. Automating routine tasks like check-in, translation, and reporting frees teams to focus on what matters most: the human connection. The result is seamless convenience for guests and greater clarity and control for staff, a true win-win. Importantly, this also helps attract and retain talent. Digital-first tools align with how modern employees expect to work, making roles more engaging

Offering a late check-out should be simple. Guests want it, and they’re often happy to pay forty or fifty dollars for it. So why do so many properties have to say no? It’s not because the room isn’t available. It’s because they don’t have the system in place to connect the operational pieces together. That's the story Cole Rubin, Co-founder and CEO of Conduit, told Matt Welle on the latest episode of Matt Talks Hospitality. Before building an AI agent platform for hospitality, Cole ran a $19 million residential portfolio of around 200 properties across Airbnb and Booking.com . Cole knows the midnight messages and the missed calls firsthand, because he used to be the one answering them. Here’s how he fixed the problem. The forty-dollar problem Cole says many hotels lose money orchestrating and facilitating these early check-outs, to the point where they choose not to offer them. A request that should be a quick yes turns into four separate steps of back-and-forth between front desk, housekeeping and the guest. Conduit's approach is to let an AI agent handle that whole chain: checking the reservation calendar, confirming with housekeeping, taking payment, updating the guest, all without a human in the loop at all. It’s indicative of the wider shift Cole and Matt spend the episode discussing: guest communication is no longer the endpoint of an AI agent's job. It's the trigger for everything that happens next. From unified inbox to back-office agent AI can only work effectively if it has the full context of what’s needed. That’s why Cole and Conduit team started with the infrastructure around guest communication. Their first year was spent unifying every channel a guest might use: texts, Airbnb messages, booking site inboxes and PMS data. An agent that can only see half a guest's conversation can't act on it. Only once this was all in place did the team turn to the AI itself. The result? "We can instantly respond to that message – most times – better than a human would able be able to." When the agent can't handle something, it hands off to a person through the same inbox. And increasingly, it doesn't stop at the reply. It sends the payment link, updates the checkout time, and notifies the cleaning team. In other words, it handles the tasks that accompany the message, not just the message itself. Teaching the machine, not fixing the message AI will sometimes make mistakes – just as humans do. The trick is ensuring the mistakes don’t happen again. When the AI gets something wrong, don't just patch the individual message and move on. Go back to the input, the knowledge base, the instruction, the guardrail, and fix the thing that caused the mistake so it doesn't happen again. Conduit has given that role a name: conversation engineer. Someone whose job is to sit with the conversations the AI couldn't handle and teach it what it was missing. It's the same discipline that good managers use with

The week opens with the AI search monetization moment that the distribution thread has been building toward for three weeks. Google is selling placement inside AI answers, and the first hotel partner is a major chain brought in by invitation. That's the structure of every new intermediary at the moment it turns on the revenue tap: start with credible partners, make access feel like privilege, then scale. The DMA piece published alongside it is the necessary counterweight: hotels already have more pricing freedom than most of them are using. Google Is Now Selling Placement Inside the AI Answer, Starting with IHG, by Invitation Only hospitality.today and reconline AG report that Google has launched a Direct Offers format that places sponsored promotions inside AI-generated travel recommendations. IHG is named as the first hotel partner in what is currently an invitation-only program. The structure is precise: a hotel chain pays to appear inside an AI answer that looks like an organic recommendation, in a format that guests have no reason to identify as paid placement. The piece identifies this as the monetization inflection point for AI search. For three weeks, the brief has covered AI as a visibility problem: most hotels don't appear in AI recommendations, citation share is concentrating, and AI rankings are unstable. Google Direct Offers reframes the problem: visibility in AI answers is now also purchasable, by invitation, at rates Google controls. Independent hotels and small chains are not in the room for this conversation. Read the analysis → The Law That Just Fined Google Has Been Running on Booking.com Since December 2024 hospitality.today and reconline AG follow Friday's Google fine story with a piece most hoteliers will find genuinely surprising: the EU's Digital Markets Act forced Booking.com to drop rate parity clauses in December 2024, giving hotels the legal right to offer lower rates on their own websites than on Booking. The right exists. Most hotels aren't using it, either because they don't know it applies to them or because they're concerned about Booking's algorithmic response to properties that undercut its listed rate. The piece makes a clean argument: the regulatory framework has already moved in hotels' favor on pricing, and the commercial opportunity is sitting unused. Whether hotels can act on it without triggering visibility penalties in Booking's ranking system is the open question the piece raises without fully resolving. Read the argument → Hilton Tops Luxury Hotels by Brand Value at $19.2 Billion Brand Finance's Hotels 50 2026 report puts Hilton first in luxury hotel brand value at $19.2 billion, up 28% year-on-year, while Taj Hotels leads brand strength with a Brand Strength Index score of 93.5 out of 100. Marriott and IHG follow Hilton in brand value, with the top three collectively accounting for a disproportionate share of total sector brand equity and reinforcing the winner-take-most pattern that has run through the AI visibility coverage this month. The data point that sits under the headline is the 28% year-on-year gain: brand value at this scale

💰 Google’s AI-powered ad system, AI Max, is now serving over 500,000 advertisers after its beta phase. New features include Highlighted Answers and Direct Offers, with IHG being the first hotel partner. Google reports a 15% increase in conversions and a 20% boost in ad relevance. The AI Max initiative, initially predicted to be auction-based, currently operates as an invitation-only program, offering valuable ad space within AI recommendations. Highlighted Answers is in testing, showing "early traction.

💻 HITEC 2026 in San Antonio highlights AI's evolving role in hotels, beyond chatbots, into governance of AI agents across departments. The emergence of Agent Management Platforms (AMP) aids in managing AI agents, ensuring governance, security, and cost control. Token costs, a burgeoning expense with AI adoption, will require careful management for optimization. Managers must now focus on designing decision systems rather than task oversight, representing a shift towards AI-driven operational strategies in the hotel industry.