Innovation

🏨 AI is essential in hotels by 2026, shifting focus from SEO to data consistency for recommendation. The 2026 World Cup analysis shows cities with limited hotel supply saw high ADR gains, while dynamic pricing outperformed static rates. The Gallivant, East Sussex, highlights small hotels' tech advantages due to agility. Amsterdam's city tax may hit 20% by 2031. Sunborn London cut check-in time from 8 to 1 minute. Winnow aims to prevent over $1 billion in food waste globally.

📈 Apollos Gause and Rick Posey, in a Cendyn webinar, discuss AI's impact on hotel discovery via platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini. They outline strategies for marketers to enhance visibility in AI-powered searches. Cendyn, serving over 35,000 customers in 150+ countries, generates $20 billion annually in hotel revenue. The company, operating globally, emphasizes content that resonates with AI to influence hotel recommendations and increase visibility in this evolving digital landscape.

This article was written by Lodging Magazine. Click here to read the original article Soft brands have been surging in popularity among owners of unique hotels seeking enhanced visibility to…

When people talk about digital transformation in hospitality, the conversation often revolves around technology. New platforms, new integrations, and new capabilities tend to dominate the discussion. After speaking with Francisco Ventura , General Manager of Sunborn London, I found myself thinking about something quite different. What stayed with me wasn’t the technology itself. It was the idea that the best technology is almost invisible. When systems work together seamlessly, they remove the operational friction that stands between hotel teams and their guests. That, to me, is the real promise of interconnected hospitality . Takeaways Interconnected hospitality starts by removing friction before guests arrive. Faster processes create more opportunities for meaningful guest interactions. Secure, connected payment experiences strengthen guest trust. Technology delivers greater value when systems communicate seamlessly. The most successful digital transformation projects always keep people at the center. The best arrival experience doesn’t feel like a process Sunborn London is unlike most hotels. Permanently moored beside ExCeL London , it attracts business travelers attending major exhibitions and conferences, while also welcoming leisure guests who choose the yacht as the destination itself. Although their reasons for traveling differ, both groups share the same expectation. They want to arrive and immediately begin enjoying their stay. Francisco explained that this became the guiding principle behind Sunborn’s technology transformation. Rather than asking how the hotel could speed up check-in, the team asked a more meaningful question: how could they remove the administrative barriers that often define the first interaction between a guest and a hotel? The answer was to complete as much of the journey as possible before guests stepped through the door. Reservations, pre-registration, identity verification and payments now happen in advance, allowing reception teams to focus on welcoming rather than processing. One sentence perfectly captured that philosophy: We want them to feel as though their vacation has already begun. That idea resonated with me because it reminds us that hospitality doesn’t begin when a room key is handed over. It begins the moment a guest feels cared for. More than saving time One statistic from our conversation immediately stood out. Sunborn reduced its average check-in time from eight minutes to just one minute. On its own, that sounds like an operational success story. Yet Francisco framed it very differently. Those seven minutes are not simply saved. They are reinvested. Instead of collecting documents or processing payments, reception teams can recommend a restaurant, explain the facilities, help plan a celebration, or simply have a genuine conversation. Technology becomes valuable because it creates opportunities for human interaction rather than replacing it. That perspective feels particularly relevant at a time when hotels are investing heavily in automation. The objective should never be to reduce hospitality. It should be to create more space for it. Trust is becoming part of the guest experience Another moment that stayed with me was Francisco’s discussion about payments . Payment technology is rarely the most exciting topic in hospitality, yet he described it in a way that made me

The trigger Two AI model launches, forty-eight hours apart, are the reason for this paper. On 15 July 2026, Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter open-weight model. The company said outright it isn't the strongest model on the market — the pitch is that enterprises would rather own and fine-tune a good model than rent a great one. A day later, China's Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight system that independent evaluators ranked close to, and on some coding benchmarks ahead of, the leading closed frontier models from the US labs. Neither event is, on its own, remarkable. Model launches happen weekly. What makes this pairing worth a Viewpoint is the price signal underneath it. Kimi K3's output pricing runs around $15 per million tokens. The frontier closed model it's being benchmarked against runs roughly $50 for the same volume. That's not a discount. That's a different market. The Lambo-and-Camry problem The trade press has taken to describing this as a Lambo-and-Camry moment — plenty of very good, very reliable options now sit on the lot beside the flagship. It's a tidy line, but it understates what's happening for an owner-operator, because a hotel guest has never once asked what car brought their room-service order up. They notice whether it arrived hot, on time, and correctly. The badge on the token is invisible to them. It is entirely visible on your P&L. The guest has never asked what model answered their question. They've only ever asked whether the answer was right. Reframing this through TCPG This is precisely the gap Token Cost Per Guest was built to expose: token consumption is not a technology metric; it's a unit-economics one, and it only means something once price is treated as a variable rather than a constant. Most owner-operators are still budgeting for AI the way they budgeted for their first PMS license — one vendor, one price, reviewed annually. That assumption breaks in an environment where the underlying compute for a comparable task can fall by an order of magnitude in a single news cycle, as it plainly has this week. The honest picture, though, is not "switch everything to the cheap model." It's that TCPG now needs to be modeled as two regimes, not one — and the next 12 months will be about learning to route between them rather than picking a single vendor and staying loyal to it out of habit. Regime Commodity tokens Judgment tokens Typical task Guest FAQ chat, review summarizing, routine drafting, translation Multi-system agentic orchestration, brand-voice output, service recovery, compliance-sensitive judgment Price trajectory Falling fast — open-weight models now price this a full order of magnitude below flagship closed models Sticky — frontier labs are holding premium pricing where the cost of a wrong answer outweighs the token saving TCPG posture Route to open-weight or mid-tier models; treat brand-name pricing here as overpaying Retain closed frontier models; the premium is buying risk reduction, not just intelligence What changes in

Most hotel leaders will look back at 2026 and realize it was the year the rules changed without an announcement. There will be no single launch moment. No dramatic platform reveals that forces everyone to scramble. No overnight collapse of the systems hotels depend on today. What will happen instead is slower and more dangerous. The assumptions that shaped how hotels attracted demand, converted guests, and operated day to day will stop being true, one by one, until the old playbook no longer works, even though it still looks familiar. The biggest mistake hotels can make right now is thinking the next phase is about “adding AI.” Buying another tool. Testing a chatbot. Automating a report. Those things will matter, but they are not the shift. The shift is structural. The guest journey hotels spent the last decade optimizing is no longer where decisions begin. And by the time that becomes obvious in numbers, the advantage will already belong to someone else. The Front Door to Your Hotel Is No Longer a Website Discovery Quietly Moves from Pages to Answers For years, the mental model was simple. A traveler searches. They compare. They click. They land on a website. The hotel’s job is to rank, persuade, and convert. That model is eroding. In 2026, more travel decisions will start inside conversational interfaces that do the comparison work on the guest’s behalf. Instead of opening ten tabs, travelers will ask for a system to summarize options, explain tradeoffs, and recommend where to stay based on preferences they may not even articulate clearly. What comes back is not a list of links. It is the answer. This matters because answers behave differently from search results. Search rewarded visibility. Answers reward confidence. An AI system does not ask which hotel looks nicest. It asks which hotel it can safely recommend. Safety, in this context, is not about risk in the human sense. It is about data certainty. Consistency. Freshness. Proof. If your room types are inconsistently described across channels, that is a risk. If your cancellation policies are unclear, that is a risk. If reviews contradict your marketing, that is a risk. If availability data lags or fails, that is a risk. So, the question hotels must start asking is not “how do we rank?” It is “Would a machine confidently recommend us?” That is a very different game. Visibility Stops Being About Page One And Starts Being About Machine Confidence The uncomfortable truth is that many hotels have built their digital presence for humans who tolerate ambiguity. Humans will forgive unclear fees if the photos are beautiful. Humans will forgive clunky booking flows if the location is perfect. Humans will fill in gaps with emotion. Machines do none of that. An AI agent evaluating where to send demand is not impressed by storytelling if the underlying facts are inconsistent. It is not persuaded by brand voice if the inventory data is unreliable. It is not patient with exceptions. This is why visibility

One of hospitality's common myths is that big hotel groups have the tech advantage. After all, they have the budget, the IT department and the data that independents can only dream of. But this story just creates excuses for small or boutique properties not to dream big. And it’s also, according to the latest episode of Matt Talks Hospitality, mostly wrong. Mews CEO, Matt Welle, sat down with Elise Roberts, Managing Director of Happiness Hospitality and the GM behind The Gallivant, a coastal boutique hotel in East Sussex that picked up a MICHELIN key and VisitEngland's Small Hotel of the Year. Elise has worked both sides of the size divide, from Hilton and Aviator through to running tech for a single, fiercely personal property. In her opinion: "Modern tech has given much more opportunity to independent hotels." The importance of intentional technology Big hotel groups are strong commercially, with loyalty data and repeat business often locked up tight. But under the hood, many of them are running newer tools bolted onto legacy cores – layered rather than unified. This creates a disconnect that can slow and limit the brand’s potential. An independent property doesn't carry that weight. "We can be more agile, we can be a bit scrappy, and we can try things and move on quickly if they don't work," Elise says. Shorter contracts help. Some vendors now run rolling 30-day terms, so a tool that isn't earning its place can be swapped out fast, without the multi-year lock-in that slows a bigger operator down. Unlike many systems used by bigger operators, Mews doesn’t charge connection fees for integrations, removing another barrier to agility. The Gallivant runs on 18 different solutions. For a small, seasonal, independently run boutique hotel, it feels like a lot. But every tool has a job, and every tool gets reviewed against two questions: does it add more value than it costs, in revenue, efficiency or better decisions, and will the team actually use it? "We just can't justify two weeks of classroom training to learn a new system," Elise says. Without an HR or training department to lean on, a system that a new starter can't largely teach themselves is a system that doesn't get chosen. That same discipline runs through the property's approach to iteration. When The Gallivant relaunched its restaurant, it priced the menu for the local market and, in doing so, narrowed its range so guests couldn't splash out on special occasions. Average spend took a hit, but the team caught it and they're correcting course. It's a small example of a bigger habit: try something, measure it, change it. In other words, "don't be afraid to fail." Fewer vendors, not more tools Specialist software can be important, but hotels shouldn’t collect them for their own sake. Yes, 18 tools is a lot, but Elise is actively folding standalone software into the core system whenever she can, because a connected operating system beats a stack of separately excellent parts. The hotel

A hotel breakfast experience is like a first date: A good one or not so good one leaves an indelible mark on the rest of the stay. Hoteliers are taking…

This article was written by Lodging Magazine. Click here to read the original article Photo Credit: Nobu Hotels Hudini announced that it has entered into an agreement with Nobu Hotels…

Winnow, the AI food waste technology company, has appointed Paul Whetsell (CEO, CapStar Hotel Company) and Gregory Maliassas (CEO, Driftwood Hospitality Management) to a new Advisory Board. The board is designed to help Winnow scale its food waste AI across hotel and resort portfolios globally. Chicago, 6.23.26 — Winnow, the AI food waste technology company trusted by leading hospitality brands including Hilton, Marriott, and Accor, today announced the formation of a new Advisory Board with the appointment of two seasoned hospitality executives: Paul Whetsell, Chief Executive Officer of CapStar Hotel Company, and Gregory Maliassas, CEO of Driftwood Hospitality Management. The Advisory Board has been established to bring deep operational and strategic expertise to bear on Winnow's product development and go-to-market strategy, as the company scales its technology across the global hospitality sector. Paul Whetsell brings more than 45 years of hospitality industry experience. He founded the original CapStar Hotel Company in 1987 and has since led some of the industry's most prominent organisations, including as Chairman and CEO of Interstate Hotels and Resorts, and President and CEO of Loews Hotels & Resorts. He currently serves as a Non-Executive Director on the boards of Boyd Gaming Corporation and Hilton Grand Vacations. Gregory Maliassas brings three decades of international operational leadership, with particular depth in the resort and all-inclusive sector. In April 2026, he was announced as CEO of Driftwood Hospitality Management. Previously, as Chief Operating Officer of Playa Hotels & Resorts, he oversaw branded all-inclusive properties across the Caribbean and Mexico in partnership with Marriott, Hyatt, IHG, Hilton, and Wyndham, leading a team of more than 15,000 employees. He has also held senior roles with Accor across luxury brands including Raffles, Fairmont, and Sofitel. Looking ahead, Winnow plans to deepen its partnerships with the world's leading hospitality operators as it works toward an ambitious goal: helping the industry prevent more than $1 billion in food waste. The newly formed Advisory Board will play a key role in shaping this next phase of growth, providing operational insight to help Winnow scale its AI-powered technology across complex hotel and resort environments, accelerate adoption in key markets, and ensure the company continues to deliver measurable financial and environmental results for operators worldwide. Marc Zornes, Founder and CEO of Winnow, said: "Paul and Greg bring the kind of hard-won operational experience that can only come from running large, complex hospitality businesses at the highest level. Their perspectives will help us build technology that works in the real world - in busy kitchens, across large portfolios, and in environments where margins are tight and the pressure is constant." Paul Whetsell said: "Food waste has always been a cost that the industry accepted as inevitable. What Winnow has shown is that with the right data, it isn't. For a business running hundreds of hotel rooms, the numbers are significant - money that falls straight to the bottom line when you get it right. That's a straightforward case to make to any operator, and it's why I think