Innovation

🏖 In June and July 2026, an AI visibility audit by Americas Great Resorts analyzed nine luxury hotels across five markets using platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others. The name recognition test succeeded for all properties, yet the category test failed mostly due to reliance on third-party sources. A 2025 Cloudbeds study found 55.3% of AI hotel citations are from online travel agencies and 13.6% from hotel websites. This highlights the importance of managing category sources for improved visibility in AI-generated searches.

💻 Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals (HFTP) collaborates with Destination AI to advance artificial intelligence in hospitality. The 3rd Annual Destination AI Hospitality Summit will be held in Washington, D.C., on September 29–30, 2026, aiming for 500 attendees. Last year, over 300 participants from 280+ companies attended. The event focuses on AI's business impact and innovation. HFTP supports AI education with partners like AHLA and BLLA.

A lively conversation on the real state of robotics in hospitality, from where automation is already delivering ROI to what is still holding broader adoption back. Thank you to Sloan Dean, Susan Graves, Roman Pedan, and Ried Floco for joining me and sharing such candid perspectives on the operational realities, workforce impact, and future of hotel robotics.

Two pieces in this series set up the problem. Chains built their AI tools for a journey that starts on their own platforms, while the part where travelers actually discover a hotel moved onto surfaces the chains don't own and can't control. Marriott made the smartest response anyone's made — a spot inside Google AI Mode while still defending its own front door — but on Google's terms and at a price nobody has put in writing yet. The discovery layer has an owner. It isn't the hotels. One asset sits outside all of that. It's been sitting there for twenty years, treated as a marketing program when it was really a strategic position. The loyalty database. What an AI agent actually needs Think about what an AI agent has to know to book a hotel stay on a traveler's behalf. Where that person has stayed before. What they liked. What tier they hold. What rate they're owed. And how to actually complete the payment. None of that is on Google's page. None of it is in ChatGPT's training. It lives in one place: the loyalty program. Look at the size of what the chains are holding. Marriott Bonvoy has 283 million members, 43 million of them added in 2025 alone, signed up across 68% of its hotels. Hilton Honors has more than 200 million. World of Hyatt hit 63 million at the end of 2025, up 19% in a year. Call these what they are. Not mailing lists. They're detailed records of how hundreds of millions of people travel — where they go, the room they pick, what they spend once they're there, and the card they pay with. That's exactly the picture an agent needs to book for someone without asking twenty questions first. On the Q4 2025 earnings call, Capuano said Marriott is optimistic that AI will pull more travelers into the Bonvoy ecosystem and strengthen direct booking. Notice the framing. In his telling, the loyalty program isn't something the agentic shift happens to. It's the thing the agentic shift runs on. What the chains are building toward IHG's CEO Elie Maalouf confirmed on his own Q4 2025 call that the company is building one unified loyalty and CRM platform on Salesforce, with an AI-powered version coming in 2026. The plan is plain: get all the guest's preference data in one place, clean, and ready for the systems that will handle agentic booking. IHG One Rewards passed nine million app downloads in 2025. The app is what the guest sees. The Salesforce platform underneath is the data an AI agent could reach into. Hyatt's Mark Hoplamazian went further on his call. Hyatt has already put four large agentic AI platforms to work inside the company, built its own private-cloud setup that runs models from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic side by side, and is getting ready for what he called agent-to-agent booking — Hyatt's own AI dealing directly with the AI of a corporate travel manager, a

Lodging Interactive, a hospitality digital marketing company with more than 25 years of experience serving hotels, resorts, and hospitality management companies, today announced the launch of CruVu™ , a new private Customer-Powered Recognition service designed to help hotel leaders better understand, recognize, and improve the departments and team members that shape the guest experience. ‍ Finally, know which departments create your best guest experiences. ‍ For more than two decades, Lodging Interactive has helped hotels protect and strengthen their online reputation through guest review management, social media marketing, and digital guest engagement. Through that work, the company recognized an important opportunity to help hotel operators move beyond managing guest feedback after the stay and begin using it to improve the guest experience while it is being created. CruVu was developed to fill that gap. ‍ Unlike traditional reputation management services that focus on responding to public reviews, CruVu captures private guest recognition and transforms it into meaningful operational intelligence for hotel leadership. Guests can quickly recognize the departments that made the greatest impact on their stay, such as Front Desk, Housekeeping, Engineering, Food & Beverage, Concierge, Valet, or Spa Services. Rather than publishing that information publicly, CruVu delivers it privately to hotel management, where it becomes actionable intelligence for recognition, coaching, and operational improvement. ‍ “Since 2001, we’ve helped hotels understand what their guests are saying,” said DJ Vallauri, Founder and CEO of Lodging Interactive. “After reviewing and responding to millions of guest comments, we realized that by the time a public review is posted, the opportunity to recognize great work and reinforce exceptional service has often passed. We wanted to create a better way to help hotel leaders recognize the departments driving outstanding guest experiences and provide managers with meaningful insights to coach their teams.” ‍ CruVu extends reputation management upstream by helping hotels improve the guest experiences that ultimately create their reputation. ‍ CruVu is designed as a private internal guest-powered recognition service that complements Lodging Interactive’s reputation management offerings. Guest recognition is never intended to replace public reviews. Instead, it gives hotel leaders an additional source of operational intelligence that helps answer important questions: Which departments consistently exceed guest expectations? Which areas deserve greater recognition? Where are coaching opportunities emerging? What service trends are developing across shifts, departments, or locations? How can leadership reinforce the behaviors that create memorable guest experiences? ‍ By combining customer-powered recognition with operational insights, CruVu helps hotel managers celebrate success, strengthen team engagement, improve service consistency, and ultimately create better guest experiences that naturally contribute to stronger online reviews, greater guest trust, and increased loyalty. ‍ “Reputation is built long before a guest posts an online review,” Vallauri added. “CruVu helps hotel leaders recognize the people and departments behind exceptional service, creating a culture where recognition and coaching become part of everyday operations. Better guest experiences naturally lead to stronger reputations.” ‍ Extending the Same CruVu Philosophy to Restaurants ‍ In restaurant environments, guests often recognize individual team members, servers, bartenders, hosts,

We sat down with Sean Anderson three days into his role as Chief Revenue Officer of RobosizeME , and he came at it from a useful angle, because he's done this before. At Book4Time, the spa and wellness software company, he consulted with founder and CEO Roger Sholanki for a year before joining as VP of Sales and eventually CRO. He’s followed a similar pattern at RobosizeME: he invested in the last funding round in February, consulted with RSM's founder and CEO Stephen for a month or two, and has now joined full-time as CRO to run sales, marketing, and partnerships. When we asked him to explain RobosizeME in plain terms, he reached for a framing built for a CIO. In hospitality, even in 2026, there's a pile of manual, repetitive, tedious work that has to get done every single day across reservations, finance, distribution, and revenue management. RobosizeME's job is to be the glue between the systems that handle it. The term he used to describe this best was agentic middleware, though as the conversation went on he was careful that "agentic" is only part of what they actually do. The work that eats two hours a day Sean's clearest example came from a corporate director of revenue management he'd spoken to the week before, who runs a team of 66 people. The chain offers its franchisees a corporate revenue-management service, and when the corporate team is involved rather than the franchisee going it alone, they see a real RevPAR uplift from the expertise. But every day, new rate recommendations come in, and the corporate revenue managers spend two to three hours playing email ping-pong to get approvals, because they need an audit trail on every sign-off from the franchisee. It's low-value work, and it caps how far the program can scale, because there are only so many hours in the day. RobosizeME automates that approval loop so the team can cover more properties and focus on higher-value work. The franchisee gets higher RevPAR, corporate benefits, and there are fewer mistakes because the manual step is gone. The other examples are the same shape. OTA and virtual-card reconciliation, where someone has to take a virtual card from one payment window and move it to another by hand, then assign what's covered on the OTA's card versus the card collected on property. At a busy front desk the on-property card sometimes overrides the OTA card, and then you've got a tangle of issues to fix manually through the OTA portal. Reservation quality checks are another. The thread through all of it is manual work still being done, in 2026, across reservations, finance, and distribution. The part that isn't AI, on purpose Here's the part that sets RobosizeME apart from the AI-for-everything pitch. When there's a defined, standardised process to run, they use RPA, robotic process automation, rather than AI. The preferred way in is an API, but APIs aren't always available, or aren't as open as vendors claim, even now.

Executive Summary Two phrases entered hospitality's vocabulary this week without anyone in the industry quite asking for them: “ frontier model ” and “ application layer .” Both come from outside hospitality — one from AI labs, one from enterprise software — but both describe a fight now underway inside every hotel's technology stack: who supplies the intelligence, and who gets to keep the value it creates. On 2 July 2026, Microsoft announced Microsoft Frontier Company: a $2.5 billion commitment to embed 6,000 engineers directly within customer organizations, going beyond what it calls Forward Deployed Engineering to co-design and continuously improve AI systems to deliver measurable outcomes. It is the fourth such move in roughly a month — Amazon, OpenAI, and Anthropic each stood up comparable deployment organizations across May and June. Separately, and rather more combatively, Palantir's Alex Karp used a live CNBC interview the same week to argue that the model itself is now the least interesting part of the stack — that value, trust, and control sit in what he calls the application layer, not in the frontier model beneath it. Neither story mentions a hotel. Both describe hospitality's next five years with uncomfortable precision. This paper explains the two terms in plain language, traces where the money and the argument are actually going, and sets out what independents, regional groups, and owners should watch for — and do — in the next 12 to 24 months. Two Terms, Defined Plainly The Frontier Model A “frontier model” is simply the most capable general-purpose AI engine available at a given time — Claude, GPT, Gemini, and a handful of others. Think of it as raw horsepower: extraordinary at language, reasoning, and increasingly at using tools, but generic. Out of the box, a frontier model knows nothing about a specific hotel's rate structure, its loyalty tiers, its housekeeping schedule, or the fact that room 412's air-conditioning has been flagged twice this month. It is priced by the token — the fragment of text it reads or writes — and, as of mid-2026, that price is falling fast. Open-weight models from providers such as Alibaba's Qwen and DeepSeek now sit within single digits of closed frontier models on many benchmarks, at a fraction of the cost per token. The strategic implication is blunt: the model itself is becoming a commodity input rather than a competitive advantage. The Application Layer The application layer is everything that wraps around that raw model to make it safe, specific, and useful within a particular business. In hospitality terms, it is the layer that knows which PMS record a guest's message refers to, which rate rules a revenue engine is allowed to override autonomously, and which a human must approve, what a loyalty member is entitled to, and what must never be said to a guest without a human in the loop. It is also, increasingly, the layer that decides which frontier model actually does the thinking underneath — and can swap it out without

This article was written by Mauricio Prieto. Click here to read the original article How a bootstrapped, profitable API company is becoming the backbone for AI-driven travel distribution Welcome to…

🤖 A Chinese court ruled a company unlawfully dismissed an employee due to AI automation, emphasizing AI should augment rather than replace workers. IKEA demonstrated leadership by retraining staff for new roles after automating routine tasks. Hospitality relies on human interaction beyond AI's capabilities. CDR's World Panel on Talent and Culture explores shaping leaders to optimize remaining human-centric roles. Christina Reti leads CDR Talent Advisory, advising in luxury hospitality and real estate, focusing on leadership and people transformation.