Innovation

📧 Google’s Gemini AI transforms Gmail by prioritizing email relevance and engagement, impacting hotel email performance. This AI curates inboxes by surfacing important emails, affecting marketers who rely on volume. High engagement is key for visibility; low-engagement email risks being deprioritized. Hoteliers should focus on guest value and segmentation, cleaning lists and personalizing content. Google’s update emphasizes relevance, trust, and respect for user attention, crucial for hotel marketing success. Cendyn assists hotels with email strategy, serving 35,000 clients globally.

💻 Hotels are adapting tech systems as they scale, according to Stayntouch's 2026 study with NYU and IDeaS. Surveying 300+ hotel professionals, 68% of independent hotels with 100+ rooms opt for Best-in-Class systems for growth. Smaller hotels favor simplicity; larger ones need flexibility. Booking errors and guest preference issues are key concerns. Satisfaction rises with specialized systems offering open APIs and integration. This tech evolution supports smarter decisions, reflecting a shift in maturing hotel businesses.

📊 9.5 billion passengers have traveled, marking a 3% increase from pre-pandemic levels. However, airport retail sales are 13% below 2019 levels. At E23, this gap is tackled through a technology ecosystem. Spatial intelligence from Outsight uses 3D LiDAR, while ShopperAI offers behavioral insights. Pladway's DOOH platform enables targeted campaigns in 48 hours. Radical Storage helps optimize campaigns using profiling data. This approach aims to recover the 15% revenue left unclaimed by brands and retailers.

📈 AI adoption is reshaping the hospitality industry, with 98% of hotel owners integrating AI into operations, though only 32% have it fully embedded. Top uses include operational and energy efficiency (64% and 54%). By 2026, 61% aim to expand AI in construction planning. Data privacy, costs, and integration with legacy systems are key barriers. Wyndham’s investments have enabled 5,000 hotels to adopt AI, boosting satisfaction by 400 bps. Nearly 90% find brand partnerships key in AI adoption.

💻 Stuart Greif, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Forbes Travel Guide, highlights AI adoption in hotels is maturing, as discussed at Destination AI 2025. Greif led a panel on AI's role in enhancing revenue, sales, staffing, and guest experiences, urging a shift from an efficiency-first mindset. The panel is available on YouTube. AI's integration in hospitality is evolving, promising significant industry advancements.

🏨 Salt Lake City, UT, 27 January 2026: The Leading Hotels of the World (LHW) with over 400 luxury hotels in 80 countries, partners with Yipy, a Hospitality Standards Management System, through the Leading Strategic Sourcing (LSS) program. Yipy aids hotels in maintaining service excellence with measurable, tech-driven solutions, enhancing guest satisfaction and brand scores. This collaboration supports independent hotels in achieving service consistency while preserving individuality.

🔍 In 2025, the SEO industry faced a transformative year with the rise of AI assistants like ChatGPT, reaching 800 million weekly active users by March. The SEO landscape shifted towards AI search optimization, introducing terms like GEO and AEO. The $202.3 billion AI investment surge included Adobe’s $1.9 billion acquisition of Semrush. Despite the shift, traditional SEO remained critical, with AI tools still relying on search engines for information retrieval. Organic traffic decreased, prompting new success metrics.

📡 OpenAI plans to announce its first hardware device, potentially screen-free earbuds codenamed "Sweet Pea," in the latter half of 2026. The device may feature a custom 2-nanometer processor for local AI tasks, aiming to ship 40-50 million units in the first year. Potential manufacturing partners include Luxshare and Foxconn in Taiwan. OpenAI, with nearly a billion weekly ChatGPT users, seeks to enhance its AI assistant's development and distribution through exclusive features.

🏨 Revenue managers in 13 countries, totaling over 260 professionals, leverage key tech companies for hotel operations. Oracle Hospitality OPERA dominates the PMS space, SiteMinder leads in Channel Manager Software, and Mirai is prominent in Internet Booking Engines. This data was highlighted on revenuemanager.page. The role of revenue managers has evolved into system architects who build and visualize tech ecosystems. The next focus is on various hotel segments, including hotels, hostels, campings, and resorts.

💻 Guest journey automation for independent hotels optimizes pre-stay, in-stay, and post-stay phases to save time and enhance guest experience by reducing repetitive tasks. Pre-stay automation focuses on setting expectations and reducing emails. In-stay automation supports real-time guest needs discreetly. Post-stay automation gathers feedback and encourages repeat bookings. Lighthouse, used by over 70,000 hotels in 185 countries, offers integrated solutions for seamless guest experience and operational efficiency.