Americans Are Moving to Russia on an ‘Anti-Woke’ Visa
Americans Are Moving to Russia on an ‘Anti-Woke’ Visa
First openings for lifestyle soft brand expected in November
https://www.costar.com/article/2034651107/hiltons-new-collection-brand-outset-targets-upper-midscale-and-upscale-hotels
A future Outset Collection by Hilton hotel in Moab, Utah. (Hilton)
Hilton officials have announced their 25th brand, a lifestyle-focused upper-midscale and upscale soft brand called Outset Collection by Hilton.
President of Global Brands and Commercial Services Chris Silcock said the impetus of the brand grew from owners' interest in the company's other collection brands.
Owners "recognize the strength of the Hilton engine," he said in an interview. "We've achieved the highest market shares across our estate by a long shot compared to our competitors. So there's a thirst from owners to get access to that. We have Curio [Collection] at the upper end of upper-upscale as a full-service collection, allowing some of those real destination hotels to join. We have Tapestry [Collection by Hilton] below that with, again, good quality finish but slightly lower service level — but still a full-service hotel with room services, gyms and food and beverage. Then we had lots of owners coming to us with hotels that don't quite meet those standards in terms of the services they offer, and that was the opportunity."
Silcock noted Tapestry is expected to hit 200 hotels in 2026, and that's given the company insights into the segment and how there's a lot of high-quality hotels that could benefit from Hilton's distribution and booking platform that don't fit the current mold.
Outset Collection is described as Hilton's eighth lifestyle brand and will focus on "a range of hotels, with upscale finishes and story-driven designs."
"The format is flexible so that each location's identity can run deep," the news release announcing the brand launch states. "Whether it is hidden gems, revived landmarks or urban boutiques, each stay is layered with narrative and purpose."
Silcock elaborated that he doesn't view Outset as a catch-all for brands that don't fit into Hilton's other collections but independently focused properties with a lower price point and corresponding service levels.
The ACME Hotel Chicago will be among the first Outset Collection by Hilton properties slated to open in November. (Hilton)
"It has to be quality fit and finish," he said. "It is going to be more flexible based on the location around what [food and beverage] it needs. Every hotel will have free tea and coffee in the lobby, but if you're in an urban center city surrounded by F&B outlets, then we're not going to require you have a full-service restaurant. If you're in the middle of nowhere, you may have a coffee shop or a cafe. So, it is going to be more flexible."
The brand will largely be driven by conversions, Silcock said, but they won't rule out new-build properties when given the opportunity.
"The majority will be conversions because we want the owners' own character and design and individuality," he said. "That's part of the attraction to our customers, to find those little gems where somebody's own personality has been put on it but with the Hilton stamp of approval of quality and service."
He said the conversion opportunity should be relatively quick and seamless, with the first signings expected in November and the first openings later that same month.
"This will move pretty fast," he said. "We're in 60 discussions with owners about specific hotels, many of them a fair way down the path, so we'll have several open and operating this year."
Company officials foresee growth up to 500 properties in the U.S. and Canada. The initial Outset properties are expected to include "a basecamp for exploration at Moab and a boutique hotel in Chicago."
Hilton officials have recently touted their growth in the lifestyle space with luxury and lifestyle properties hitting 1,000 across their portfolio earlier this year. The company's other lifestyle brands include NoMad, Canopy, Curio, Graduate, Tapestry, Tempo and Motto.
From raw data to real profits: A primer for building a thriving data business
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/from-raw-data-to-real-profits-a-primer-for-building-a-thriving-data-business
By
Building a profitable data business hinges on having not just the right data but also a business model and enterprise capabilities to support it.
Almost two centuries ago, Lewis Tappan and John M. Bradstreet illustrated the potential for turning data into a profitable product. At the time, businesses and merchants were expanding their operations and needed a reliable way to determine the creditworthiness of potential partners. Bankers and investors were eager for more consistent, objective information in this burgeoning economy to guide their lending and investment decisions. Tappan and Bradstreet established firms dedicated to collecting, analyzing, and selling data, along with the insights they derived from it. Their firms filled a critical gap in the market, eventually merging to form Dun & Bradstreet.
Fast-forward to today, when companies are often awash in data and trying to figure out if they can turn it into a business. The answer isn’t obvious. Building a data business is not for every institution, especially in a field where a few dominant players with massive advantages in data already exist. However, the potential rewards can be immense for companies that can unlock unique data, analytics, or organizational know-how to create a product that addresses an untapped market opportunity.
A European building-materials company identified a new-business opportunity with more than $500 million in enterprise value by turning an internal tool for tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) into a product it could sell externally. Similarly, a telecom company is on track to realize $200 million in new revenue in less than five years by using its data to build a digital lending business. And they’re not alone. McKinsey’s annual survey of business leaders on new-business building found that approximately 40 percent of them expect to create data, analytics, and AI-based businesses in the next five years—the highest of any new-business building category.
Why now
While leaders have sized up data businesses for over a decade, evolving technology capabilities and greater adoption worldwide of AI and analytics have increased the feasibility of monetizing data today. Four technology shifts, in particular, have enabled companies to create new data products faster and less expensively than ever:Enhanced data-management efficiency: Companies can more efficiently process, manage, access, and reuse data in real time across different platforms thanks to greater sophistication of data tools and technologies. This efficiency is crucial for creating a scalable and sustainable data business.
Generative AI (gen AI): A few years ago, converting unstructured data, such as text, images, and videos, into a standardized form so it could be accessed and analyzed was prohibitively expensive for most companies. Gen AI has made structuring such data more cost-effective, enabling broader use. Combined with the emergence of low-code and no-code analytics platforms that democratize AI and analytics, data businesses can now derive more value from their data.
Increased access to real-world data: As Internet of Things (IoT) adoption accelerates, the costs and barriers associated with implementing sensor technology and capturing real-world data have significantly decreased. Companies can now gather real-world data more quickly and affordably and make it accessible to a broader range of applications.
Growing use of internal data products: Industry leaders are increasingly treating data like a product internally so that a given data set can support many different use cases (see sidebar, “What is a data product?”). This “data packaging” gives them a head start in monetizing their data.
Assessing the opportunity and the right strategy
At its foundation, a data business must have access to a sizable amount of data (internal or external) or an approach to processing data and extrapolating business value from it that is unique enough to address an unmet market need. Demographic shopping data, for instance, may not be valuable today, given its ample availability from current market leaders in the space. However, data on real-time shopping preferences in niche market segments could be valuable to some companies as they localize market strategies.
In our experience, leaders can pursue three broad strategies for building such data sets, each with a different value proposition and critical success factors.
Critical considerations for building an enduring data business
Leaders who identify a potential opportunity to monetize data should expect a three-to-five-year runway to achieve the economies of scale that are the foundation of a high-margin, enduring offering. (Launching a minimum viable product for market testing should occur within the first 12 to 18 months.)
Navigating this terrain successfully requires defining a strong customer value proposition, implementing an operating model and technology capabilities capable of scaling and sustaining the business, and addressing up front any data privacy and security concerns that might affect operations.
In our experience, leaders can pursue three broad strategies for building such data sets, each with a different value proposition and critical success factors (Exhibit 2):
Create an industry standard, as Moody’s, S&P Global, and Fitch did for credit ratings. Typically, these data businesses start as data aggregators, assembling a massive amount of unique data. Some can reach a tipping point when a network effect scales the utility of their product until it eventually surpasses alternative offerings and becomes an industry standard. This can be a very effective strategy. Consider Reddit’s $60 million annual deal enabling Google to train its AI models on its data.5 But it’s also one of the most difficult business models to pursue. Once the market leaders become established as a de facto standard, it is increasingly difficult for new entrants to compete.
Succeeding here requires an asymmetric advantage in data access, a first-mover edge, or both. One financial-services firm has positioned itself to become the go-to choice for accurate pricing predictions in regions where pricing dynamics change quickly. The company has done this by collecting novel data from satellite images, listings, public filings, ads, direct calls, and business locations (sometimes dispatching individuals in person to capture specifics not available online) and analyzing it in a way that improves its predictive accuracy. It then offers customers an easy-to-use platform to access the resulting insights.
Harness insights from an engaged user base. With the appropriate data usage rights, organizations can turn data collected from an engaged user base into valuable insights for advertisers, suppliers, partners, and users. Benchmarks and behavioral data from digital interactions, for instance, can be sold “as is” via data marketplaces or combined with analytics and sold as insights directly to buyers. Companies can also use these insights to sell targeted ads on their digital channels.
This strategy depends heavily on the uniqueness of the data and the company’s ability to create a strong product value proposition for customers. The business case becomes more attractive if it can trigger a “flywheel effect” in which the sale of data products increases the sales or stickiness of core products. The financial-services firm paved the way for incremental revenue by stitching its popular data and analytics products into an intelligent workflow solution that automated a critical business process for its customers and accelerated their decision making. This integrated solution also boosted sales of the company’s other offerings because customers preferred to stay in its ecosystem for other data and analytics needs.
Turn sizable organizational know-how into a product. For example, knowledge and capabilities accumulated in building a tool to solve an internal business problem can sometimes evolve into a profitable offering. This was the strategy of the European building-materials company cited earlier that turned an internal tool for tracking efficiency into a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. While leaders were initially concerned about cannibalizing the competitive advantage gained from this data, their analysis found that turning this data into a product would be more lucrative for the company than keeping the tool for itself.
This organizational know-how can also emerge as a company collects unique data as a by-product of its core operations. One company is transforming the way it operates and creating new data-driven revenue streams by adding IoT sensors to its assets and using the resulting insights to enhance its customers’ operations. For instance, with temperature and GPS data from the sensors, the company’s customers can make better routing decisions in transit for temperature-sensitive shipments.
Defining a strong customer value proposition
We find there are generally two product attributes that can impact customer value proposition and adoption:
*- The type of “intelligence” a data product offers. The classic DIKW framework—data, information, knowledge, and wisdom—offers one hierarchy for assessing the potential value and durability of an offering (Exhibit 3). Companies can create profitable products by selling volumes of raw data or information—basically data that has been contextualized in some way, such as purchasing habits extracted from sales data. However, the higher a data product ascends in this value chain, the greater its value for end users and the more difficult it is for competitors to replicate it, resulting in higher margins and customer retention over time.
*- Product-delivery archetype. Raw data is usually delivered through a data platform such as a data marketplace. Other types of intelligence are offered through traditional insights platforms, such as an analytics tool, or intelligent applications integrated directly into an end user’s workflow. Here, the more integrated an offering is within an end user’s decision making and workflow, the greater its potential value to end users, the higher the margins, and the more likely it is that end users will come to view it as essential to their daily work, reducing customer attrition. Over time, as your customer base increases, a virtuous cycle is created in which data and feedback from a growing body of interactions further differentiate the offering and increase customer loyalty.
Adapting your operating model.
One of the most common mistakes we have seen companies make in building a data business is neglecting to adapt their organizations and capabilities to effectively support the delivery of data products. Enterprises building data businesses need to orient their organizations around new profit-and-loss (P&L) expectations, new pricing and sales models, and investment in new technical skills:
*- Incentivizing growth potential over short-term profits: Often, data products fail due to unreasonable performance expectations in the first year. As is the case with any start-up venture, during the first one and a half to two years, leaders should base incentives on KPIs that measure growth potential rather than short-term profitability. These KPIs typically include customer growth and retention, monthly recurring revenue (in the case of SaaS products), or lifetime value of a customer compared to the cost of customer acquisition (LTV versus CAC). One strategy to support this is separating the data business from the parent company through internal organizational and accounting controls or by creating a distinct legal entity. The European building-materials company, for instance, spun off its data business as a subsidiary, enabling the new entity to increase its autonomy and make decisions faster.
*- Adopting new sales and pricing models: On the sales side, most data businesses will need to hire new talent and upskill existing talent to explain and demonstrate a data product’s value—tailoring and delivering demos, engaging customers early with pilot programs, developing relationships with senior technology or data decision makers, supporting new pricing models (for example, freemium models), and helping clients understand deployment considerations. For instance, one large consumer data and research company seeded a digital go-to-market team to lead product-based sales efforts with free trials and targeted usage tiers as it built out its offering. Beyond initial sales, setting up an organization to assist clients in ensuring their customers’ success in using the product, as well as upskilling talent to provide ongoing client advice, can help improve the customer experience.
Pricing data products can be tricky, as the value of “better, faster decision making and workflows”—often fundamental benefits of this type of offering—can vary more than it does for traditional products. The utility of a data product isn’t always immediately apparent to customers, making it more challenging to convince them that these products soothe a distinct pain point, especially when other options are available. As a result, it is critical to invest in adequate pricing research to ascertain the product’s usefulness to the customer and what the customer is willing to pay for it. This research can also often guide a company on how best to align its offerings with customer pain points and position them against alternatives on the market.
*- Investing in specialized technical skills: The goal is to support growth and sustainability of the data business and build out the company’s capacity to monetize data. The type of intelligence a data business delivers within the DIKW value chain will dictate the kind of technical talent a company needs. Leaders seeking to provide raw data will need to invest primarily in data engineers, while those seeking to provide end users with more sophisticated insights, such as knowledge or wisdom, will need to increase their bench of data scientists as well as their AI and machine learning engineers.
Modernizing your data technologies
Without a modern data architecture, it is tough for a data business to scale and sustain a leading customer experience. Depending on the starting point and complexity of data assets, a strong data foundation could take anywhere between six to 15 months to establish.
Some foundational technologies are table stakes that every data business will require (Exhibit 5). Additional investments will depend on the type of data and delivery method used. For instance, some data businesses, such as those seeking to provide customers with access to large volumes of data and information, typically provide a portal (commonly called a storefront) from which customers can search for and view details about the data sets.
Those companies that plan to offer an intelligence platform or develop a broad set of data products will need to embed strong MLOps and DataOps tooling, technologies, and practices into their platforms. These approaches enable companies to more rapidly, reliably, and cost-effectively deliver new AI capabilities as part of their offering, while effectively managing risk.
Latest news: Service Properties Trust sells 3 assets; LA default; SF sales approved
https://www.hotelinvestmenttoday.com/Deals/Mergers-and-Acquistions/Service-Properties-Trust-sells-3-assets-LA-default-SF-sales-approved
Breaking news about deals, development, data and more.
REIT sells 3 more hotels. Newton, Massachusetts-based REIT Service Properties Trust has sold three hotels totaling 399 rooms in three states for $22.5 million to an undisclosed buyer. The transaction is part of a previously announced agreement to sell a portfolio of 113 hotels, comprising of 14,803 rooms, for $913.3 million, excluding closing costs. With this latest sale, the company has completed the sale of 23 hotels with 3,166 rooms for a combined $158.2 million. Service Properties Trust remains under agreement to sell the remaining 90 hotels, which have 11,637 rooms, for $755.1 million. The company said the remaining hotel sales are expected to be completed in phases by the end of 2025. According to the filing, it expects to use the proceeds to repay debt.
Los Angeles default. London-based private equity firm Queensgate Investments defaulted on $70.8 million loan tied to the 226-key Freehand Los Angeles in California, according to The Real Deal. Atlanta-based lender Trimont provided the loan in 2021, with a maturity date this past May. The borrower, according to a notice of default and election to sell, is a company connected to Generator Hostels, which Queensgate sold its European interests to Brookfield earlier this year. Queensgate purchased the Freehand hotel brand six years ago for $400 million from Sydell Group and later refinanced the acquisition for $230 million.
SCP segments portfolio. Soul Community Planet – founded seven years ago on the values of wellness, kindness and sustainability – has segmented its 10 hotels into three sub-brands: SCP WildFree, SCP Hotels, and By SCP. The first SCP WildFree (nostalgic motels, reimagined for the modern, mindful traveler) will be a conversion of the SCP Colorado Springs following a $1.5 million renovation. SCP Founder and CEO Ken Cruse said he sees SCP Hilo in Hawaii as being a solid candidate for conversion to the SCP WildFree expression. By SCP (one-of-a-kind destinations, elevated through shared values) will start with the Salishan Coastal Lodge in Oregon, the Corcovado Wilderness Lodge in Costa Rica, and the Laguna Surf Lodge in California. Cruse said the remaining hotels are in the SCP Hotels segment (boutique sanctuaries grounded in wellness and nature). “We see each of these three segments as having significant growth potential,” Cruse told Hotel Investment Today.
Choice grows in France. Choice Hotels International said it will onboard an additional 50 properties representing more than 4,800 rooms across France, nearly doubling the company’s portfolio in the country from 57 to 107 franchised hotels. The new properties will join the Quality Suites brand and complement Choice Hotels’ existing Clarion, Quality, Comfort and Ascend Hotel Collection hotels in France. The new hotels will be located throughout France and will add 30 more cities to Choice’s network.
Portland hotel sells. Virk Hotels Management has acquired the Residence Inn by Marriott in Portland, Oregon, from Blackstone for $13.3 million. The financing, which was provided by Scottsdale, Arizona-based Arriba Capital, includes additional proceeds to complete a change-of-ownership PIP.
Court approves sale of troubled SF assets. A San Francisco court has approved the sale of the Hilton Union Square and Parc 55 hotels to Newbond Holdings and Conversant Capital, according to multiple reports. The sale price was undisclosed, though the value of the hotels has dropped significantly, with the properties’ combined value estimated at less than $600 million, down from a $1.56 billion appraised value in 2016. Tysons, Virginia-based REIT Park Hotels & Resorts stopped making payments on the $725 million loan for the 1,921-room Hilton Union Square and the 1,024-room Parc 55 in 2023, which are the first- and third-largest hotels in the city. The sale of the assets has been heavily watched by the hotel industry as the San Francisco market has rebounded over the past year.
Chestnut gets £20 in financing. U.K.-based hospitality firm Chestnut Group has received a £20 million loan from Metro Bank, taking the bank’s total funding to £50 million. The new facility includes a £10 million revolving credit line and a £10 million commercial loan. The hospitality firm will use the lending for expansion to acquire the Titchwell Manor Hotel in Norfolk, with funding remaining for future potential acquisitions. Chestnut owns 26 pubs and hotels across the U.K.
White Lodging adds in South Carolina. Merrillville, Indiana-based White Lodging has added the Sher Shepherd Hotel at Clemson University in South Carolina to its management portfolio. The hotel is purposely built to employ people with intellectual disabilities and has been open for three years. As part of the agreement, all current associates of The Shepherd Hotel will be invited to become White Lodging associates with comparable roles, wages and benefits.
First Hospitality adds in Chicago. Chicago-based First Hopsitality had added the 210-key, dual-brand Hyatt House Chicago – Medical/University District and Hyatt Place Chicago – Medical/University District to its management portfolio. The property is the company’s fifth dual-brand hotel and expands its Chicago-area presence to 16 properties.
WTTC: Travel booming but needs workers. The travel industry is not just surviving but thriving, despite conflict and geopolitical shifts, leaders at the World Travel & Tourism Council Global Summit said this week. The industry’s real threat to growth is a workforce shortfall. In a new report, the WTTC said 10 years from now, global demand for workers in travel and tourism will outpace supply by more than 43 million people, or 16% below required levels. The hospitality sector alone faces an expected gap of 8.6 million workers by 2035, around 18% below the staffing levels needed. Low-skilled roles, which are critical to the sector, remain the most sought after, with a projected need of more than 20 million additional workers. Positions that rely heavily on human interaction and services that cannot be easily automated are also in high demand. While the labor challenge impacts most major economies, the most significant absolute shortfalls forecast are in China (16.9 million), India (11 million) and the EU (6.4 million).
Amano acquires in London. Berlin-based boutique hotel brand Amano has expanded in London with the £20 million acquisition of Waterman House. Manex Properties, a joint venture between Amano and London-based investment firm Excellion Capital, acquired the property on September 29 from Regal Hotels International Holdings.
UAE development. United Arab Emirates-based developer Marjan has launched its mixed-use beach town destination, Marjan Beach. The development is set to attract billions in investments across lifestyle, real estate and hospitality and accelerate RAK Vision 2030. This destination designed to deliver a seamless fusion of accessibility and livability, offering a luxury lifestyle for residents and visitors alike. Upon completion, the development will host 12,000 hotel keys and 22,000 residential units with an anticipated population of 74,000 residents and a workforce of 32,000. The mixed-use development is designed to accommodate up to 180,000 visitors annually.
Pride Hotels files IPO. New Delhi, India-based Pride Hotels Ltd. has filed its Draft Red Herring Prospectus with SEBI for an Initial Public Offering. The company is the sixth largest hotel chain in India in terms of size and has hotels in the upscale, upper midscale, and midscale segments. The offer comprises a fresh issue of equity shares aggregating up to ₹2,600.00 million (₹260 crores) and an offer for sale of up to 39,239,446 equity shares of face value of ₹5 each.
Shangri-La reopening in the Maldives. Hong Kong-based Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts is reopening the Shangri-La Villingili Resort & Spa in the Maldives in late December. The resort is located on the Villingili Island in the Addu Atoll and features tropical greenery, natural lagoons, two kilometers of white sandy beaches, and six kilometers of Indian Ocean coastline.
Hoteliers grapple with lackluster performance amid precarious economy, political environment
Hospitality executives call for more AI use to help margins
From left: Women in Hospitality Leadership Alliance’s Rachel Humphrey, Preferred Travel Group’s Michelle Woodley, Peachtree Group’s Greg Friedman, Highgate’s Arash Azarbarzin, Aimbridge Hospitality’s Craig Smith and Marriott International’s Liam Brown speak during the “Executive Briefing Part I” session at The Lodging Conference in Phoenix. (Trevor Simpson)
https://www.costar.com/article/933683286/hoteliers-grapple-with-lackluster-performance-amid-precarious-economy-political-environment
PHOENIX — This year hasn't quite gone the way hoteliers expected, with performance coming short of expectations and the transaction market remaining relatively quiet as a couple of examples. With 2026 right around the corner, executives at The Lodging Conference hope that next year will bring better results as the industry wades through choppy waters.
There's been no shortage of uncertainty this year, as factors such as the U.S.'s tariff policy and rhetoric toward other countries having an impact on the hospitality industry could not have been planned for. This uncertainty certainly hasn't waned, but hoteliers are hopeful that their experience this year will have them primed for whatever comes next.
(The Lodging Conference)
Leeny Oberg (center), CFO and executive vice president of development for Marriott International, received this year's Peggy Berg Castell Award, which "honors leaders that have turned their success into ladders that others can climb," said Kevin Carey (second from left), AHLA chief operating officer and senior executive vice president in his remarks introducing the award. Oberg will retire from Marriott this March. Also pictured are The Lodging Conference's Harry Javer (left) and Elizabeth Wolff (second from right) and AHLA President and CEO Rosanna Maietta.
Quotes of the day
The U.S. government shutdown "has consequences for the lodging industry. In the last 24 to 36 hours, we've been hearing more stories about air traffic controllers. These are federal employees who are paid by the government — but not now. Air traffic controllers are calling in sick. And if this escalates with air traffic controllers and TSA employees, this is going to shut down travel. If the U.S. economy was a movie, this is when you would hear the iconic sounds of 'Jaws' music." —Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at The Economic Outlook Group, speaking on the potential short-term threat to the U.S. travel industry that could happen as the current government shutdown persists.
"The longer hotels fester out there, there will be more pressure to transact. I think we’re reaching that inflection point. Based on conversations I've had leading up to here and at the conference, it does seem like we’ll start to see more activity." —Kate Henriksen, co-chief investment officer of RLJ Lodging Trust, in a panel discussion about hotel deal flow.
"I think the race here is not who adopts what first; I think the race here is going to be who standardizes this and adopts it first." — Kamalesh Patel, AAHOA chairman of 2025-2026, on improving hotel brand apps by adding more user-friendly tools.
Editors' takeaways
If the U.S. hotel industry is optimistic at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit in January and pessimistic at the NYU IHIF conference in June, the mood at The Lodging Conference in the fall is typically realistic.
This year, hotel executives speaking at the conference are honestly acknowledging that the uncertainty of the last 12 months is still there and having real impact on hotel valuations and budgeting. Lackluster performance, in the form of underwhelming average daily rate and revenue per available room growth, hasn't helped.
But the clouds are parting on hotel transactions, as brave buyers are confronting the bid-ask gap and making moves. Speakers this week talked about increased competitiveness for smaller hotels at lower price tags. These aren't trophy assets fetching record pricing, but making hotel deals at this level is the right move for this point in the cycle, especially with overall supply still so low, economists said.
"The tide is changing," said Rod Clough, president of the Americas at HVS. "We are going to be a more active deals market over the next 12 months. Maybe now is the time to sell your stabilized asset. There are plenty of buyers out there; there will be more buyers out there."
—Stephanie Ricca, editorial director
Will artificial intelligence be the piece of technology that finally breaks through for the hotel industry and catches it up to its peers? Hoteliers speaking at The Lodging Conference sure think so. Or at least hope.
Kamalesh Patel, AAHOA chairman of 2025-2026, echoed a sentiment that I've heard plenty of times reporting from hotel conferences: "Technology in hospitality today, for lack of better words, sucks. We are so, so far behind."
Perhaps a more blunt way of putting it than I've heard in the past, but alas it's a point that's been driven home many times.
We've been covering AI in the hotel industry for a few years now, so it's not like it's a brand-new tool at this point. Hoteliers preached soft-launching these tools to ensure its reliability, which was the correct idea in my estimation.
With the industry struggling with shrinking margins and seeking any possible relief, now feels like the time to lean on these tools to start producing results. Aimbridge CEO Craig Smith called the technology a "game-changer at many, many levels" and said it's already saving his company a lot of money with the budgeting process.
Maybe the cards are starting to fall into place for the industry to catch up.
—Trevor Simpson, associate editor
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