Travel power shifts, taste problems & tech upgrades

Good morning. ITB Berlin is driving a wave of hotel tech announcements this week, from AI-powered distribution tools to unified marketing platforms, all betting that the way travelers find and book hotels is about to change fundamentally. Meanwhile, California's annual hotel transaction data shows a market where volume is rising but per-room values are falling, a split that defines this cycle for operators and investors.

Congrats to Amit Sripathi on his appointment as chief financial officer at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, succeeding interim CFO Kurt Albert. Congrats also to David Wilner on assuming the chief development officer role at Wyndham, to Jared Saft on being named COO of Westgate Resorts, and to Adam Bullard on his promotion to vice president of people and culture at Hospitality America.

Today’s podcast: The Power Shift in Travel — Sloan Dean (10 min)

Sloan Dean, host of the Not Done podcast, shares what he's changed his mind about after interviewing some of the most influential leaders across hospitality and tech, including why he believes traditional loyalty programs are losing strength and points should be reframed as a currency that many brands have steadily devalued. Listen here. This is timely as platform consolidation and AI-driven booking tools reshape how hotels reach travelers, raising questions about whether points programs alone can sustain guest relationships.

Guest Experience & Design

The Forbes Travel Guide Summit in Monaco drew nearly 1,000 delegates from 65+ countries, and hertelier pulled out seven signals about where luxury hospitality is headed. Among them: discoverability is the new battleground as AI agents increasingly guide travel decisions, and hotels that aren't visible to those systems will lose. Read more on hertelier

Bashar Wali makes the case that most hotels have a taste problem, and it's costing them money. "Your hotel has a vibe. Unfortunately, the vibe is 'airport Marriott had a baby with a Doubletree from 2009,'" Wali writes. His argument: taste is a skill, most owners don't have it, most don't know they don't have it, and "the ones who do not know are currently signing off on another beige corridor with 'locally inspired' wall art from a vendor in New Jersey." He calls it The Aesthetic Gap, and he frames it not as embarrassment but as a revenue problem. Read more on LinkedIn

What separates profitable hotel bars from the ones that just fill space? Storytelling, data-driven menus, and the zero-proof trend. HOTELS Magazine talked to beverage leaders at Hilton, Rosewood, and Marcus Hotels & Resorts about what's actually working. Hilton's Allison Kafalas says menus should be built from sales data, not bartender preferences, balancing spirit types, brands, and flavor profiles. Rosewood's Tony Mosca at CUT Above in D.C. says every detail from glassware to lighting should reinforce a cohesive identity tied to the property. And across the board, elevated zero-proof and low-ABV cocktails are no longer afterthoughts. They're letting guests participate in the drinking ritual without the alcohol, and the margins are strong. Read more on HOTELS Magazine

William Graf flew Turkish Airlines recently and came away with a reminder that great “soft” product can compensate for an unremarkable “hard” product. The seat and cabin were standard. But the crew's deliberate hospitality left a mark: a menu that walked passengers through Turkish regions, staff confidently redirecting guests to the better tea, Turkish delight handed out before landing with a note explaining the tradition. "This was one of the most memorable flights I've had in the last 10 years," Graf writes. "Nobody remembers a designer door knob. They remember how they were treated, how they felt." Read more on LinkedIn

Operations & Tech

Actabl's Alice platform now replaces static PDF itineraries with interactive, real-time digital versions guests can access from any device. Hotel teams can customize with property branding, share instantly via email or SMS, and push live updates that guests see immediately. The feature eliminates the paper-based itinerary workflow that most concierge teams still rely on. Alice's concierge solution earned first place in the 2026 Hotel Tech Awards. Read more via Actabl

Canary Technologies launched Hospitality AI Agent Studio, a platform that lets hoteliers build and deploy custom AI agents tailored to their specific operations. Beyond Canary's existing agents, the studio gives teams tools to create workflows for reservations, operations, sales, and marketing from one central platform, aligned with brand standards and existing systems. More than 20,000 hotels across 90+ countries already use Canary's platform, including Marriott, Four Seasons, Choice, Wyndham, and IHG. The significance here: the hotel AI conversation is shifting from "should we adopt it" to "how do we customize it for our operations." Read more via Canary Technologies

Shiji expanded its Move mobile platform at ITB Berlin into a unified property-wide experience, letting hotel associates switch between its Daylight PMS, Infrasys POS, and Meridian Experiences modules from a single device. Read more on Lodging Magazine

Commercial

Rafat Ali argues in Skift that the entire travel intermediation layer is one AI plugin away from a massive repricing. His evidence: four weeks in February wiped roughly $1.5 trillion in market value across legal, finance, and cybersecurity after Anthropic announced new capabilities. Travel hasn't been hit yet, but Ali says its moats are weaker than the sectors already disrupted. OTAs don't own proprietary data the way Thomson Reuters does. GDS contracts are being undermined by NDC. TMC per-transaction fees are vulnerable the moment a Fortune 500 CFO sees an AI agent enforce travel policy at a fraction of the cost. The strongest counterpoint: AI could expand travel demand as planning friction falls toward zero, but that growth would primarily benefit asset owners (airlines, hotels, destinations), not intermediaries. For hotel operators, that's arguably good news. Read more on Skift

RateGain is folding Sojern and Adara into a single brand, creating what it calls the world's largest source of travel intent data. The consolidation combines Adara's 1.3 billion digital identities and 22 billion data elements across 130 countries with Sojern's ad platform, linking booking data directly to the marketing that drives it. Demand Booster's direct booking ad business is also being integrated. For hotels, this means the platform that already powers a significant share of travel marketing now has the data infrastructure to measure what actually converts. It's an early signal that the travel ad tech landscape is consolidating around companies that can connect planning behavior to booking outcomes. Read more on Skift

Aven, the former Sabre hotel unit, is embedding Model Context Protocol (MCP) across its SynXis platform, making 35,000+ hotels' rates and availability directly discoverable by AI agents. Hotels using Aven's CRS and booking engine will be able to expose official inventory to AI-driven discovery surfaces without bespoke integrations, while keeping pricing and transaction control. An MCP Early Access Program begins in Q2 2026. If Ali's thesis above plays out, hotels that are already plugged into AI discovery surfaces will have an advantage over those waiting for OTAs to adapt on their behalf. Read more via Aven Hospitality

Money Moves

Glenn Haussman talked to Bruce Ford (SVP, Lodging Econometrics) about what the global hotel pipeline looks like from the owner's side, and it's a different picture than what brands present. The big franchise companies play a global game; most owners play a street-corner game with one asset and one set of debt terms. Ford notes it costs about 25% more to run a hotel now than at the start of the pandemic, and there are roughly 2.5x more renovations and conversions globally than rooms under construction for new hotels. Brands are pushing harder on PIPs and standards, and owners are pushing to monetize every revenue dollar per square foot. The gap between how Hilton/Marriott/IHG think about "global" and how a single-property owner does is where the real tension lives. Read more on LinkedIn

California closed 2025 with $4.1 billion in hotel sales, a 22% jump from 2024, but the median price per room fell 7.2% to $138,409, according to Atlas Hospitality Group's annual survey. The picture is sharply uneven: Northern California dollar volume surged 104% year over year, driven largely by distressed and lender-initiated transactions, including the 1,919-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square at $265.5M. Southern California volume dropped 22%. In Los Angeles County, 41 hotels traded for $736.1M, with the 397-room Line Hotel selling lender-initiated at $68M. Atlas expects 2026 to remain a selective, price-sensitive market with liquidity focused on well-positioned assets rather than a broad recovery. Read more on Asian Hospitality

Peregrine Hospitality expanded its Northern California portfolio with the acquisition of The Lodge at Tiburon and Toll House Hotel, two premium drive-to-leisure properties that bring the company's national portfolio to 57 hotels. Read more via Peregrine Hospitality

Beyond Hotels

RETAIL → HOSPITALITY: Amazon is quietly closing more Amazon Go stores, and Martin Soler argues the lesson for hotels is not what you'd expect. The promise was frictionless retail: walk in, grab, walk out. It worked technically, but felt cold. "Like shopping inside a vending machine," Soler writes. His takeaway for hospitality: the industry seems to think it's "either automate everything or protect every old way." The better approach is to automate the parts that generate negative experiences (payments, ID checks, admin) and humanize the ones that generate positive ones (welcome, guidance, presence). "We do not need fewer people. We need fewer negative emotional tasks for people." Read more on LinkedIn