The Hotel Industry is at a Unique Inflection Point

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“As an industry, we're at a really unique inflection point and there's a lot of positive trends on the horizon.”

“We're seeing a lot of investors, particularly traditional hotel investors, but also first-time hotel investors, recognize that travel is part of the human experience, and it's just continuing to increase - whether it's luxury travel, economy travel, or everything in between. We see a huge amount of positive sentiment and a huge amount of interest from investors around the hotel industry.”

"The reality is that AI, at least the way it's broadly defined, is used and has been used by hotels for years to power a lot of their back of house tools, pricing being chief among them. The hotel industry has been using some form of AI in many capacities for years, but clearly there's a way to accelerate that tremendously. When we talk about what's the biggest challenges that hoteliers are facing - and I definitely hear it every day - labor and profitability are chief among them. I think we have to be really cautious, because the reality is that hotels are a consumer business and a people business. We have to be clear that we're not actually replacing people, but we're making people and we're making the business more efficient. I think AI has a huge role to play there.

“Think about labor, think about staffing. This is still bizarre to me, but many hotels still function on the old school 11 to 7, 7 to 3, 3 to 11 shifts. That makes zero sense. Hotels should have a tremendous amount of data on when their guests are arriving, when they're checking out, if you're a business guest, if you're staying here for Bank of America, where's the Bank of America office - all these things. For humans, it's really hard to ingest that information and have actionable consequences. Perfect use case for AI. I think there's some companies out there that have amazing solutions that hotels should adopt today, because you should be able to schedule your labor to optimize around when guests are checking in, when they're checking out, when they're going to be at the restaurant, whatever the case may be. That creates huge labor efficiencies."

"The possibilities in our industry are limitless, but space utilization is at an all-time low. Hotels at their core are places to stay, but they're also places to congregate. They're places to eat, places to go to the spa, play golf. Think about the amount of people passing through a hotel on any given day and what they're there for. If you can capture that - which there's really no reason you shouldn't be able to - how do you then optimize that experience? You could drive revenue if you're doing it in the right way.”

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