How Technology is Transforming Hotel Revenue Strategies

AI Agents Are Booking Hotels. Is Your Direct Channel Ready to Compete? OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent Mode has transformed hotel bookings. AI is no longer just suggesting options. It now books directly on behalf of travelers. Instead of comparing hotels across websites, guests simply ask ChatGPT for what they want, and the AI searches, selects, and completes the reservation, often through OTAs. If your hotel content isn’t structured in a way AI systems can read and trust, your brand is effectively invisible. Traditional SEO tactics focused on human search behavior are no longer enough. Hotels must shift to Answer Engine Optimization, using structured data and clear content that AI agents can easily process. Most hotel teams are not ready for this shift and may already be missing bookings without realizing it. 📢 THE PIVOT FOR HOTEL COMMERCIAL TEAMS: Hotel commercial teams need to rethink their entire approach. This is not about improving your Google rank. It is about making your hotel visible to AI agents that now complete bookings for your guests. ⚠️ The rules of the direct channel have changed. Your content needs to be structured for AI discoverability. Your team needs to understand how AI agents make decisions. Without that, you will be bypassed without even knowing it. The direct channel is at risk unless your teams become AI-literate and start building content for machines as well as humans. FIVE ACTION STEPS FOR HOTEL TEAMS: 1️⃣ Audit and Optimize Structured Data Review your website and booking platform to ensure correct schema markup is in place. AI agents rely on machine-readable data to process your rates, amenities, and availability. 2️⃣ Implement Answer Engine Optimization Move beyond traditional SEO. Focus your content on clear, factual, structured property details across all platforms where AI agents can find them. 3️⃣ Upskill Your Team on AI Literacy Train your marketing, revenue, and sales teams on how AI agents function. AI is now a participant in the booking process. Your teams need to understand how to influence its choices. 4️⃣ Track AI Visibility and Recommendations Start measuring how often your hotel is seen or selected by AI systems like ChatGPT. Visibility is now invisible. Without tracking, you won’t know what you are losing. 5️⃣ Strengthen Direct Channel AI Readiness Ensure your website, booking engine, and voice assistants are optimized to serve both human guests and AI agents. Using AI Voice Agents can help capture direct bookings that might otherwise be lost. If your team needs help optimizing your direct channel, developing AI skills, or driving immediate revenue, reach out. Whether it’s training your team, creating structured content, or helping you track AI-driven visibility, I can support you. Consider me a gig member of your team, ready to help you drive results.

📈 𝟑𝟓 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 — from Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts Bora Bora to 14 hostels in New Zealand (Haka House Hostels) rebuilt and reopened in just five months — sit under Michael Belanger, MBA, CHSL’s watch at GCP Hospitality (Gaw Capital Group). GCP’s portfolio is a crash-course in complexity: ultra-luxury resorts, franchise flags that allow selective retooling, and independents where the team can rip-and-replace everything. Layer on hostels (beds-versus-rooms, Gen Z guests, razor-thin staffing) and you get a perfect lab for testing what actually works in hotel tech — and what’s still missing. Full episode in the comments below ⬇️ Inside the episode — takeaways for seasoned hotel-tech pros: 🥞 𝐄𝐧𝐝-𝐭𝐨-𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐮𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐢𝐧 <𝟓 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐬: Mews PMS + mobile keys delivered 100 % contactless check-in across 14 reopened hostels, keeping on-property teams lean. ⚖️ 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲-𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 = zero wasted spend: Triptease only bids when rates are in parity, solving the APAC “rogue rate” problem and stretching marketing budgets further than legacy meta vendors ever did. 🔐 𝐒𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐲 𝐭𝐨𝐲𝐬: Multi-factor auth now covers 100 % of GCP’s vendor stack after a 12-month push; any partner unable to add passkeys was shown the door. 📊 𝐓𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐥-𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐮𝐞 𝐁𝐈, 𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐨-𝐰𝐢𝐝𝐞: Rolling out a single dashboard via Avalon Analytics for all 35 hotels to surface margin leaks beyond rooms and put owners’ full P&L at managers’ fingertips. Then layering revenue management systems like Duetto for ultra luxury boutiques and FLYR Hospitality for hostels #HotelTechnology #HospitalityInnovation #DigitalTransformation #RevenueManagement #HotelTechInsider

💡 Real-time pricing is coming to AI-powered travel search, which will change everything. AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini only show estimated #hotelprices. But that's about to shift! 🚀 The next big leap in #hospitalitytech is integrating real-time availability, rates, and inventory (ARI) into AI and GenAI platforms. Thanks to frameworks like Model Context Protocol (MCP), hotel tech systems—PMSs, RMSs, channel managers—can connect directly with LLMs, opening the door to live pricing, availability, and even end-to-end bookings within AI interfaces. 🏨 For #hotels, this is a huge opportunity—but only if they prepare. That means: ▫️ Getting listed on key metasearch platforms ▪️ Ensuring real-time pricing APIs are in place ▫️ Indexing their sites with AI search tools ▪️ Tracking attribution data to stay in control The race has already started—and the winners will be those who act before it becomes the norm. #AI #GenAI #TravelTech #Hospitality #DigitalTransformation #HotelTech #TravelIndustry https://lnkd.in/e5h_5GGj

After reading an ITB ‘trends panel’ recap article from HospitalityNet (link in comments), I saw synergies between the industry expert suggestions and our AI-powered commercial strategy platform. Wietse Bijzet (Shiji) highlights AI’s role in distilling complex challenges into clear, actionable insights, paving the way for more efficient and innovative operational strategies. LodgIQ consolidates Revenue, Sales, and Marketing data, providing easy analysis and strategic recommendations for all three disciplines based on market insights and forward-looking consumer buying behavior not found in any other system or data well. Similarly, Frank Seedorf (B&B Hotels Germany) underscores the significance of technology in hospitality, identifying AI in customer service, data platform integration, and revenue management automation as critical for progress. He champions AI's potential to refine customer service and pricing strategies, elevating guest experiences. Our platform evolved from an AI-enabled Revenue Management System to a centralized hub that provides ‘willingness-to-pay’ pricing data to help you craft pricing strategies that meet consumer preferences head-on. LodgIQ uses a shared pool of data across the revenue management, sales, and marketing disciplines. This allows for a more holistic understanding of the market, guest behaviors, and the hotel's overall performance, benefiting all three departments’ deliverables and responsibilities. The synthesis of LodgIQ’s platform with the insights from Bijzet and Seedorf heralds a new era in hospitality. An era where the focus shifts from merely managing data to strategically leveraging it for competitive advantage. If you're part of a commercial team striving to save time and achieve optimal revenue outcomes while enhancing profitability through a unified commercial strategy, why not consider LodgIQ as your compass in the vast sea of hospitality technology?

Recently, Hospitality Net asked their Digital Marketing in Hospitality panel how hotels could use AI to shift bookings from OTAs to their direct channels. You might find this answer interesting: In the near term, the biggest opportunities AI provides for driving direct revenue revolve around creating richer, more personalized experiences at each stage of the guest journey. Hotel marketers can use AI to better segment potential guests based on behaviors and deliver content and offers — at scale — that match those segments’ intent. Increasingly, you can let the AI select and orchestrate campaign messages, images, and offers that align with the needs of potential guests, and drive conversion. Similarly, these tools can provide intelligent rate displays and offer attractive upsell opportunities to guests to improve the revenue you achieve during each stay. Real-time guest service during the booking process, including chat, can help improve that experience and increase conversion rate.  Of course, the guest journey doesn’t end at time of booking. Again, savvy hotel commercial teams are beginning to put AI to work to upsell and cross-sell on-property experiences during the pre-arrival and on-property stages of the guest journey to drive greater share of wallet. And, of course, intelligent, automated post-stay campaigns are beginning to produce results in driving repeat bookings from past guests.  In the longer term, we’ve not yet seen how universal access to AI assistants will shape guest behavior. These tools are likely to shift the way guests interact with information and experiences every bit as much as the internet, mobile, and social media have. We should expect to see new marketing and distribution channels that make it easy for us to reach guests directly — and new gatekeepers who seek to insert themselves into that process. Every silver lining comes wrapped in its own cloud.  Regardless, these benefits come with a cost. Hoteliers must take a serious look at their existing tech stack and team skills to ensure they’re ready to put these tools to work. Take a look at the partners you work with. Do they make it easy to connect with new sales and marketing partners? Do they have a well-articulated vision for how they’ll incorporate AI into their products? Have they begun to deliver on that vision? If so, you’re in great shape. If not, it may be time to start looking at alternatives.  And, finally, don’t ignore your people. Does your team have the skills, the resources, and the vision needed to adapt to a changing customer and technology landscape? You will want to give them the support they need to quickly adjust as guest behaviors — and those of your competitors — evolve. The hoteliers who are able to learn the fastest, and put those learnings to use, are the ones most likely to succeed at driving more direct business as AI becomes more common. And there’s nothing artificial about that. #AI #hospitalitymarketing