There are no shortage of opinions about where hospitality is heading.
Every week there’s another article about AI, another prediction about the future of distribution, or another technology promising to solve the industry’s biggest challenges. Yet when you sit down with the people leading commercial strategy inside hotels, the conversation is very different.
Last month, in partnership with Mews, we brought together a small group of senior hospitality leaders for a private advisory lunch. The idea wasn’t to present solutions or sell products. It was simply to create the space for conversation between people facing many of the same commercial challenges.
We used the upcoming Global Revenue Forum theme as the starting point, which quickly transitioned to challenges that people were trying to overcome in their own businesses every day.
Artificial intelligence featured heavily, although perhaps not in the way we expected. Rather than discussing where AI might take the industry in five years’ time, people wanted to talk about what happens on Monday morning.
- How do you introduce AI into a hotel business?
- Which companies have done this well?
- Who owns it?
- How do you know it’s producing the right answers?
- How do you measure whether it’s genuinely creating value rather than simply adding another cost?
The discussion also returned several times to something that has been challenging hospitality for years. Commercial, digital and technology teams are still too often working towards the same objectives from different directions. As technology becomes more deeply embedded in every commercial decision, bringing those teams closer together feels less like an aspiration and more like a necessity.
It was also interesting to see where people wanted the conversation to go next. Total revenue management, distribution strategy, payments and practical examples of successful implementation all generated far more discussion than abstract ideas about AI. There was a real appetite for hearing from hotels that have already tackled these challenges and can share what worked, what didn’t, and what they’d do differently.
For us, that’s exactly why sessions like this matter.
At Revenue by Design, we spend a lot of time working alongside hotel teams, but there is something uniquely valuable about bringing experienced people together to learn from one another. Those conversations help us challenge our own thinking, understand where the industry is today, and make sure the work we’re doing continues to reflect the realities hotels are facing.
They also influence how we shape initiatives like Global Revenue Forum. Not because we’re looking for people to validate a theme, but because we want the conversations on stage to reflect the conversations already happening around the table.
A huge thank you to everyone who joined us and contributed so openly. The willingness to share ideas, experiences and challenges made for an incredibly valuable afternoon, and we’re looking forward to continuing the conversation at future advisory lunches.
