Revenue Management & Channel Opt

For many hoteliers, this story will feel familiar: your legacy Property Management System (PMS) no longer meets the needs of your operation. Workflows are clunky, guest experiences inconsistent, and the thought of switching feels too costly or complex – so you stick with what you know.

Talk to any hotelier about the guest journey, and the same themes tend to emerge: personalisation, seamless booking, loyalty, guest experience. Technology is expected to enhance all these moments. But there’s one step that often gets overlooked and yet it underpins the entire guest relationship: identity verification.

The hotel industry is facing a powerful mix of opportunity and pressure. Hotel guest spending on travel and associated expenses is projected to hit a record $777 billion, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association. But costs are rising, staffing remains tight and many traditional revenue streams are feeling the squeeze. So what’s the smartest way forward?

Most hotels rely on OTAs to keep occupancy high, especially in low season. It is a working strategy. But it comes at a price: lost margins, limited control over guest data, and the constant challenge of competing with your own listings.

Summer brings a welcome surge in travel, with millions of people booking hotels, redeeming loyalty rewards, and flocking to vacation destinations. But as transaction volumes rise, so do fraud risks and many hospitality brands find themselves unprepared for the scale, speed, and sophistication of these attacks.

When it comes to your work you’re going to want to have a great set of constraints. Without them, you’re going to float aimlessly through your day and week and wonder why you don’t get the work done or the projects completed. We need to set time limits for the work we do in order to be productive. We need to build these into our teams and their worlds with structure and create a professional environment that’s rich with productivity and a sense of order with the flow. With this structure comes the opportunity to create and this is where we grow.

In hospitality, it’s not the lack of effort that slows teams down — it’s the lag between information and action. And all too often, that lag starts with communication that lives outside the flow of work.

Customer segmentation has been critical from day one for the modern hotel industry. More recently, with numerous data sets being merged due to technological advances, brands are starting to get quite granular with their KYC (know your customer) in terms of understanding where guests are coming from (channels and geography), why they are selecting your property (leisure, corporate, conference and so on) and what their buying (packages, upselling offers, onsite ancillary spend or others).

The recent PhocusWire article, “Hotels grapple with ‘secondary OTAs’ for pricing control,” highlights a growing concern in the hospitality industry: the rise of non-major OTAs and their impact on rate parity and revenue management.

Massive developments are happening in AI. Just this week the popular Hotel Tech Insider innovation newsletter covered a story about Hyatt laying off 30% of it’s US Call Center staff and we’re seeing major tectonic shifts like this across the industry each week but most hotels are only just beginning to explore its potential. In many cases, individual hoteliers and staff are experimenting with tools like ChatGPT for writing content or answering questions. Some hotels have added basic AI features into their operations – think of voice-activated assistants in rooms or simple text chatbots on their websites that answer guest FAQs. Others use AI behind the scenes for tasks like summarizing guest feedback or generating reports. These early uses are valuable, but they barely scratch the surface of what’s coming.