Revenue Management & Channel Opt

In hotel technology, a term such as “API integration” often appears to be overused or misunderstood. On paper, most Revenue Management Systems claim to be connected to the PMS. But in practice, that connection often means receiving a daily aggregated report from the PMS.

There was a time when continuity in hospitality lived in people.

2026 is already three weeks old. Everyone started posting. And I’ve been sitting here for days asking myself a very uncomfortable question:

For most hoteliers, seasonality means fluctuating demand and shifting rates. For Arctic SnowHotel & Glass Igloos in Finnish Lapland, seasonality defines the business. The team rebuilds an entire hotel from snow and ice every winter, only for it to melt away again in spring.

One of the most helpful ways to define automation is by looking at what shouldn’t be automated.

The complexity introduced by digital platforms, cloud, and digitised systems, isn’t a sign of failure or lack of planning. It comes down to how platforms have struggled to keep pace with the speed at which business operations are changing. The converging forces of AI disruption, the volatility of global economies, geopolitical shifts and increased pressures on the regulatory and environmental fronts are forcing companies into a state of continuous reinvention. Over the past two years, enterprise leaders aren’t asking whether cloud and AI matter, but rather what they can implement that will reduce friction across the business while still keeping it ahead.

The travel industry has spent years trading opinions about what AI will do to planning and booking. No more hypotheticals. New research by TakeUp, The Rise of AI Planned Travel in 2026, based on a survey of 300 US leisure travelers, shows the shift is already influencing real booking behavior: 78% of travelers who use AI say they’ve booked travel primarily based on an AI recommendation.

Next week, hospitality industry leaders, including investors, owners, lenders, developers, management and brand executives and the like will travel to Los Angeles to attend ALIS, the world’s leading and most influential hotel investment conference. While there, discussions will not debate whether AI matters. That conversation is over. The new question is where capital should be deployed in relation to AI and what kind of return investors should realistically expect.

Every revenue manager knows the frustration: performance drops unexpectedly, pickup slows, or ADRs fluctuate without a clear reason. The system shows you what changed, but it doesn’t show why. And to find out, you’re bouncing between PMS reports, spreadsheets, and legacy dashboards, trying to make sense of disconnected data.

In hospitality, time is everything. And yet, too much of it is spent on the wrong things. Admin overload, repetitive reporting, fragmented systems… it all adds up. That’s where automation steps in, not to replace people, but to give them back time, so they can connect, think, serve. In this article, I want to share what we’re seeing in the field: the real impact of AI and Automation on hotel teams, and why the future of hospitality is more human than ever.