Catégorie : Strategy

Future-Proofing Hotel Deals: Myth or Must-Have? This evening I had the pleasure of attending a panel hosted by Keystone Law on a topic at the heart of hospitality investment: are “future-proof” hotel deals a myth, or a must-have? The discussion brought together perspectives from across the ecosystem – Timothy Walton (Marriott International), Winston Zahra (Troo…

Hotels are under mounting pressure to modernize in an era where guests expect frictionless travel experiences. Yet despite hospitality’s appetite for innovation, many promising technologies stall — not from lack of demand, but because the systems powering hotel operations simply don’t connect.Mobile keys that fail or loyalty points that don’t post aren’t the core issue.…

A new wave is emerging in hospitality: nature-based design. Hotels don’t just have an energy problem, they have a design problem. The solution is not about inventing something new, but rediscovering what our ancestors already knew. For thousands of years, buildings worked with nature instead of against it: 🌞 Following the sun to stay warm…

Consider a traveler who has visited a hotel multiple times, only to be asked on a recent stay if it was their first. It’s a disheartening experience, especially when that same traveler stops at a gas station and is both greeted by name and even offered a free coffee or donut.  It’s not that guests…

OpenAI just announced that shoppers can checkout in-app from Etsy and Shopify merchants. It is exactly the integration we knew was in the works. This is not agentic commerce – people still need to click around and make decisions – but two things have been true for a while. First, people are using ChatGPT and…

It’s probably not controversial anymore to say we are accelerating into the biggest disruption in travel distribution of all time. Three years ago today, nobody talked about any kind of upcoming threat to the dominance of Google. In a year from now, Google may be unrecognizable from the default UX today, and there’s a good…

🤖 The MCP: Travel’s New Universal Translator When Sabre Corporation announced its #MCP server, my tech curious customers asked: what exactly does this do? Lets look at it 👇 📊 The current problem: Travel technology industry speaks dozens of “languages” — EDIFACT, XML, JSON, NDC schemas, proprietary airline APIs. #AI agents don’t natively understand these…

Many of my recent conversations have been focused on the impact of agentic commerce on commerce media. We’ll talk about how this will play out, and I’m always thinking about the Hemingway line, « gradually, then suddenly. » Today, we have a very important new buy button and Agentic Commerce Protocol – https://lnkd.in/gzU-5GSy – and the « suddenly »…