ROUNDTABLE
At attention: James Wilson, corporate director of business intelligence and distribution, OUTRIGGER Resorts & Hotels; Tim Thilleman, director of strategic hospitality technology and consulting, MIS Computer Corp.; and Russ Meek, senior director of product at Otelier.
Nick Clark, VP of operations, Remington Hospitality, drives home a point during the session.
Owners fund investments but often lack operational expertise. Management companies operate multiple brands with competing requirements, while software vendors must navigate all those stakeholders.
“ I’ m still trying to find who that champion is,” said Tim Thilleman, director of strategic hospitality technology and consulting at MIS Computer Corp.“ An owner has an impetus, but they don’ t really understand. A management company wants something that benefits its portfolio, while the general manager is focused on their own property. Ten years later we’ re having the same conversation. We’ re looking at AI to solve it. It’ s not. If they can’ t do power BI, how are they going to do AI?”
WHERE AI CAN HELP— NOW Despite the cautious tone, participants identified several areas where AI is already delivering value or appears closest to doing so. Revenue management topped the list.
Chris Cheney, EVP of commercial strategy at Stonebridge Companies, described a future where revenue leaders spend less time adjusting daily rates and more time overseeing broader strategy.
“ You’ ll still have to monitor the strategy and make sure it aligns with the hotel’ s value proposition, the owner’ s goals and competitive positioning,” he said.“ But what you probably won’ t have to do is analyze whether your price for next Tuesday is correct.”
Labor management also emerged as a promising opportunity.“ Imagine scheduling based not just on forecasts and pace, but on demand signals before people even book— what’ s likely to happen next week before it shows up in your data,” Cheney added.
He also proposed using guestroom key-lock data to inform hotel design.“ I can see that room 207 used its key to access all these different areas of the hotel and when they used them,” he said.“ When helping an owner develop a new hotel, you could determine that, based on the expected customer mix, you don’ t need a fitness center that large— you need a bigger executive lounge.”
ON LOYALTY One of the discussion’ s more animated moments centered on loyalty programs— and who controls the data they generate. Panelists argued that hotel brands
possess enormous amounts of guest behavioral data through their loyalty ecosystems, yet much of that information remains inaccessible to management companies and operators.
“ That’ s what they’ ve got that’ s most powerful,” Clark said.“ That’ s the Willy Wonka factory right there. Brands can sell that because they have the recognition through loyalty and distribution.”
AI-powered personalization could dramatically improve the guest experience, but only if operators gain greater access to the behavioral data currently locked inside brand loyalty platforms.
F & B: THE QUIET DATA REVOLUTION Though much of the AI conversation in hospitality focuses on rooms, panelists pointed to food and beverage as another area undergoing significant change.
Clark described using AI to benchmark procurement costs across a portfolio by feeding six months of invoices into a cloudbased analysis tool.“ We took invoices from the last six months for these hotels and dumped them into a massive cloud project,” he said.“ Then we benchmarked
66 hotelsmag. com September 2026