Hotel Moment

 In this episode of Hotel Moment, host Karen Stephens, Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate, sits down with Aaron Miller, Senior Vice President of Digital Marketing and CRM at Highgate, to unpack what genuine AI adoption looks like inside one of the world's largest hospitality companies. With more than 20 years of digital, CRM, and loyalty experience across brands like The Venetian Resort Las Vegas, Sidell Group, Trump Hotels, and Turning Stone Enterprises, Aaron brings a buyer's discipline to a conversation flooded with vendor hype, while keeping a sharp eye on guest behavior, content ownership, and live demand challenges.


What you'll learn:
● Cutting through "AI-powered" marketing: How to evaluate vendor claims case by case when every deck now references AI, and why saturation is now the baseline expectation rather than a differentiator.
● The three AI futures from McKinsey: Why the OTA-dominant, agent-to-agent, and direct booking renaissance scenarios each carry different implications, and why hotel-owned content sits at the heart of the most favorable outcome.
● The new version of search: How prompts and content optimization are reshaping how hotels get found, and why getting off the bot and onto a beautifully curated website still drives the actual booking.
● Why guests still want curated websites: How travelers treat booking as a high-stakes decision because, in Aaron's words, "you can't return your hotel stay" the way you can return a pair of shoes.
● AI as a marketer's tool, not a replacement: Where AI accelerates copywriting and analytics, where it creates ethical risk in imagery, and how Highgate's teams treat it like a calculator that speeds up arithmetic but cannot do the math for you.
● Pivoting FIFA World Cup demand: How Highgate's hotels are layering staycation packages, free parking offers, and segmented database campaigns to capture local market demand as international pickup softens.
● Reading the HITEC 2026 floor: What Aaron looks for in technology vendors that lead a new category rather than join a crowded one, and how the independent portfolio acts as a testbed for early adoption.
● From experience to AI, same conversation: Why "experience, experience, experience" was the buzzword two years ago and AI is today, and how both ultimately serve the same goal of getting guests to a real place where they can finally unplug.


Together, Karen and Aaron also discuss the role of clean data foundations, the budgeting decisions facing non-branded hotels, and what the back half of 2026 looks like for marketers planning for a world where bots, agents, and humans all share the booking journey.


If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Instructions on how to do this are here.


Connect with Aaron Miller here:

• LinkedIn
• Highgate

Connect with Karen Stephens here:

• LinkedIn
• Revinate

Follow the podcast here:

• LinkedIn

Episode Highlights
[02:24] Cutting through the "AI-powered" marketing glitz - Aaron describes the saturation point hotel technology buyers have reached, where every vendor deck references AI as a matter of course. "It's everywhere, but there's very little question on whether it should be or should not be. We're no longer surprised. I mean, I guess you could say that it's saturated, but it needs to be." His point reframes the buyer's job: differentiation has moved from whether a vendor uses AI to how it actually performs and integrates.

[04:18] The direct booking renaissance - Reflecting on McKinsey's three plausible AI futures for hospitality, Aaron lands on the scenario he finds most exciting for hoteliers. "How do we get our hotels to show up when somebody's looking to book a hotel in New York City? It's the new version of search in so many different ways." The Renaissance, he notes, depends on hoteliers owning their content and treating prompts the way they once treated SEO.
[07:35] Why you can't return your hotel stay - Aaron shares an insight from Revinate’s NAVIGATE conference that has stayed with him on the trust gap travelers still feel with AI. "You can't return your hotel stay. If you don't like them, you can't send them back in 30 days. You spent time, you left your home, you went somewhere, and you spent time there. You want to get it right on the outset." It's a reminder that high-stakes booking decisions still belong on a hotel's own curated website.

[12:29] AI as the marketer's calculator - On where AI fits inside Highgate's marketing teams, Aaron lands on an analogy that captures the right level of dependence. "This arithmetic used to take us some time. Now we have a calculator. It's going to speed things up, but you can't expect the calculator to do everything for you." The tool compresses reporting work that once took days into minutes, but human judgment still decides which equation matters.
[16:34] Pivoting FIFA demand to local markets - With FIFA World Cup matches weeks away, Aaron explains how Highgate's New York properties are layering offers to hedge against softer-than-expected international pickup. "This isn't necessarily pick one or the other. It's just making sure that you have that relevant offer to the relevant market where it makes sense." Staycation packages, free parking, and breakfast inclusions are being deployed to capture drive-to travelers without shutting out long-distance bookings.


Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
02:24 - Cutting through the AI marketing glitz 
04:18 - The direct booking renaissance scenario 
07:35 - Why you can't return your hotel stay 
09:51 - AI's real impact on marketing teams 
15:52 - Preparing for the FIFA World Cup 
18:48 - HITEC 2026 and what comes next


If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here and follow us on LinkedIn so you never miss a moment! 
Hotel Moment Podcast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so


Previous guests include: Shannon Knapp, CEO of Leading Hotels of the World (LHW), Patrick Norton of Brittain Resorts & Hotels, Shawn Jereb of Montage International, Carlo Del Mistro, Chief Digital Officer of Ennismore, Jason Pirock of Springboard Hospitality, and many more.


Are you a hospitality industry leader with insights to share? We're always looking for innovative voices to join our conversation about the future of hospitality technology.

If you'd like to be a guest on an upcoming episode of Hotel Moment, we'd love to hear from you! Our podcast reaches thousands of hospitality professionals worldwide, and we're particularly interested in perspectives on:

• Innovation in hospitality technology
• Guest experience transformation
• Revenue optimization strategies
• Emerging industry trends

Express your interest in being a guest →
Check out the three most downloaded episodes:

• Revinate’s new CEO — on a mission to empower hoteliers with data-driven technology | with Bryson Koehler 
• Guests define what luxury means today | with Shannon Knapp
• Your commercial strategy as an evolution and not a revolution | with Jennifer Hill
  
  

In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens, Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate, and Bailey Yeats, Marketing Manager at Revinate, take listeners inside NAVIGATE 2026, the annual Revinate customer conference that brought 300 attendees together this year at the Wigwam in Phoenix. Around 200 were customers; the rest were vendor partners and Revinators. The Wigwam, a nearly century-old property in the Historic Hotels of America collection, provided both the backdrop and an unexpected proof of concept: a barista who knew Bailey's exact order every morning before she said a word.


What you'll learn:

● AI is already reshaping how travel is booked: Conference MC, Courtney Witherspoon opened the main session with one question: how many people had used ChatGPT or a similar tool to book travel in the last six months? Seventy-five percent of hands went up. The question of how hoteliers prepare for a world where AI models become primary distribution channels is no longer hypothetical.

● The three AI use cases shaping hospitality: A McKinsey presentation at NAVIGATE outlined three areas: back-office functions like HR and finance, on-property AI applications for guest experience and operational efficiency, and the disruption of traditional search and booking flows as OTAs face increasing pressure from AI-native discovery.
● Ivy is Revinate's AI intelligence layer: Running through all of Revinate's platforms, Ivy is beginning to manifest in Reservation Sales first. The initial application is automated call scoring, which Bailey notes could save reservations managers up to 30 hours per month. Colton Bean, Director of Reservations at Suncadia Resort and a Revy Award winner at NAVIGATE, describes the impact: time back in the day to focus on strategic priorities, culture, and streamlining processes.
● Sixty to seventy percent of hoteliers in pre-conference training wanted the same superpower: When asked what superpower they would choose, the overwhelming answer was time-saving. The products coming down Revinate's roadmap are designed to deliver exactly that.
● Personalization is not a merge tag: Abby Waski, Area Marketing Specialist at Pyramid Global Hospitality, describes the aha moment from NAVIGATE: enhancing guest profiles to capture real preferences, and activating those preferences in communications and front desk interactions. Bailey's framing cuts to the point: there is nothing worse than arriving at a hotel you have stayed at ten times and being asked if it is your first visit.
● AI without clean data hallucinates: Bryson Koehler, CEO of Revinate, delivered the conference's most direct caution in his keynote: AI vendors promising transformative results on top of a messy data foundation are selling something that cannot be delivered. His analogy is precise: it is like a world-class chef trying to bake a cake after someone switched all the labels in the pantry. Salt in the sugar jar, sand in the red jar. The AI does not know the difference.
● Seventeen years of data collection is now an activation asset: Revinate started in 2009 collecting reputation and survey data. Today the company connects to over 100 PMS systems and has more than 160 integrations, all synthesized through identity resolution into guest profiles. Karen's point is direct: that foundation, built over 17 years, is what makes AI activation both possible and safe. It is also what separates a hotel that can genuinely personalize from one that cannot.

● Data outbound capabilities are live: For the first time, hoteliers can activate Revinate guest data outside the Revinate ecosystem, running it through AI platforms, external tools, and third-party activations while using Revinate as the clean, identity-resolved source of truth.
● Bold decisions require a data foundation: Angelo Fernandes, CEO of Cote Hospitality, describes what the NAVIGATE conversation meant to him: the ability to make bold decisions faster and more efficiently, based on data that was previously unavailable to the companies he has led.

● The anxiety became optimism: Jennifer Barnhart, Marketing Manager at Noble House Pacific City Collection, captures the arc of the conference in a single sentence: the future of AI in the hotel industry is going to be brighter than we can ever imagine. Bailey echoes it: the hoteliers who arrived with questions left with a direction.

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Instructions on how to do this are here.

Connect with Bailey Yeats here:

• LinkedIn
• Revinate

Connect with Karen Stephens here:

• LinkedIn
• Revinate

Follow the podcast here:

• LinkedIn

Episode Highlights
[04:53] From anxiety to advantage — Bailey describes the mood in the pre-conference training room at the start of the day: real questions, some anxiety, and a lot of uncertainty about what AI means for hospitality teams. By the end of NAVIGATE, the tone had shifted. "I think them being there and being able to lean on each other and lean on our team really helped calm some of that anxiety around what to do next." Karen adds the framing that ran through the entire conference: "You don't get into hotels because you love technology. You get into hotels because you love beautiful properties, guest experience, making people feel wonderful."
[08:38] The icebreaker that revealed everything — When pre-conference training opened with the question "if you could have a superpower, what would it be?", 60 to 70% of the room answered the same way: they wanted to save time. Bailey connects that directly to the products coming from Revinate's roadmap, particularly automated call scoring through Revinate’s AI intelligence layer, Ivy. Colton Bean, Director of Reservations at Suncadia Resort, makes it concrete: "Thirty hours a month is crazy. And I just am so excited that once this is online, we will have that time back to be able to focus on strategic things — helping streamline our processes and focus on culture."

[13:23] Personalization is not a first name — Abby Waski from Pyramid Global Hospitality describes her aha moment at NAVIGATE: "Getting to know our guests, enhancing their profile, getting to know their needs and what they really love when they come to the hotel, so that we can implement those guest preferences into Revinate." Karen connects it to the technology vision: "It's running behind the scenes so that the person having that interaction can easily understand — this person has been here four times, they stay in the spa, they really enjoy vanilla lattes — all of that information at their fingertips." Not AI replacing the human at the front desk. AI making that human unbeatable.

[15:30] The chef with the unlabeled pantry — Bryson Koehler's NAVIGATE keynote delivers the conference's most memorable framing of the AI data problem: "AI without data is like a world-class chef trying to bake a cake, but somebody's gone into the pantry and taken all of the labels — where the sugar was in the blue jar and the salt was in the red jar and switched all around." The AI hallucination is what happens when the ingredients are mislabeled. The vendors selling AI on top of a messy data foundation are selling a cake that will not rise. "That's the vendor who sold a bill of goods."

[17:34] The data void that no longer exists — Angelo Fernandes, CEO of Cote Hospitality, describes what made NAVIGATE meaningful for him: "The ability to make bold decisions based on the data that we're able to collect — that was a big void in our industry for many years." Revinate's 17-year foundation of reputation data, guest data across 100-plus PMS systems, and over 160 integrations synthesized into identity-resolved profiles is what fills that void. As Karen summarizes: "We saw the future, we are now in the future, we are here — and now we're all about activating."

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
00:57 - NAVIGATE 2026 at the Wigwam, Phoenix 
02:48 - What great hospitality looks like in the wild 
04:53 - AI anxiety and AI opportunity
06:35 - McKinsey on the main stage: Three ways AI is reshaping hospitality 
08:38 -Revinate’s Ivy and Reservation Sales: what automated call scoring changes 
13:23 - Personalization beyond the merge tag: Abby Waski on knowing your guests 
15:30 - Bryson Koehler: Why clean data is the foundation of every AI strategy 
17:34 - Angelo Fernandes: bold decisions and the data void that no longer exists 
19:03 - Jennifer Barnhart: The future is brighter than we can imagine


If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here and follow us on LinkedIn so you never miss a moment! 
Hotel Moment Podcast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so


Previous guests include: Shannon Knapp, CEO of Leading Hotels of the World (LHW), Patrick Norton of Brittain Resorts & Hotels, Shawn Jereb of Montage International, Carlo Del Mistro, Chief Digital Officer of Ennismore, Jason Pirock of Springboard Hospitality, and many more.


Are you a hospitality industry leader with insights to share? We're always looking for innovative voices to join our conversation about the future of hospitality technology.

If you'd like to be a guest on an upcoming episode of Hotel Moment, we'd love to hear from you! Our podcast reaches thousands of hospitality professionals worldwide, and we're particularly interested in perspectives on:

• Innovation in hospitality technology
• Guest experience transformation
• Revenue optimization strategies
• Emerging industry trends

Express your interest in being a guest →
Check out the three most downloaded episodes:

• Revinate’s new CEO — on a mission to empower hoteliers with data-driven technology | with Bryson Koehler 
• Guests define what luxury means today | with Shannon Knapp
• Your commercial strategy as an evolution and not a revolution | with Jennifer Hill
  
  

 In this webinar episode of Hotel Moment, Bailey Yeats, Marketing Manager at Revinate, sits down with Amanda Wasco Brown, Director of Revenue at Old Edwards Hospitality Group, for the third and final session of the 2026 Benchmark Report Leadership Series. The focus: the voice channel, and specifically what the data from 4.3 million phone calls analyzed globally in 2025 reveals about where reservations teams are winning, where they are losing revenue they do not know they are losing, and how to close the gap.

Amanda brings 14 years at Old Edwards — eight of them in reservations — and a holistic operation that most properties would not attempt: seven agents handling rooms, dining, spa, and golf across four hotels, three golf courses, and multiple event and dining venues. Her experience makes every benchmark number land with operational weight.


What you'll learn:

● Inbound call volume is a staffing and revenue planning tool: In peak months — June, July, August, and October through December — the benchmark sits at three inbound lead calls per room per month. For a 100-room hotel, that is 300 high-intent calls during the busiest period of the year. Understanding when volume peaks lets call center leaders optimize staffing before the season, not scramble during it.

● High-intent callers are not front desk traffic: Inbound lead calls are not service inquiries or operational requests. They are guests actively looking to make a reservation — the highest-intent contact point in the direct booking cycle. Treating them as such, with dedicated staffing and campaign-linked toll-free numbers that tell agents exactly why a guest is calling before the conversation starts, changes what is possible in every call.

● Conversion rates are the NPS of the voice channel: The benchmark shows best-performing months at 49% to 53% conversion, meaning well-trained reservations teams are closing more than half of every qualified lead they receive. When conversion dips, it is not just a revenue signal — it is a coaching diagnostic. Amanda's team uses the nightly lead demand report alongside conversion data to distinguish rate resistance from policy friction from agent skill gaps.
● Non-booked lead volume tells a different story than total call volume: June and July average 1.5 non-booked inbound calls per room per month, the highest of any period. But Amanda reads it as intelligence. Non-booked spikes reveal whether the issue is pricing, minimum stay policies, or something the marketing team is promoting that the property cannot deliver. At Old Edwards, removing nightly minimums in winter and into Q2 produced immediate improvement in the abandonment report and forecasting.

● Outbound calls generate $1,164 in incremental revenue per room annually: The benchmark finding on outbound is one of the most striking in the report. A 100-room hotel running proactive outbound calls can expect just over $116,000 in additional revenue annually. This revenue arrives with a lower acquisition cost than any OTA booking, carries no commission, and builds a direct guest data record that belongs to the property. Amanda is candid that her team's outbound focus has been constrained by inbound abandonment rates, but acknowledges that every reservations manager who has deployed true outbound strategy reports significant bottom-line impact.

● Campaign-linked toll-free numbers change the inbound experience: When an email campaign drives a call and the call comes through a campaign-specific toll-free number, the agent already knows what the caller is calling about before saying hello. No explanations, no re-establishing context — just a more personalized conversation from the first second. Amanda's team uses this in combination with targeted email campaigns to move from blanket outreach to high-context inbound conversations.

● Role-play is the training method that actually works: Amanda identifies asking for the reservation as the single most common sticking point for newer agents, not knowledge gaps but comfort gaps. The fix, in her experience, is role-play, specifically on closing language and the offer of a follow-up call. Combined with Revinate's in-person on-site training, which Old Edwards has used with measurable team impact, role-play builds the muscle memory that makes closing feel natural rather than uncomfortable.

● Scoring forms are only useful when paired with one-on-ones: Amanda's reservation manager conducts weekly one-on-ones with every agent, using scoring form data as a starting point but always going further. Half of the Old Edwards reservations team works remotely, and the one-on-ones serve a dual purpose: performance coaching and human connection that prevents silos from forming in a distributed team.

● Agents are the foundation of every guest data point: Bailey's framing for the reservation agent's role in the broader data ecosystem is one of the most memorable in the series. "They are the ones who ultimately enter that first data piece for that guest. They're like the foundation of the house. And the rest of the team builds on top of that house." When agents understand that their lead form accuracy determines everything downstream, the quality of the data, the personalization of the marketing, and the recognition of the guest at check-in, their relationship with their role changes.


If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Instructions on how to do this are here.

Read the Hospitality Benchmark Report here: https://www.revinate.com/hospitality-benchmark-report/ 
Connect with Bailey Yeats here:

• LinkedIn
• Revinate

Connect with Amanda Wasco Brown here:

• LinkedIn
• Old Edwards Hospitality Group

Follow the podcast here:

• LinkedIn

Episode Highlights
[05:30] Inbound call volume: the number that determines your staffing season — Bailey presents the benchmark data that reshapes how reservations managers should think about planning: during peak months, a standard 100-room hotel can expect 300 inbound lead calls. Amanda's immediate response is direct — staffing is the most important thing her team pulls from this report. With seven agents managing rooms, dining, spa, and golf across four properties, knowing when volume peaks is not a planning convenience. It is the difference between capturing that revenue and losing it to an abandoned call.

[12:00] Conversion rates as a coaching tool, not just a KPI — Amanda reframes what conversion data is actually useful for when you have a newer team: "Being able to track that really helps us dig into who needs more coaching, a little more love." The benchmark's 49 to 53% conversion rates in best-performing months are a ceiling to aim for, but the nightly lead demand report sits underneath the conversion data and tells Amanda whether a dip is a rate problem, a policy problem, or an agent skill problem. Each has a different fix and conversion data alone cannot distinguish between them.
[20:44] What non-booked leads reveal about rate and policy — Amanda describes how removing nightly minimums in winter and into Q2 at Old Edwards' most economical Highlands property immediately improved both the abandonment report and revenue forecasts. "We just weren't selling in the winter time." Non-booked lead volume told her where the friction was. The nightly lead demand report told her what callers were actually asking about. The fix was a policy change, not more training.

[24:22] Outbound calls: the revenue that arrives without a commission — The benchmark finding is specific: $1,164 in incremental revenue per room per year from outbound calls, with no OTA commission attached and guest data secured directly into the hotel's own database. Amanda is candid about the challenge: "It has been my dream to have outbound-specific agents." Her team's current outbound effort focuses on returning voicemails and responding to abandoned calls, but she acknowledges that every reservations manager who has deployed dedicated outbound reports it as transformative.
[29:04] Role-play and one-on-ones: the coaching combination that sticks — Amanda identifies the most common agent sticking point as the moment of asking for the reservation — not a knowledge gap but a comfort gap. "That seems to be the biggest block for newer agents." Her solution is role-play, specifically on closing language and the proactive offer of a follow-up call. Combined with weekly one-on-ones that go beyond the scoring form, this approach keeps remote agents connected to their manager and continuously improving. "Not just doing the forms, but actually having the catch-up one-on-ones."


Chapters:
00:00 - Intro 
00:52 - About the 2026 Benchmark Report Leadership Series 
02:30 - Old Edwards Hospitality Group: four hotels, three golf courses, one team of seven 
05:30 - Inbound lead call volume: 300 calls per month at a 100-room hotel 
12:00 - Conversion rates: the NPS of the voice channel 
18:20 - Non-booked lead volume: what summer spikes are really telling you 
22:37 - Outbound calls: $1,164 in incremental revenue per room annually 
29:04 - Coaching, scoring, and building agents who close 


If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here and follow us on LinkedIn so you never miss a moment! 
Hotel Moment Podcast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so


Previous guests include: Shannon Knapp, CEO of Leading Hotels of the World (LHW), Patrick Norton of Brittain Resorts & Hotels, Shawn Jereb of Montage International, Carlo Del Mistro, Chief Digital Officer of Ennismore, Jason Pirock of Springboard Hospitality, and many more.


Are you a hospitality industry leader with insights to share? We're always looking for innovative voices to join our conversation about the future of hospitality technology.

If you'd like to be a guest on an upcoming episode of Hotel Moment, we'd love to hear from you! Our podcast reaches thousands of hospitality professionals worldwide, and we're particularly interested in perspectives on:

• Innovation in hospitality technology
• Guest experience transformation
• Revenue optimization strategies
• Emerging industry trends

Express your interest in being a guest →
Check out the three most downloaded episodes:

• Revinate’s new CEO — on a mission to empower hoteliers with data-driven technology | with Bryson Koehler 
• Guests define what luxury means today | with Shannon Knapp
• Your commercial strategy as an evolution and not a revolution | with Jennifer Hill
  
  

 In this episode of Hotel Moment, host Karen Stephens, CMO of Revinate, welcomes back Adam Mogelonsky, Partner at Hotel Mogel Consulting Ltd with over 15 years of experience focusing on revenue modeling, margin optimization, and integrating emergent technologies for upscale and luxury hotels, to discuss preparing for FIFA World Cup 2026. With less than eight weeks until the tournament brings 72% ADR premiums and 13% RevPAR lifts to 16 host cities across 11 US markets, three in Mexico, and two in Canada, Adam emphasizes viewing FIFA not as a one-off event but as an opportunity to build systems and processes applicable to any future landmark compression event.


What you'll learn:

• Operational challenges from lead time volatility: Pandemic refundable policies trained guests to book days before arrival instead of months ahead, making it nearly impossible to forecast labor needs when premium rates create higher service expectations. Adam explains how to manage operational delivery when you can't predict demand until the last minute.
• Non-refundable versus refundable rate science: Discounting non-refundable rates too much pushes your flexible rates out of competition, but not enough won't drive commitment. Adam shares how to find the sweet spot using data that connects guest sentiment with the rate plan they chose.
• Packaging and direct booking fenced offers: Hotels can identify past guests from FIFA countries and offer them packages that bypass OTA rate parity rules. This strategy converts the 10-20% you'd pay in commissions into breakfast, lower rates, and direct bookings.
• Voice channel data goldmine transformation: Recording calls and converting them to text reveals the questions guests ask most, which become FAQ content that boosts your AI search ranking. Adam explains how this works whether callers book or not, and why non-bookers are your best callback list.
• Story-driven guest concept beyond luxury: Rate alone doesn't define luxury anymore. Adam introduces the story-driven framework, where boutique hotels win guests through unique design, wellness focus, or intimate key counts that create emotional connection rather than star ratings.
  
  

Throughout the conversation, Adam and Karen emphasize treating FIFA preparation as systems-building for any future compression event, from rate strategies to voice channel optimization to targeted direct offers.


If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Instructions on how to do this are here.

Connect with Adam Mogelonsky here:

• LinkedIn
• Hotel Mogel Consulting Ltd.

Connect with Karen Stephens here:

• LinkedIn
• Revinate

Follow the podcast here:

• LinkedIn

Episode Highlights
[00:00] FIFA as a systems-building opportunity - Adam frames the approach: "It's easy to look at FIFA as a one-off event, but there're tons of things that we can do to capture as much demand as possible for this one-off event, and then apply those systems and processes to any future event that goes forward."
[04:26] Lead time volatility operational challenges - Adam explains pandemic impact: "When we look at the confluence of Internet-borne bookings, digital bookings combined with relatively easy refundable policies that all came about during the pandemic, we've essentially trained a lot of our guests to expect that as the norm. People have been trained to book relatively close to the intended date. When you see such a large ADR premium from landmark events like FIFA, there is an increased expectation for service quality. Everyone knows the city will be more expensive, but they're going to be looking at it and going, well, you know, I'm staying in this branded hotel, I'm paying $700 a night when regular rates after that week are $300. What else am I getting?"
[08:01] Non-refundable versus refundable rate balance - Adam describes the science: "The whole idea of non-refundable versus refundable rate is scientific. It's also a bit of an art form. You want to incentivize the non-refundable rate by making it more attractive in terms of a price discount. But you don't want it to be so far that it pushes your cancelable rate out of competition with your comp set. Harmonization of data and the cleansing of records to properly associate how somebody felt about their stay, what else they spent on stay, with the rate plan that they were under, is rife territory for innovation."

[10:20] Packaging operational delivery versus friction - Adam outlines the challenge: "If you ask any hotel, they'll say, 'Yes, I want to maximize total revenue and revenue per guest,' because every hotel fundamentally knows that the more a guest spends on site, and the longer a guest stays with you, the more satisfied they are. The issues are: number one, can you deliver on any packages that you promise? That's going back to the operational issue. And then number two is the sticker price, where if you're pushing packages up front, it can potentially introduce another point of friction in terms of securing that booking."
[11:28] Direct bookings fenced offer strategy - Adam emphasizes the path forward: "Direct bookings are the best way forward for every hotel in terms of reducing commissions and then either having that net revenue gain flow through to GOP, or to enhancing service to thereby enhance guest satisfaction and potentially build out your return guest profile and loyalty."

[15:02] Voice channel data richness transformation - Adam reveals the opportunity: "I'm a huge fan of the voice channel because it is the most data-rich channel, but the least harmonized or structured in that data. Humans are way better talkers than we are typers. So therefore, this whole movement with AI-driven automation is moving us back towards what's called conversational commerce. You want to know in some sort of structured way what questions they ask. And from there, you can take those questions and say, well, how do we make this information more readily available on the website in a FAQ, in a storytelling manner, so that way the calls that are arriving are more high-intent or confident bookers."
[20:42] Story-driven guest concept introduction - Adam introduces the framework: "I want to introduce a term here, called story-driven guest. It's a little bit more ambiguous than just luxury, because luxury in essence is more of a rate term. Story is emotion. When you think about a story-driven hotelier and story-seeking guests, they don't want the standard experience. They want to truly live or embody something that's unique to them."


Chapters:
00:00 - Intro 
04:26 - Lead time volatility and operational forecasting challenges 
08:01 - Non-refundable versus refundable rate science 
10:20 - Packaging strategy balancing delivery and friction 
11:55 - Direct booking fenced offers for international travelers 
15:02 - Voice channel data capture and AI search optimization 
20:42 - Story-driven guest concept beyond luxury definitions 
27:42 - Counter-programming for hotels outside FIFA markets 
33:39 - Navigating fuel crisis uncertainty with peace of mind 


If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here and follow us on LinkedIn so you never miss a moment! 
Hotel Moment Podcast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so


Previous guests include: Shannon Knapp, CEO of Leading Hotels of the World (LHW), Patrick Norton of Brittain Resorts & Hotels, Shawn Jereb of Montage International, Carlo Del Mistro, Chief Digital Officer of Ennismore, Jason Pirock of Springboard Hospitality, and many more.


Are you a hospitality industry leader with insights to share? We're always looking for innovative voices to join our conversation about the future of hospitality technology.

If you'd like to be a guest on an upcoming episode of Hotel Moment, we'd love to hear from you! Our podcast reaches thousands of hospitality professionals worldwide, and we're particularly interested in perspectives on:

• Innovation in hospitality technology
• Guest experience transformation
• Revenue optimization strategies
• Emerging industry trends

Express your interest in being a guest →
Check out the three most downloaded episodes:

• Revinate’s new CEO — on a mission to empower hoteliers with data-driven technology | with Bryson Koehler 
• Guests define what luxury means today | with Shannon Knapp
• Your commercial strategy as an evolution and not a revolution | with Jennifer Hill
  
  

In this webinar episode of Hotel Moment, Bailey Yeats, Marketing Manager at Revinate, sits down with Gitti Hernández, Digital Marketing Manager at Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic, for the second session of the 2026 Benchmark Report Leadership Series — this time focused entirely on database health. Casa de Campo is one of the Caribbean's most complex hospitality operations: 315 rooms across 7,000 acres, three golf courses, a private beach, an equestrian centre, a marina, a racket centre, and a 6,000-seat amphitheater that has hosted Frank Sinatra, Andrea Bocelli, and Jennifer Lopez. Managing the guest data that flows through a property like that and using it to create genuinely personalized experiences is not a theoretical exercise. It is ten years of daily work that Gitti has led from the inside.


What you'll learn:

●Database growth is the foundation of marketing growth: North American hotels are seeing 21% to 26% database growth year over year across all property sizes. That compounding growth creates the audience that makes segmentation, personalization, and direct revenue campaigns possible, but only if the data collected is clean, complete, and structured correctly.
● Segmentation starts with knowing who your guests actually are: Casa de Campo does not have one type of guest — it has golfers, polo spectators, beach guests, equestrian visitors, marina users, concert-goers, and wedding parties, among others. Gitti describes the multi-year effort to bring disparate systems together and create distinct, actionable segments for each. "That has been our biggest challenge and our biggest task."
● A pre-arrival itinerary program raised guest satisfaction by 40%: Before Casa de Campo invested in email capture, guests would arrive with no dining reservations, no activity bookings, and sometimes discover a shooting centre on day four of a five-day stay — with no time left to use it. Now, 90% of guests arrive with a pre-built itinerary created in collaboration with a dedicated vacation planner. The catalyst was simple: having an email address to send that first outreach.

● Phone capture is the biggest global gap — and Ivy made it urgent: When Casa de Campo launched Ivy for automated on-property messaging, they discovered they had almost no mobile numbers in their database, only landlines. Building mobile phone capture into every guest touchpoint became an immediate operational priority, and the results now show up in everything from lost towel requests to real-time navigation help on a property so large that guests regularly get lost.
● 12% of North American email records are OTA-masked — and the window is closing: For every 100 guests in a hotel's database with an email address, 12 are reachable only through a temporary OTA-masked address that expires within 20 to 30 days. In EMEA, the figure reaches 34%. Gitti's team launched an OTA win-back campaign after NAVIGATE, and it outperformed expectations. The mission is to find out what makes those guests book through the OTA, and remove that reason.
● Merged profiles turned duplicate chaos into Ultra VIP clarity: Before Revinate's identity resolution tools were fully deployed at Casa de Campo, the same guest could appear four or five times in the database — each profile distinguished by a period, an extra letter, or a formatting variation. Once merged, the data told a completely different story. For the resort's 50th anniversary, the team was able to identify and segment guests who had visited repeatedly, experienced multiple facets of the property, and truly embodied the Casa de Campo guest, creating a campaign that would not have been possible with fragmented data.

● Placeholder email addresses are the silent database killer: Bailey and Gitti both flag the practice of filling email fields with dummy addresses just to satisfy a form field. Beyond the obvious deliverability damage, it corrupts the profile data that every downstream campaign relies on. Gitti's approach: teach the team not just what to do, but why it matters and what breaks when they do it wrong.
● Clean data is a team sport that starts with reservations: Casa de Campo's data SOPs cover the entire guest journey — what to request, how to ask, how to enter data without typos or inconsistent formatting, and when it is acceptable to move on without the information. Reservation agents are positioned as the foundational layer of the entire data operation, because they create the guest profile that every other touchpoint builds on.
● Understanding what you will actually use prevents data hoarding: A golf tournament contact list will always arrive with handicap numbers. Casa de Campo keeps the original file but removes irrelevant columns before importing because until you know how you will use data, you cannot know what you do not need. Reviewing marketing plans before deciding on data fields is the order of operations Gitti now recommends to anyone starting a segmentation strategy.

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Instructions on how to do this are here.

Read the Hospitality Benchmark Report here: https://www.revinate.com/hospitality-benchmark-report/ 
Connect with Bailey Yeats here:

• LinkedIn
• Revinate

Connect with Gitti Hernández here:

• LinkedIn
• Casa Del Campo

Follow the podcast here:

• LinkedIn

Episode Highlights
[11:50] Why database health actually matters — Gitti opens with a decade of experience compressed into a few sentences. At Casa de Campo, the challenge was never just growing a database, it was making sense of an operation where golfers, polo spectators, equestrian guests, beach visitors, and concert-goers all generate data in different systems that historically never spoke to each other. "We had to find a streamlined way to differentiate all those guests. And that has been our biggest challenge and our biggest task — how to really identify them, and then create different segments." The benchmark report's database growth figures are the foundation. What Gitti describes is the decade of work required to turn that growth into something usable.

[22:48] The itinerary strategy that changed the guest experience — Before Casa de Campo invested seriously in email capture, guests would arrive with no dining reservations, no activities booked, and no awareness of what the property even offered. Gitti describes a guest discovering the shooting center on day four of a five-day stay and leaving before ever getting to use it. The fix was a pre-arrival itinerary program,  a vacation planner assigned to each guest, an email sent immediately after booking, and a standing invitation to shape the stay before arrival. "That improved our guest satisfaction by forty percent." The operational lever was one email address captured at the right moment.

[31:15] The OTA masked email problem — and what Casa de Campo did about it — Bailey presents the benchmark finding that 12% of North American email records are OTA-masked and set to expire within 20 to 30 days. For EMEA the figure is 34%. Gitti describes how the team launched an OTA win-back campaign after last year's NAVIGATE — a newsletter sign-up invitation with no offer, just a clear call to stay connected. "I think we have more emails than I thought we were gonna get." She makes the strategic point that drives the effort: finding out why a guest booked through the OTA in the first place, and then giving them a reason they cannot find there to book directly next time.

[43:40] How merged profiles unlocked the Ultra VIP segment — Gitti describes what the database looked like before systematic profile merging: the same guest appearing three, four, or five times across different records, each separated by a stray period, an extra character, or a formatting inconsistency. Once those profiles were unified, the picture changed entirely. For Casa de Campo's 50th anniversary, the team was able to identify guests who had visited repeatedly, experienced multiple areas of the resort, and truly represented the depth of the brand. "If we didn't have all those merged profiles, I don't think we would have been able to create that specific segment." Recognition, personalization, and the feeling of being seen as a returning guest all start with data that knows who someone actually is.

[44:55] Teaching the team to own the data — Gitti's most transferable lesson is a mindset. Reservation agents who fill email fields with placeholders because a form requires an entry are not being careless. They just do not understand what breaks when they do it. "Making sure they understand why. Not just because you're gonna complete the field to make me happy or make your boss happy, but why is it important, how it connects with everything else, and how it will break something else if you do it wrong." When the team understands the downstream impact of what they capture, the data quality changes and so does how they feel about their role in the guest experience.

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro01:14 - About the 2026 Hospitality Benchmark Report03:03 - Casa de Campo: 50 years, 7,000 acres, and a data challenge to match07:20 - Database growth benchmarks and what they mean for marketing10:43 - Why personalization and segmentation start with clean data17:08 - The itinerary strategy that raised guest satisfaction by 40%29:12 - OTA masked emails: the 12% problem and how to win those guests back


If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here and follow us on LinkedIn so you never miss a moment! 
Hotel Moment Podcast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so


Previous guests include: Shannon Knapp, CEO of Leading Hotels of the World (LHW), Patrick Norton of Brittain Resorts & Hotels, Shawn Jereb of Montage International, Carlo Del Mistro, Chief Digital Officer of Ennismore, Jason Pirock of Springboard Hospitality, and many more.


Are you a hospitality industry leader with insights to share? We're always looking for innovative voices to join our conversation about the future of hospitality technology.

If you'd like to be a guest on an upcoming episode of Hotel Moment, we'd love to hear from you! Our podcast reaches thousands of hospitality professionals worldwide, and we're particularly interested in perspectives on:

• Innovation in hospitality technology
• Guest experience transformation
• Revenue optimization strategies
• Emerging industry trends

Express your interest in being a guest →
Check out the three most downloaded episodes:

• Revinate’s new CEO — on a mission to empower hoteliers with data-driven technology | with Bryson Koehler 
• Guests define what luxury means today | with Shannon Knapp
• Your commercial strategy as an evolution and not a revolution | with Jennifer Hill
  
  

In this episode of Hotel Moment, Dylan Cole, Managing Director EMEA at Revinate, sits down with Tomas Bäcklund, Chief Marketing Officer at Elite Hotels of Sweden, for a conversation that challenges some of the industry's most persistent assumptions about where revenue growth comes from. Tomas is not a career hotelier — he came from the creative agency world, was headhunted as a candidate for the CMO role at Elite Hotels, and pitched his way into the job with a 35-slide deck built over a weekend. That outsider perspective has defined his leadership: while most of the industry focuses on distribution and efficiency, Tomas has spent five years making the case that brand is the single most underinvested revenue lever in hospitality.


What you'll learn:

● Brand is why Gucci charges 8,000% more than a basic t-shirt: Tomas uses the fashion industry's most familiar example to make a point the hotel industry consistently misses. The quality difference between a luxury brand and a generic product does not justify the price gap. Brand does. The same logic applies to ADR, and most hotels have not learned to use it.
● Margins are compressing and brand is the only sustainable fix: Costs of labor, goods, and rentals have risen sharply across the last five years. Hotel prices have not kept pace. The result is a margin squeeze that most companies respond to by cutting costs — including marketing. Tomas's argument is that the opposite approach, investing in brand to support price increases, is the one that actually works.
● Elite Hotels grew direct website booking share by nearly ten percent in five years: This is not a theoretical argument. Under Tomas's leadership, the share of bookings coming through Elite Hotels' own website has risen significantly — a result he attributes to a combination of brand investment, website usability improvements, and loyalty program development working in parallel.

● The 95-5 rule changes how you think about hotel marketing: At any given moment, 95% of potential guests are not ready to buy. Hotel marketing that focuses exclusively on the bottom of the funnel — people already close to booking — is only ever talking to existing customers. Growing means building relationships with people in all three layers of the funnel, including those who currently book elsewhere, over a long enough time frame that they are positioned to choose you when they are ready.

● Human touch is becoming the next luxury: As more hotel operations automate, Tomas predicts a bifurcation in the market between fully automated, cost-efficient experiences and premium hospitality where the human element is the product. "I think that human touch will be the next luxury. I really do."
● Retail brands outperform hospitality on brand building — despite having less time with customers: Retailers have guests for fifteen minutes. Hotels have them for twenty-four hours. And yet retail consistently produces more creative, emotionally resonant brand building. Tomas draws inspiration from Jonathan Anderson's transformation of Loewe, Demna Gvasalia's reinvention of Balenciaga, and Soho House's global name recognition built on twenty hotels. These, he argues, are the case studies hotel CMOs should be studying.

● Sweden's hotel pricing problem illustrates a global brand failure: Sweden is one of Europe's most expensive countries for almost everything except hotels. Stockholm ADR sits between Slovenia and Bulgaria in European comparisons. The reason, Tomas argues, is not market conditions,  it is a decade of under-investment in communicating why a hotel experience is worth paying for.
● Physical and mental availability both have to work: Borrowing from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Tomas frames direct booking growth as requiring two things simultaneously — mental availability (brand strength, relevance, desire) and physical availability (a website that is easy to book from). Expedia employs 4,200 data scientists focused almost entirely on making their platform easier to use. Most hotels are competing against that with far fewer resources. Both sides of the equation have to be working.

● The hospitality industry recycles the same marketing ideas: Tomas observes that senior marketing executives in hospitality tend to move between the same pool of companies, producing the same ideas. His case: a former CMO of Coca-Cola or Nike would likely revolutionise hotel marketing precisely because they come from outside the circular thinking of the industry.
Dylan and Tomas also discuss the founding story of Elite Hotels — built by Bicky Chakraborty, who arrived in Sweden from Calcutta in 1966 with nothing and created one of the country's most famous hospitality brands through sheer force of personality and relentless PR — and what that founding story reveals about brand building at its most raw.

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Instructions on how to do this are here.


Connect with Tomas Bäcklund here:

• LinkedIn
• Elite Hotels of Sweden AB

Connect with Dylan Cole here:

• LinkedIn
• Revinate

Follow the podcast here:

• LinkedIn

Episode Highlights
[00:00] Brand is how you charge more — Tomas opens with the idea that has shaped his five years in hotel marketing: "What I've been going around telling people in the last five years is that there's another way of doing things. If you increase your brand, you can charge more. You see this in every single industry all over the world." It is a simple argument — and one he argues the hospitality industry has consistently failed to act on.
[05:47] Why human touch is becoming the next luxury — Reflecting on the contrast between the most memorable hotel stay of his life — a 12-villa property in the Philippines run by a couple who trained every local staff member from scratch — and the worst, a visually perfect cliff-top hotel in southern Italy with terrible food and service, Tomas draws a line that runs through the rest of the conversation: "The more we go into AI and the more everything is automated, I think that human touch will be the next luxury. I really do." For premium and luxury hotels, he argues, the human element is not a cost to be optimised away — it is the product.
[11:42] The forgotten revenue lever — Tomas makes his core strategic case with unusual directness. As inflation drives up costs and margins compress, most companies respond by cutting — including cutting marketing. His alternative: "If you increase your brand, you can charge more. You see this in every single industry all over the world." He illustrates with a brand equity study run by Kantar in Sweden in 2023, where one hotel competitor ranked in the top 30 brands nationally on brand strength relative to pricing power — meaning they could raise prices significantly without losing guests. "And yet I don't see any of that happening in Sweden."

[22:00] Why the same ideas keep going round — Tomas identifies a structural problem in hotel marketing leadership: senior executives move between the same pool of companies, recycling the same thinking. "Everyone has basically the same ideas going round and round and round." His solution is to hire marketing talent from outside the industry. "If you take Coca-Cola's or Nike's former CMO — do you think they'll do a bad job in the hospitality industry? I think they would revolutionise the place. Because marketing is a different beast. You don't have to know hospitality in order to be good at marketing. You need to know marketing in order to be good at marketing."

[27:35] How to grow direct bookings — the full picture — Asked what advice he would give a hotel leader wanting to strengthen brand and drive direct bookings simultaneously, Tomas offers the most complete strategic framework of the episode. Brand investment builds desire in the 95% of potential guests not currently ready to buy. Website usability converts that desire into bookings when they are. Loyalty keeps them coming back. "The stronger the brand you have, the more people will come to you directly. And then there's the complexity — the harder it is to purchase from your own website, the less people will buy from it." All three elements have to work together.


Chapters:
00:00 - Intro 
00:42 - Tomas Bäcklund and Elite Hotels of Sweden 
02:12 - The best hotel in the world  and what made it great 
05:47 - Why human touch is becoming the next luxury 
06:58 - How a brand outsider became a hotel CMO 
11:42 - Why branding is the forgotten revenue lever in hospitality 
17:50 - Sweden's hotel pricing problem  and what it reveals about brand


If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here and follow us on LinkedIn so you never miss a moment! 
Hotel Moment Podcast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so


Previous guests include: Shannon Knapp, CEO of Leading Hotels of the World (LHW), Patrick Norton of Brittain Resorts & Hotels, Shawn Jereb of Montage International, Carlo Del Mistro, Chief Digital Officer of Ennismore, Jason Pirock of Springboard Hospitality, and many more.


Are you a hospitality industry leader with insights to share? We're always looking for innovative voices to join our conversation about the future of hospitality technology.

If you'd like to be a guest on an upcoming episode of Hotel Moment, we'd love to hear from you! Our podcast reaches thousands of hospitality professionals worldwide, and we're particularly interested in perspectives on:

• Innovation in hospitality technology
• Guest experience transformation
• Revenue optimization strategies
• Emerging industry trends

Express your interest in being a guest →
Check out the three most downloaded episodes:

• Revinate’s new CEO — on a mission to empower hoteliers with data-driven technology | with Bryson Koehler 
• Guests define what luxury means today | with Shannon Knapp
• Your commercial strategy as an evolution and not a revolution | with Jennifer Hill
  
  

In this webinar episode of Hotel Moment, Bailey Yeats, Marketing Manager at Revinate, sits down with Christine Malfair, Fractional CMO for Independent Hotels at Malfair Marketing, for a practical, data-rich session on the email channel findings from the 2026 Revinate Hospitality Benchmark Report. Drawn from 2.8 billion emails analyzed globally throughout 2025, this edition of the report is Revinate's most comprehensive yet — and the email findings make a clear case that the shift from volume to precision is no longer optional. It is the difference between conversion rates that move revenue and sends that quietly damage sender reputation.


What you'll learn:

● Open rates are determined before the email is opened: Newsletters benchmark at 33.8% open rates globally. But as Christine notes, open rates are a measure of one thing — the subject line. Citing David Ogilvy's rule that 80 cents of every marketing dollar should go to the headline, Christine argues that subject lines have moved from important to hyper-important, especially as inboxes become more competitive and direct guest relationships more valuable.
● Click-through rates validate content relevance: A click-through rate is not just a metric, it is confirmation that the content inside the email was worth opening. Christine frames it simply: "Are they actually moved to take action?" Buttons consistently outperform text-based calls to action, and the language on those buttons matters significantly. Action-oriented, outcome-specific wording drives measurably better results.
● Cart abandonment is the highest-converting campaign in the report: At 63% open rate, 13.5% click-through, and 6.8% conversion, cart abandonment is the benchmark report's standout performer. Christine's framing captures why: the guest who made it to checkout and backed out is already invested. They showed intent. The job of the cart abandonment email is to meet them where they left off, handle their objections, and make it easy to say yes again.
● Cancellation recovery is the secret weapon: At 51.4% open rate and 5.8% conversion, cancellation recovery is one of the most underused campaigns in hotel email marketing. Guests who canceled are hot leads — they wanted to come, something got in the way, and a well-timed, empathetic follow-up can recover bookings that would otherwise be lost permanently.
● Conversion rates are ten times lower without segmentation: The 2026 benchmark data is direct: segments under 5,000 recipients dramatically outperform large-volume sends. Beyond conversion, mass blasts generate volume spikes that damage sender reputation, create deliverability issues, and force hotels to work harder to recover standing with inbox providers. Christine's reframe is useful — segments are not just a marketing tactic, they are mini communities of people with shared interests and intentions.
● Six high-performing segments to build immediately: Bailey walks through practical segment criteria that require nothing more than data already held in the CRM,  local drive market guests, holiday-season returners, low-season loyalists, survey promoters, restaurant or spa visitors via Data In, and high-value bookers by room type or spend. The goal is one segment implemented immediately, not a full programme redesigned overnight.

● Confirmation and pre-arrival emails hide significant upsell revenue: These transactional emails open at 55 to 66% — among the highest rates of any campaign type — because guests are eagerly anticipating confirmation of a booking they just made. Adding a well-positioned upsell in this moment generates $93 per booking on confirmation emails and $95 on pre-arrival emails. Christine's framework: find the next-best-yes, not the biggest possible ask.
● Food and beverage leads all upsell categories globally: At 34% of global upsell activity, food and beverage consistently tops the benchmark report year over year. Early and late checkout follow, with activities and special experiences combining for nearly a third of upsell efforts. The key principle throughout: the upsell must match the guest type, or it erodes the trust that the transactional email has already built.
If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Instructions on how to do this are here.

Read the Hospitality Benchmark Report here: https://www.revinate.com/hospitality-benchmark-report/ 
Connect with Bailey Yeats here:

• LinkedIn
• Revinate

Connect with Christine Malfair here:

• LinkedIn
• Malfair Marketing

Follow the podcast here:

• LinkedIn

Episode Highlights
[09:05] The email metrics that actually matter — Christine reframes how hoteliers should think about the three core email metrics, drawing on a principle she attributes to David Ogilvy: "If you had a dollar to spend, 80 cents of that dollar should be spent on the headline and that is true for your subject line in your email." Open rate measures whether the subject line delivered value. Click-through rate measures whether the content was worth reading. Conversion rate measures whether the email did its job. Understanding each as a diagnostic, not just a KPI, changes how teams troubleshoot underperforming campaigns.
[16:02] Cart abandonment: the most unignorable number in the report — When Bailey presents the cart abandonment data — 63% open rate, 13.5% click-through, 6.8% conversion — Christine's response is direct: "That is unignorable. If that isn't something you're doing, there's the numbers to support why you would do that." The logic is simple. A guest who reached checkout and backed out was invested. The cart abandonment email's job is to meet their intent, handle the objection that stopped them, and make the path back to booking frictionless. Bailey adds the segmentation layer: "You could go back and remind them using merge tags to say, 'we saw you were interested in the luxury suite.'"

[22:37] Why segmentation is no longer optional — The ten times conversion gap between targeted segments and mass sends is the benchmark report's starkest finding on email strategy. Christine draws on fifteen years of watching the industry's relationship with list size evolve: "I've been around long enough to know the glory of the list size — when ownership hears we're sending to X number of people, it sounds big, it sounds effective. And that's changed." Her reframe is practical and memorable: "We use the term segments in email marketing, but I love the idea of them being like mini communities or audiences in themselves. You can say 'hey skiers' in the subject line. That stands out in an inbox of a skier beside everything else they have."
[35:48] The next-best-yes: a framework for upsell revenue — Christine challenges the hospitality industry's tendency to treat upsells as big asks. "A lot of people think upsells have to be this big offer. But I like to think of it as what would be the next easiest yes." Working through the guest's decision journey — destination chosen, hotel chosen, booking confirmed — she identifies the next logical step as something small and obvious: a dining credit, a breakfast add-on, a spa reservation for a spa the guest already knows is hard to get into. "Introduce something that they didn't know about your property. This is a moment to surprise and delight."
[41:36] When the upsell erodes trust instead of building it — Christine lands the most important warning of the upsell discussion with a single example: offering a romance package to a family traveling with small children. "It erodes trust, which is a huge concern in confirmation and pre-arrivals. People know what technology is capable of now and they just expect better. Show that you're paying attention." The right upsell in the wrong segment does not just fail to convert,  it signals to the guest that the hotel is not paying attention, undermining the trust the transactional email had already built.

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro 
01:15 - About the 2026 Hospitality Benchmark Report 
05:30 - One-time campaign benchmarks: open rates, clicks, and conversions 
09:05 - What email metrics actually tell you — and how to move them 
16:02 - Top performing recurring campaigns: cart abandonment and cancellation recovery 
22:37 - Why segmentation beats blasting and the ten times conversion gap 
35:48 - Upsell revenue by campaign type and the next-best-yes framework


If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here and follow us on LinkedIn so you never miss a moment! 
Hotel Moment Podcast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so


Previous guests include: Shannon Knapp, CEO of Leading Hotels of the World (LHW), Patrick Norton of Brittain Resorts & Hotels, Shawn Jereb of Montage International, Carlo Del Mistro, Chief Digital Officer of Ennismore, Jason Pirock of Springboard Hospitality, and many more.


Are you a hospitality industry leader with insights to share? We're always looking for innovative voices to join our conversation about the future of hospitality technology.

If you'd like to be a guest on an upcoming episode of Hotel Moment, we'd love to hear from you! Our podcast reaches thousands of hospitality professionals worldwide, and we're particularly interested in perspectives on:

• Innovation in hospitality technology
• Guest experience transformation
• Revenue optimization strategies
• Emerging industry trends

Express your interest in being a guest →
Check out the three most downloaded episodes:

• Revinate’s new CEO — on a mission to empower hoteliers with data-driven technology | with Bryson Koehler 
• Guests define what luxury means today | with Shannon Knapp
• Your commercial strategy as an evolution and not a revolution | with Jennifer Hill
  
  

In this episode of Hotel Moment, Dylan Cole, Managing Director EMEA at Revinate, sits down with Diego Calvo, CEO and Co-Founder of Concept Hotel Group, for a conversation as distinctive as the hotels Diego builds. A lifelong Ibiza native, music promoter, collector of over 700 vintage shirts, and passionate champion of cultural hospitality, Diego founded Concept Hotel Group in 2013 with a clear conviction: hotels should be cultural destinations with a genuine personality, not just places to sleep. Today, nine brands and nearly a decade later, that conviction is producing 35 to 43% direct bookings across the portfolio, driven not by pricing strategy but by brand desire so strong that guests search properties by name rather than browsing OTAs by location.


What you'll learn:

● Five pillars, nine personalities: Art, fashion, design, music, and cinema are not marketing language at Concept Hotel Group, they are the structural framework around which each hotel brand is built. Gran Paradiso, the movie hotel, features a 30-seat cinema and a rotating gallery of commissioned video art. Los Felices, the fashion hotel, displays work from 80 fashion designers across its corridors and rooms. Every pillar lives in a different hotel, and every hotel tells a different story.

● Global inspiration, local identity: Diego draws his design references not from Ibiza itself but from the places he loves most — The Standard Hotels, Chateau Marmont, La Sirenuse on the Amalfi Coast, the Pacific coast aesthetic of Boca Chica. He travels specifically to gather visual and cultural reference before beginning each new project, most recently returning from the Pacific coast to develop the 2027 brand Acapulco Amor.
● The conceptual briefing comes first: Before architects or interior designers are ever briefed, Diego's team builds a comprehensive conceptual document covering music, photography, mood, materials, and narrative. "It's like we build a Ferrari and then maybe we finish with a Mercedes. The important thing is we have an objective and we sit down with the rest of the team." The briefing governs every decision that follows.

● Cultural programming drives direct bookings: Concept Hotel Group achieves 35 to 43% direct bookings across its portfolio. Diego attributes this to the strength of brand desire, guests who want the Cubanito or Mongibello experience go looking for it by name, not by destination. "They go into Google and they say, I like Hotel Cubanito, because they want the experience."
● Only 15% of current guests match the ideal profile — and that is the opportunity: Diego is candid that roughly 15% of current guests are the cosmopolitan, culturally engaged travelers the brand is genuinely built for. Building the Concept Society loyalty programme and increasing direct bookings is explicitly about closing that gap and attracting more guests who love the brand for what it stands for, not just where it is located.
● The Concept Society rewards loyalty, not spend: Launching in April with Revinate, the Concept Society is structured around room nights rather than revenue — recognising that a guest who can only afford to come in low season but returns every year is as valuable to the brand as a high-spending peak-season booker. Tiers run from Insider and Regular through Resident, with the Collective reserved for curated brand ambassadors.
● The Local tier extends loyalty beyond hotel guests: Ibiza locals who attend Concept Hotel Group's live music events and art exhibitions can earn Local status without ever staying in a hotel. By connecting their events platform to Revinate, Diego's team can track external guest attendance and recognise the community that keeps the cultural programme alive year-round.
● Passion is the non-negotiable foundation: Diego's closing advice for any hotelier looking to build something genuine is disarmingly simple. "The main thing is to build something that you feel passion for. If you don't feel the passion for it, then you need to find someone else that is having the passion." Authenticity, he argues, is not a brand strategy — it is a prerequisite.
Dylan and Diego also discuss Ibiza's extraordinary expansion from one five-star hotel in the 1990s to 36 today, how Concept Hotel Group manages aggressive yield management alongside brand consistency across seasons, and the upcoming Mongibello upgrade to five-star status in summer 2026.
If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Instructions on how to do this are here.

Connect with Diego Calvo here:

• LinkedIn
• Concept Hotel Group

Connect with Dylan Cole here:

• LinkedIn
• Revinate

Follow the podcast here:

• LinkedIn

Episode Highlights
[05:11] Bringing the world to Ibiza — Diego reveals that despite being a lifelong Ibiza native, his design references come almost entirely from elsewhere — The Standard Hotels, Chateau Marmont, the Amalfi Coast, Ocean Drive, and most recently the Pacific coast. "Work out the little details. That's how a brand feels more real, not only what you offer, but what you design." Each trip is research, each property a love letter to a specific place and era that Diego then recreates with complete commitment in Ibiza.

[13:25] Why the conceptual briefing changes everything — Diego walks through the design process that sets Concept Hotel Group apart from developers who brief architects first and think about identity later: "It's so important to pay attention to the design process because once you build, once you finish the building, then you can't go backwards and redesign everything." The conceptual briefing covers music, photography, mood, and narrative — everything about a hotel's personality is resolved before construction decisions are made.

[16:52] Cultural programming as a direct booking engine — Diego shares a striking data point: only around 15% of current guests are the cosmopolitan, culturally engaged travelers the brand is designed for, and that is exactly why the Concept Society is launching. "We want the people to feel not only part of a loyalty plan,  I want the people to feel part of the lifestyle we offer in the hotels." The goal is not more bookings from anyone. It is more bookings from the right people, through a loyalty programme that rewards belonging rather than spend.

[18:06] The Concept Society — Dylan and Diego walk through the structure of the incoming loyalty programme tier by tier: Insider, Regular, Resident, Collective, and the Local — a tier reserved exclusively for Ibiza residents who attend cultural events at the hotels without ever staying. "We see the number of nights as more important than the revenue production. Because maybe we have someone that really loves the brand but can only come in low season because they can't afford coming in August. I really appreciate that they're coming back with us."
[22:11] Passion as the only non-negotiable — Diego closes with the piece of advice he would offer any hotelier looking to build something genuine: "The main thing is to build something that you feel passion for. If you don't feel the passion for it, then you need to find someone else that is having the passion." He connects this directly to authenticity, noting that today's travellers are searching for something more — "not like in the past, where they were just looking for a comfortable bed, a minibar, good air conditioning, breakfast. Now they're always looking for something else."


Chapters:
00:00 - Intro01:40 - Diego's journey from Ibiza to Marriott and back again05:11 - Finding global inspiration and bringing it to Ibiza09:39 - Five cultural pillars and how they live inside each hotel13:25 - The conceptual briefing: how a hotel is designed before the architects arrive16:52 - Cultural programming, direct bookings, and the ideal guest profile18:06 - The Concept Society: a loyalty programme built around lifestyle


If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here and follow us on LinkedIn so you never miss a moment! 
Hotel Moment Podcast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so


Previous guests include: Shannon Knapp, CEO of Leading Hotels of the World (LHW), Patrick Norton of Brittain Resorts & Hotels, Shawn Jereb of Montage International, Carlo Del Mistro, Chief Digital Officer of Ennismore, Jason Pirock of Springboard Hospitality, and many more.


Are you a hospitality industry leader with insights to share? We're always looking for innovative voices to join our conversation about the future of hospitality technology.

If you'd like to be a guest on an upcoming episode of Hotel Moment, we'd love to hear from you! Our podcast reaches thousands of hospitality professionals worldwide, and we're particularly interested in perspectives on:

• Innovation in hospitality technology
• Guest experience transformation
• Revenue optimization strategies
• Emerging industry trends

Express your interest in being a guest →
Check out the three most downloaded episodes:

• Revinate’s new CEO — on a mission to empower hoteliers with data-driven technology | with Bryson Koehler 
• Guests define what luxury means today | with Shannon Knapp
• Your commercial strategy as an evolution and not a revolution | with Jennifer Hill
  
  

In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens, Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate, welcomes back Evan Crawford, Vice President of Marketing at Pyramid Global Hospitality, for his second appearance on the podcast. Evan returns with the same operational clarity that made his first appearance so valuable, but this time the conversation is grounded in the 2026 Revinate Hospitality Benchmark Report and the practical questions of what to do with the enormous volume of guest data flowing into hotel systems every day. His answer is consistent throughout: the opportunity is not in collecting more data, it is in connecting what already exists and using it with genuine intent.


What you'll learn:

● Guest feedback is now a generative search signal: Beyond its traditional role in operations, guest feedback is central to how LLMs assign authority to hotel content. Pyramid Global Hospitality treats reputation data as both an ops tool and a discoverability asset as the industry transitions from organic search to generative engine optimization.

● The incomplete guest profile problem: A customer who loved the hotel but had a terrible restaurant experience presents as a satisfied guest in the hotel data, unless the OpenTable review is connected to the same profile. Evan illustrates exactly why bridging these silos is not just a nice-to-have but a prerequisite for accurate personalization.

● Foundations before AI: Evan draws a direct parallel between the early days of SEO promises and today's AI vendor landscape, warning against "shiny objects" that cannot deliver without proper data infrastructure underneath. "If we're building a house without the proper foundation, it's going to crumble."

● Segmentation is the difference between value and noise: Reviewing the 2026 Hospitality Benchmark Report, Evan noticed that email volume and engagement are both high — but revenue through some channels is declining. His diagnosis: undifferentiated outreach is training guests to ignore messages. Each spray-and-pray send reduces the credibility of the next.

● Revinate emails still outperform ChatGPT on last-click revenue: Evan offers one of the most grounding data points in the conversation — at Pyramid Global Hospitality, traditional email and organic search still drive the majority of direct revenue. Getting ahead of AI is important, but abandoning proven strategies to chase emerging ones would be a strategic mistake.

● Content marketing was always the right answer: The shift toward LLM-optimized content is not a new discipline — it is a natural extension of content marketing done properly. "If we're just now scrambling to say, 'Oh my gosh, we need to develop content,' then we were doing it wrong for years before this."

● Writing for LLMs as an audience: Rather than keyword-stuffing, Evan describes the new discipline as writing rich content specifically designed to answer the prompts guests are likely to ask of ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude. Hotels need to think of the LLM as part of their audience, not just as a channel.

● Service recovery requires segmentation too: Sending a warm, promotional email to a guest who had a deeply negative experience is a failure of data activation. Evan's approach involves excluding detractors from standard marketing flows and instead routing them to personalized recovery outreach — sometimes a personal note from the GM — before re-engaging them commercially.

● Negative review responses are a sales tool: Evan reframes the audience for negative review responses entirely: in most cases, the response is not for the guest who left it — they may never return. It is for every future guest reading that thread. The right formula is to acknowledge the specific concern, take accountability, and close with a positive description of what the experience should have been.

Karen and Evan also discuss the upcoming NAVIGATE conference at the Wigwam in Phoenix, a Pyramid Global Hospitality property, and a keynote conversation with the Head of Google Applied Analytics on consumer behavior and the future of hotel discoverability.

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Instructions on how to do this are here.

Read the Hospitality Benchmark Report here: https://www.revinate.com/hospitality-benchmark-report/ 
Connect with Evan Crawford here:

• LinkedIn
• Pyramid Global Hospitality

Connect with Karen Stephens here:

• LinkedIn
• Revinate

Follow the podcast here:

• LinkedIn

Episode Highlights
[03:10] Guest feedback as a generative search signal — Evan opens with a reframe that positions reputation management as a forward-looking AI strategy, not just an operations tool. "We know that people are using the large language models more and more for discovery, and guest feedback is central to what the models are using to give authority to websites and to content. So we need to be prioritizing it to make sure that we're present and have a strong reputation when customers are searching a market for a product." For Pyramid Global Hospitality, the same data serving ops leaders is now serving discoverability in the LLM era.

[03:52] The incomplete guest profile — and how to fix it — Evan uses a concrete example to make the data silo problem tangible: a guest who loved the hotel but had a poor restaurant experience presents as a satisfied customer in the hotel system unless the OpenTable review is pulled into the same profile. "If we are not augmenting that guest profile to understand the complete customer experience, then we are just missing a key data point there." His argument: connecting platforms like golf reservations and OpenTable to the CRM is not a technical exercise; it is the difference between knowing your guest and thinking you know your guest.
[08:02] Shiny objects and the foundation that matters — Evan draws a sharp parallel between the early promises of SEO vendors and the AI vendor landscape of today. "There are a lot of shiny objects right now in the AI space telling you that AI is your savior. And what we're really trying to focus on is making sure that we've got the right foundation, whether it's our website data structured properly, or through our CRM and CDP. Because if we're building a house without the proper foundation, it's going to crumble."

[15:31] Tried and true still wins — One of the most grounding moments of the episode arrives when Evan checks the AI excitement against actual revenue data: "Obviously our primary source of revenue is not AI or the large language models. Even our Revinate emails drive more last-click revenue than ChatGPT does at this point." His point that AI should be ignored, but that preparing for AI and abandoning what works are not the same decision. "Yes, we want to prepare and get our house in order. But it's not just preparing for AI,  in many ways it's doing marketing the right way in general."
[17:36] Spray and pray is eroding your audience — Evan's read of the benchmark report leads to a pointed observation about how undifferentiated outreach is undermining the channels that still work. "We have so much data available to us, but that doesn't mean we should just spray and pray and just send mass marketing to people all the time. It should just be crafted in a thoughtful way to make sure that the customer actually wants to act on the message we're sending them." Each message sent without genuine segmentation, he argues, reduces the value of the next one.


Chapters:
00:00 - Intro01:06 - Evan Crawford and Pyramid Global Hospitality's data approach 
03:10 - Guest feedback as an ops tool and generative search signal 
05:13 - Connecting data silos: OpenTable, golf, and the complete guest profile 
08:02 - AI foundations: avoiding shiny objects and building for the long term 
13:38 - Content strategy for the LLM era and what NAVIGATE will cover 
15:31 - Balancing AI preparation with proven revenue strategies 
17:36 - Segmentation, service recovery, and responding to negative reviews


If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here and follow us on LinkedIn so you never miss a moment! 
Hotel Moment Podcast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so


Previous guests include: Shannon Knapp, CEO of Leading Hotels of the World (LHW), Patrick Norton of Brittain Resorts & Hotels, Shawn Jereb of Montage International, Carlo Del Mistro, Chief Digital Officer of Ennismore, Jason Pirock of Springboard Hospitality, and many more.


Are you a hospitality industry leader with insights to share? We're always looking for innovative voices to join our conversation about the future of hospitality technology.

If you'd like to be a guest on an upcoming episode of Hotel Moment, we'd love to hear from you! Our podcast reaches thousands of hospitality professionals worldwide, and we're particularly interested in perspectives on:

• Innovation in hospitality technology
• Guest experience transformation
• Revenue optimization strategies
• Emerging industry trends

Express your interest in being a guest →
Check out the three most downloaded episodes:

• Revinate’s new CEO — on a mission to empower hoteliers with data-driven technology | with Bryson Koehler 
• Guests define what luxury means today | with Shannon Knapp
• Your commercial strategy as an evolution and not a revolution | with Jennifer Hill
  
  

In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens, Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate, sits down with Chris Koehler, Chief Marketing Officer at Twilio, to explore the fast-moving intersection of AI, guest data, and the future of hospitality personalization. As the CMO of one of the world's most trusted consumer engagement platforms — and a partner of Revinate — Chris brings a perspective that is both industry-wide and refreshingly personal. He is the exact guest hotels should be designing for: a frequent business traveler with strong preferences, no interest in loyalty points, and clear memories of every time a property got personalization right — or embarrassingly wrong.


What you'll learn:

● The personalization gap is real and measurable: Twilio's State of Customer Engagement report finds that 82% of brands believe they provide good or excellent customer engagement, but only 45% of consumers agree. That disconnect is not a technology failure — it is a data activation failure.

● The booking journey has fundamentally changed: In under a decade, travelers moved from travel agents to Google to LLMs. Chris planned an entire two-week Rome family trip through ChatGPT — day-by-day itinerary, museum tickets, hotels, and restaurants. Hotels that are not preparing for an agent-mediated booking world are already behind.

● AI-to-AI negotiation is coming: The next iteration of the booking journey will not involve guests searching or calling at all. Personal AI agents with rich traveler profiles will engage directly with hotel AI agents to find the right match, negotiate, and confirm — and the hotels with the cleanest, most accessible data will win that exchange.
● The personalization bar is lower than hoteliers think: Chris's examples are not complex. Extra coffee pods. Sparkling water in the mini bar. Not leaving a bottle of wine for a guest who does not drink. A welcome-back greeting at check-in. These signals exist in the data already — the problem is getting them in front of the right team member at the right time.

● Loyalty is about comfort and familiarity, not points: For frequent business travelers, the emotional drivers of loyalty are recognition, routine, and the sense that a property understands them. Points are largely irrelevant to this segment — and yet most loyalty programs are still built around them.

● Seamless AI-to-human handoff is the next frontier: Today the handoff between AI and human agents is deeply frustrating — guests repeat their entire story from scratch. The future requires a unified data profile that follows the guest across every touchpoint, digital and in-property, so no context is ever lost.

● Technology should follow the experience, not lead it: Chris's most important advice for non-technical hoteliers is to stay grounded in the guest experience they want to deliver and let technology serve that vision — not the other way around.

● Dedicated thinking time is not optional: The pace of change in AI is too fast for part-time attention. Chris's advice is to assign people specifically to tracking and preparing for these shifts — because being caught flat-footed is a business risk.

● Traveler bifurcation is coming: The market will split between guests who embrace fully agentic experiences and those who seek out human connection as a premium. Knowing where your property sits in that spectrum — and preparing for both — is the strategic decision hoteliers need to make now.

Karen and Chris also discuss what it means to be truly ready for an AI-driven world, why clean and accessible data is the foundation of every personalization strategy, and what role Revinate and Twilio play in helping hotels reach the other side of that equation.

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Instructions on how to do this are here.

Connect with Chris Koehler here:

• LinkedIn
• Twilio

Connect with Karen Stephens here:

• LinkedIn
• Revinate

Follow the podcast here:

• LinkedIn

Episode Highlights
[04:54] The ten-time guest who still gets asked "have you stayed here before?" — Chris sets the personalization stakes with a story from the night before the recording. Checking into a boutique hotel he has visited at least ten times, the front desk agent asked if he had stayed before. "My goodness, just such an opportunity to say welcome back. And we've been talking about personalization in travel and hospitality for a very long time. One of my jokes is the only personalization we often see when we stay in a hotel is your name on the TV and nothing else." The data exists. The problem is getting it to the right person at the right moment.

[06:19] How ChatGPT replaced the travel agent — Chris walks through the full arc of how consumers find and book travel — from brick-and-mortar travel agents, to Google, to the LLM era — with a personal example that makes the shift tangible: "Last year I spent a couple of weeks in Rome with my family, and we basically trip-planned the whole thing through ChatGPT. Day-by-day itinerary, give us links to the museums, where we need to buy the tickets, what hotels should we stay in, which restaurants should we consider that are within walking distance." The next step, he predicts, is personal AI agents negotiating directly with hotel AI agents on the guest's behalf.

[13:09] The 82/45 disconnect — Chris shares data from Twilio's State of Customer Engagement report that reframes how the entire industry should measure personalization success: "82% of brands believe they're providing good or excellent customer engagement, but only 45% of consumers agree. So there's like this big disconnect around how we think we're doing as an industry, yet the consumer doesn't agree." He pairs it with the opportunity: "88% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand if the engagement is personalized in real time."

[13:46] What personalization actually looks like — Chris makes the case that meaningful personalization does not require sophisticated technology — it requires using the signals guests are already giving. Extra coffee pods. Sparkling water. Not leaving wine for a guest who does not drink. "When I show up, just welcome me back. Little things like that. The bar's not that hard. You know what I mean? It's not that hard." His point lands because every hotel already has this data. The gap is activation, not collection.

[20:36] The bifurcation of travelers — As the conversation reaches its conclusion, Chris identifies the strategic question every hotelier needs to answer before the agentic world arrives: "Those that are gonna engage and be fully agentic, not do any of the work themselves — that's one segment. And then I think you're gonna have those that value the human touch and the human experience almost as a luxury." He sees some brands already leaning into the human-only position as a competitive differentiator — and predicts the market will split more sharply in the years ahead.


Chapters:
00:00 - Intro02:14 - Chris Koehler's career and the psychology of customer engagement 04:37 - Why personalization in hospitality is still falling short 06:19 - AI agents and the transformation of the booking journey 11:01 - The seamless handoff: AI, humans, and what guests actually want 13:46 - What meaningful personalization looks like at scale 18:23 - How hoteliers should prepare for the agentic world now


If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here and follow us on LinkedIn so you never miss a moment! 
Hotel Moment Podcast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so


Previous guests include: Shannon Knapp, CEO of Leading Hotels of the World (LHW), Patrick Norton of Brittain Resorts & Hotels, Shawn Jereb of Montage International, Carlo Del Mistro, Chief Digital Officer of Ennismore, Jason Pirock of Springboard Hospitality, and many more.


Are you a hospitality industry leader with insights to share? We're always looking for innovative voices to join our conversation about the future of hospitality technology.

If you'd like to be a guest on an upcoming episode of Hotel Moment, we'd love to hear from you! Our podcast reaches thousands of hospitality professionals worldwide, and we're particularly interested in perspectives on:

• Innovation in hospitality technology
• Guest experience transformation
• Revenue optimization strategies
• Emerging industry trends

Express your interest in being a guest →
Check out the three most downloaded episodes:

• Revinate’s new CEO — on a mission to empower hoteliers with data-driven technology | with Bryson Koehler 
• Guests define what luxury means today | with Shannon Knapp
• Your commercial strategy as an evolution and not a revolution | with Jennifer Hill