Hotels are asking the wrong question at check-in — and Alliants just proved it.

🔑 Apple Wallet and Google Wallet keys at Resorts World Las Vegas are table stakes. Member Pass is the real play: loyalty recognition built into the digital key so repeat guests see their benefits the moment they arrive.

🎯 One customer captured additional guest names from 13,000 out of 20,000 check-ins. Hotels book one name. Alliants helps capture the whole group — the difference between selling one spa package and five World Cup packages.

❓ Nobody's asking "What's bringing you to town?" They should be. Tristan Gadsby, CEO, Alberto Santana, Chief Revenue Officer, and Andrew Pirret, SVP Customer Experience at Alliants, explained how the check-in moved to pre-arrival (#NoVacancyNews) — where you can actually tailor the stay and learn why someone came.

💰 Golf packages going to people who haven't golfed since junior high. Hotels finally have the data to ask the right questions.

From HITEC. Visit alliants.com or find them on LinkedIn.

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Matthew Bright, SVP and Head of IT at Davidson Hospitality, made a promise not to talk about AI. He broke it 54 seconds in.

🔒 AI is making security worse and easier at the same time — phishing emails with zero typos, sophisticated language models doing the work bad actors used to do by hand. 🎯 Large hospitality companies getting breached makes the whole industry a target. People now understand what to steal. 👤 Your tools can block entry points. Your users are the real vulnerability — and they're more susceptible than ever. ⚙️ Basic security wins: strong network security, strong endpoint security. Then invest everything into user awareness, because that's where attacks are working now. 🚨 Social engineering and help desk password resets are the attacks happening right now, not the ones you're reading about.

From HITEC.

Unifocus, Workforce Management Redefined. Visit unifocus.com.

Want the weekly roundup of news, videos, and what you might've missed from #NoVacancyNews? Text HOTEL to 66866.

Deena Baikowitz is a cat whisperer, networking extraordinaire, and the funnest, loudest (the good kind) person you'll ever meet.

She joins Friday Night Audit alongside myself, Craig Sullivan and Suzanne Bagnera, PhD, CHA, CED from Toronto (where she's "in exile" from New York) and the crew immediately put her to work on the pet peeves hotel tournament.

🐱 The parallels between training introverted cats and introverted people are uncanny. Slow blink. Build trust. Don't stare. Feed them. Deena's done it for both species.

🍤 Hotel networking events are broken: greasy sticky fingers on the shrimp, then a handshake, then touching your phone. Someone needs to design a clean-hands networking menu. Deena volunteered. We're here for it.

🏨 The pet peeves tournament is down to the Four Horsemen of Misery — and constantly hidden lamp switches just demolished anti-theft hangers 71-29. The hotel industry is listening now

💼 She speaks five and a half languages (people training and cat training), does coaches, comedy, and will absolutely work a room for you at any conference.

Find her: Fireball Deena on Instagram, LinkedIn, or in the indentation at the middle of any crowd.

Want the weekly roundup of news, videos, and what you might've missed from #NoVacancyNews? Text HOTEL to 66866.

Brent Hayhurst, VP at Curator Hotel and Resort Collection, won't look at a new technology until he knows what KPI it's supposed to move.

💸 Labor is the largest line item on any hotel owner's balance sheet, and that's the number Curator's tech decisions chase. 🏚️ Curator skips the big splashy booths and goes straight to the fringes of the show floor, where the new ideas show up first. 🧪 A pilot that fails isn't wasted. Hayhurst treats it as proof the team needs a different approach entirely. ☎️ AI is already pulling phone calls off the front desk so staff can focus on the guest standing in front of them.

More from the show floor at HITEC. #NoVacancyNews

Unifocus, Workforce Management Redefined. Visit unifocus.com.

Want the weekly roundup of news, videos, and what you might've missed from #NoVacancyNews? Text HOTEL to 66866.

Steven Moore, CEO at Actabl, says you shouldn't need to log in to answer your owner's question.

💬 Altitude, Actabl's new product, lets you have conversations with your data instead of clicking through dashboards and pulling reports. 📊 Instead of logging in, finding the right sheet, and comparing — "What were my labor expenses last two weeks?" takes a conversation. 👥 The payoff: get property managers off screens so staff can focus on what only they can do — physical interaction with guests and the building. 💰 The goal is profitability (down from pre-pandemic levels) without sacrificing guest or associate experience. The tools that do that create lower turnover and better engagement.

From HITEC. #NoVacancyNews

Want the weekly roundup of news, videos, and what you might've missed from #NoVacancyNews? Text HOTEL to 66866.

Keryn McNamara, CIO at Aimbridge, told me AI fails the moment it replaces a human instead of freeing one up.

💰 She's bringing a labor productivity and forecasting tool to market within weeks, built on Aimbridge's scale and data. 🚪 Her go-to comparison: elevator operators disappeared, but new jobs replaced them. She thinks the same thing happens with AI in hotels. 🚩 Her test for separating real AI from marketing AI: ask partners who they're integrated with and who they actually know. ⚡ Her prediction for agentic AI hitting property management systems and point-of-sale: six months, not a year.

Unifocus, Workforce Management Redefined. Visit unifocus.com.

Want the weekly roundup of news, videos, and what you might've missed from #NoVacancyNews? Text HOTEL to 66866.

Denise Walker, CIO at Starwood Hotels and Resorts, started her career on a TRS-80. Thirty years later, she told me AI is the first technology she's never had to explain to anyone — people already see why it matters.

🏨 Smaller hotel companies can move faster than legacy chains that placed big AI bets last year, before pricing models and guest expectations shifted again. 🔐 Fear keeps guest data handled right and security practices tight — Walker calls it a good fear. 🛎️ Starwood wants AI to feel invisible, the way good technology always has. You don't think about water coming out of a pipe. ⚙️ Code written by AI still needs the same quality checks a floor full of developers used to run by hand.

Catch the full conversation from the show floor at HITEC. #NoVacancyNews

Unifocus, Workforce Management Redefined. Visit unifocus.com.

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At HITEC, I talked with Michael Grove of HotStats, which is now part of Duetto, about why hotel performance has to move beyond rooms revenue.

Michael came with actual numbers on profitability, but the conversation went quickly into how owners and operators should read the business. Demand and rate only tell part of the story. Profit depends on where revenue comes from, what it costs to capture it, and which parts of the operation deserve more attention.

We got into U.S. profitability, global travel shifts, food and beverage pressure, wellness, golf, ancillary revenue, and why Michael likes the phrase "performance engineering."

I like that phrase because it gets closer to how owners and operators actually need to think. Revenue is one piece. Profitability tells a much fuller story.

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Hotel operators don't lack AI options. They lack a clear way to evaluate them.

At HITEC, I talked with Shannon McCallum, VP of Operations at Resorts World Las Vegas, about the HFTP AI Collective and how operators can make smarter decisions around AI tools, robotics, chatbots, reporting, and vendor partners.

🤖 Robotics came up, from food prep to concierge support.

📊 Back-of-house reporting came up as a more realistic starting point for some hotels.

🏨 Resorts World Las Vegas already uses AI and chatbots, and Shannon says agentic AI comes next.

🛎️ Resorts World Las Vegas handled more than 459,000 AI-driven interactions last year across 3,506 rooms and three brands.

Shannon also made a practical operator point: guests still need choice. Some want technology. Others want a person.

#NoVacancyNews covered this at HITEC with support from Unifocus. Check them out at unifocus.com for labor solutions built for hospitality.

Want the weekly roundup of news, videos, and what you might've missed from #NoVacancyNews? Text HOTEL to 66866.

During HITEC in San Antonio yesterdayn, I talked with Robert Matsuoka of Duetto about Duetto Labs and how AI could change the daily work of hotel revenue teams.

Revenue managers already spend too much time pulling data from different systems, building reports, checking forecasts, and trying to figure out what needs attention first. Robert's view is that AI should cut through that noise so smart people spend more time making decisions and less time fighting spreadsheets.

We also talked about forecasting, pricing, profit data, and how Duetto is thinking about the next phase of revenue management technology.

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