It’s Thursday, January 29. Wyndham says hotel AI has moved out of pilots as owners lift profit expectations. Anthropic is embedding Claude inside Slack and Teams, while hotels face crawlability gaps as AI agents replace search. Mews just raised $300M to solidify its unicorn status, meanwhile travel stocks wobble on demand risk, TikTok’s U.S. deal stalls, and Europe’s Digital Networks Act targets platform power. In Dubai, skydivers just flew through the world’s tallest hotel.

🎙️ Special shoutout this week to…Greg Nawrocki, Director at Linchris Hotels. Greg joined us on the Hotel Tech Insider podcast this week and revealed the tech stack he uses to power marketing and ops across his 30+ hotel portfolio. You’ll want to hear how he gets up to 80% of guests to engage with text messaging and how he tracks ROI on analog ad placements like billboards.

TOGETHER WITH CLOUDBEDS

Fray Group modernized its tech stack and unlocked a 15% ADR increase without sacrificing service or adding complexity. In a highly price-sensitive market, smarter operations made all the difference.

  • Unified Platform, Real Results: Consolidate reservations, payments, and guest messaging on one system.

  • Smarter Pricing, Higher Revenue: Demand-based automation and full-channel visibility lifted ADR by up to 15%.

  • Built for Complexity: Manage group business, virtual cards, and permissions with ease all while saving time.

From back office to bookings, Cloudbeds gave Fray Group the tools to outperform the market and outpace the competition.

GOING DEEPER

1. Wyndham: This Is a Critical Moment for Hotel AI

Wyndham’s latest Owner Trends Report shows that AI has moved from pilot projects to central strategic focus for hotel operators. The brand highlights rising adoption of AI tools for guest communications, revenue management, and operational support. Additionally, hoteliers are reporting stronger expectations for demand and profitability over the next 12–18 months, driven in part by confidence in AI’s ability to help manage costs, enhance personalization, and optimize workforce capacity.

🎯 Why it matters: Wyndham’s findings illustrate that AI is no longer a niche experiment, but rather it’s becoming a core enabler of competitive performance across the entire hotel value chain. Properties using AI to automate routine tasks, accelerate decision-making, and tailor guest experiences are beginning to differentiate themselves in both efficiency and revenue performance.

🔑 Key takeaway: Hoteliers should accelerate their AI integration roadmap with clear business goals, not just tech for tech’s sake. Prioritize investments that improve guest engagement, streamline revenue optimization, and support operations, while ensuring that data quality, integration, and governance are solid foundations. As Wyndham’s report shows, confidence in the industry is rising alongside confidence in tech-led growth. Read More →

2. What Is AI Crawlability and Why Does It Matter?

As travelers increasingly rely on AI assistants instead of traditional search, hotels risk becoming invisible if their websites, rates, and content can’t be easily read, cited, or surfaced by AI models. Today, many hotel sites are still optimized for human browsing and legacy SEO, not for AI crawlers that power tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Mode. Key technical blockers include restrictive robots.txt files, fragmented tech stacks, unstructured content, and rate/inventory data that’s locked inside systems AI can’t access.

🎯 Why it matters: AI-driven discovery is quickly replacing Google searches as the top of the booking funnel. If AI assistants can’t reliably access a hotel’s pricing, availability, amenities, policies, or location context, they’ll default to OTAs, aggregators, or competitors that are crawlable. This isn’t just a marketing issue: it’s a distribution risk. Hotels that fail to adapt could lose influence over how (or whether) they appear in AI-generated recommendations and itineraries.

🔑 Key takeaway: Hotel leaders should treat AI crawlability as foundational infrastructure, not a future nice-to-have. Audit how your website and tech stack expose content to AI (structured data, schema, APIs, clean rate displays), align vendors on data accessibility, and rethink overly defensive bot-blocking strategies. The hotels that win in AI-first travel discovery will be the ones that make their data easy for machines to understand — while still controlling brand, accuracy, and conversion paths. Read More →

3. Claude’s New Interactive Apps Bring AI Into Workplace Tools

Anthropic has launched interactive Claude apps that enable its AI assistant to operate inside workplace tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and others. These apps transform Claude from a standalone chat interface into an embedded assistant that can take action across apps, automate tasks, and integrate with workflows. Example tasks include summarizing documents, generating reports, and responding to messages in context.

🎯 Why it matters: For hotel executives, this move signals the next phase of AI integration: assistants that don’t just answer questions, but act within the tools teams already use. Rather than siloed pilots or standalone chatbots, AI will increasingly be embedded in revenue, ops, HR, and guest service workflows, helping staff work faster and more consistently across systems they use on daily basis.

🔑 Key takeaway: Hoteliers should future-proof operations by prioritizing AI that integrates seamlessly into daily workflows, not just flashy guest-facing features. Embedding AI into the tools your teams use every day, with governance, security, and interoperability top of mind, will unlock real productivity gains and help hotels scale service without scaling costs. Read More →

 

TOOLS & TACTICS

⚒️ Hotel Tech Tools You’ve Gotta Try

Cloudbeds: All-in-one hotel management software at the speed of AI.

Journey Rewards: Drive repeat visits & upsell revenue with targeted perks and rewards.

Tripleseat: Manage hotel group bookings, catering and event sales with AI.

Actabl: Turn powerful BI data into actionable insights that maximize profits.

Canary Technologies: Powerful but simple AI powered digital guest journey platform.

ROH: Automate sales and finance to save time and capture more revenue.

Vouchercart: Turn gift vouchers into prepaid revenue across rooms, dining, and spa.

 

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AROUND THE HOTEL INDUSTRY

Other hospitality happenings this week

🏙️ New York City bans hidden hotel fees ahead of the 2026 World Cup tourism surge.

💰 Hotel tech platform Mews secures $300M in funding to expand its hospitality operating system globally.

🤖 AI-powered travel search and smarter chatbots headline hotel technology trends shaping 2026.

📉 U.S. hotels face occupancy and RevPAR declines in 2025 amid higher costs and softer demand.

📱 Meta plans to test premium subscriptions on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

🇺🇸 A proposed TikTok deal between the U.S. and China faces uncertainty as geopolitical tensions persist.

📊 Marriott’s data leader explains how data and GenAI drive loyalty through personalization at scale.

⏱️ A new report shows executives say AI is saving workers 4+ hours each week, but the workers tell a different story.

🇪🇺 Europe’s Digital Networks Act may shape AI and startup growth by rebalancing platform power.

🧳 Former Priceline CEO Brett Keller reflects on 26 years of change from no-fee travel to AI agents.

🎁 Hotels rethink pricing as packages and deals evolve in the AI era to drive direct bookings.

📉 Bernstein weighs whether geopolitical uncertainty will hit travel stocks despite resilient demand.

🌕 This startup unveils plans for a futuristic space hotel orbiting the Moon.

🪂 Thrill-seekers skydive into Dubai’s skyline with XDubai over Dubai Marina.

🏨 Despite major global events, hotel leaders enter 2026 cautiously amid economic uncertainty.

 

HOTEL TECH INSIDER PODCAST
Linchris Hotel Corporation on Rewriting Hotel Marketing Playbooks

What if the fastest way to improve service, upsells, and loyalty isn’t adding staff—but redesigning how guests communicate with your hotel?

In this episode, Greg Nawrocki, Director of Online Marketing at Linchris Hotel Corporation (30+ hotels across urban, resort, branded, and independent properties), delivers a rare, operator-level breakdown of how modern hotel marketing actually works in the wild—where technology has to prove ROI and still feel human.

Key Takeaways:

  • How to operationalize SMS at scale without losing hospitality: Greg shares how some Linchris properties see 50–80% guest adoption of text messaging, and exactly where SMS outperforms email before, during, and after the stay.

  • Turning “old-school” marketing into measurable channels: Learn how Linchris tracks ROI on billboards, newspapers, and drive-market advertising using Google Analytics, geo lift, and direct URL behavior.

  • Smarter segmentation using PMS-connected data: Practical examples of how email + PMS data enables targeting top spenders, low-value guests, OTA bookers, and drive markets—with real tactics to increase direct bookings and repeat stays.

Greg doesn’t talk in abstractions. He explains how to phrase messages differently by property type, why influencer marketing often fails (and when it works), and how independent hotels can compete with global brands by orchestrating tech vendors—not stacking them.

👉🏼 Check out the interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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