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"If you strip away the hype, most hotel AI conversations still circle the same question: Which tool should we buy?"
That question misses the point.
The hotels making real progress aren’t “doing more AI.” They’re orchestrating their core systems so intelligence can flow across the guest journey, from booking to check-out, from loyalty to payments, from operations to distribution.
AI doesn’t create transformation on its own. Connected systems do.
The shift we’re seeing now
Over the past year, three AI trajectories in hospitality have become clear.
The first is guest-facing automation. Chatbots, voice assistants, and self-service check-in; these are now table stakes. Guests expect instant access, 24/7, across every channel. This is the most visible layer of AI, and, arguably, the easiest to deploy.
The second is back-of-house automation. Here, AI quietly removes friction: night audit reconciliations, report generation, data entry, housekeeping scheduling, maintenance and request routing and exception handling. These aren’t glamorous use cases, but they’re where hotels reclaim time, reduce errors, and free staff to focus on guests.
The third, and most disruptive, is distribution.
As large language models become a natural interface for travel discovery, booking will no longer start on a hotel website or OTA. It will start inside conversational platforms. Availability, rates, loyalty validation, and payment will need to happen instantly, behind the scenes, without breaking the journey.
This is where most hotel stacks fail today, not because of AI, but because systems don’t talk to each other and the LLMs well enough.
Why orchestration matters more than intelligence
An AI-driven guest journey isn’t powered by one system. It’s powered by handoffs.
- The PMS needs to expose availability and pricing.
- Loyalty systems need to validate identity, benefits and preferences.
- Payments need to be authenticated, authorised, and settled securely and invisibly.
- All of this must happen in real time, with trust and traceability.
If any link breaks, the experience collapses.
This is why orchestration, not experimentation, is now the competitive edge.
Hotels that treat PMS, payments, loyalty, and distribution as isolated domains will struggle to scale AI beyond pilots. Hotels that define a clear system of record at each stage of the journey can move faster, automate deeper, and innovate without rebuilding their stack every year.
Open ecosystems: where orchestration becomes possible
Orchestration only works in open ecosystems.
Not “open” as a buzzword, but open in practice: API-first architectures, secure identity passing, Tokenization, and clear authorisation models. This is what allows systems to collaborate rather than compete for control.
In closed environments, data does not flow easily. The result is friction, duplication, and dependency. We’ve seen this play out in gated 3rd party channels for years.
Other industries offer a blueprint. Airlines and Credit Card Issuing Banks learned long ago that value increases when ecosystems expand. Airline loyalty points earned through credit card spend, redeemed through a hotel, settled through a bank, none of this works without shared identity and secure interoperability. Let alone the opportunities to personalise experiences the spending habits can create!
Hospitality is now at the same inflection point.
Payments: the underestimated orchestration layer
Payments are often discussed as a cost centre or a checkout step. In reality, payments are one of the most powerful orchestration layers in a hotel’s tech stack. Why?
Because payments sit at the intersection of:
- Guest identity
- Authorisation and trust
- Profile building through insights and preferences
- Revenue recognition
- Operational automation
When payments are natively embedded into the PMS, not bolted on, they enable workflows AI alone can’t fix: automated charging rules, real-time reconciliation, reduced chargebacks, cleaner data, and fewer exceptions.
This is where AI becomes agentic: not just recommending, but executing.
The unglamorous work that unlocks AI
Every hotel leader wants predictive insights and personalisation. Few want to start with connectivity audits. But the unglamorous work is the work that matters.
The most successful teams start by asking:
- What systems define truth at each stage of the journey?
- Where is data duplicated, exported, or manually reconciled?
- Which workflows still rely on spreadsheets and checklists?
Fixing these isn’t an AI project. It’s an infrastructure decision.
Once systems are connected and data flows reliably, AI stops being a risk and starts becoming a multiplier.
What leadership looks like now
Leaders don’t need to be AI experts. They need to be prioritisation experts.
The winning approach is simple:
- Identify high-volume, high-friction workflows
- Quantify time saved, or revenue recovered
- Fix integration gaps first
- Apply AI where automation can act, not just observe
Generic KPIs won’t help here. Success should be measured where it shows up: fewer manual hours, faster integrations, cleaner settlements, and incremental revenue from automation.
Why ITB matters this year
At ITB Berlin, the conversation shouldn’t be about what AI might do one day.
It should be about what hotels can orchestrate today and what that unlocks tomorrow.
AI readiness isn’t about adding another layer of technology. It’s about simplifying the core, embedding payments, and opening ecosystems so innovation can compound instead of collide.
That’s the foundation for hospitality that’s not just intelligent but resilient, scalable, and ready for what’s next.
Experience what orchestration looks like in practice at the Planet Demo Lab at ITB Berlin.
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