There is a particular kind of knowledge that accumulates only through years of standing inside a problem. The front desk manager who has watched the same integration fail in the same way for eleven years doesn’t have a theory about what’s wrong. She has a timestamp. She knows what day of the week it happens,…
In February of this year, Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano announced on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call that Marriott was building a direct booking integration with Google’s AI Mode — a system that allows a traveler to book a hotel room through a natural language conversation, without visiting a search engine, without navigating a booking site,…
Drive south through Florida on the Turnpike and you will, at some point, find yourself running nearly parallel to I-95. Two major roads, serving much of the same geography, carrying traffic toward the same destinations. They cross twice in the lower half of the state — visibly, physically, close enough that you can see one…
There is published research on what happens when a robot delivers room service and something goes wrong. Not the mechanical failure — the human one. How the guest responds. How the assignment of blame shifts depending on how human the robot appears. What recovery looks like when the thing that failed isn’t a person and…
Central Florida’s hospitality economy is enormous and well-documented. What sits beside it is the peanut butter to the chocolate. The Orlando Economic Partnership puts the region’s tech ecosystem at $43 billion in total economic contribution — 91,000 direct jobs generating output that ripples through healthcare, logistics, construction, and beyond. What’s less often appreciated is the…
The Director of Operations for a mid-sized restaurant group in Central Florida keeps a running list on her phone — not tasks, but problems. Technology problems. Specifically the gaps between systems, the workarounds that have been in place long enough that the staff has stopped thinking of them as workarounds and started thinking of them…
Previously we imagined a general manager running a 200-room hotel on a 4% net margin. She gave a tech solution entrepreneur forty-five minutes, then sent him away with “let me think about it.” Her hesitation was structural — the economics of her business made deferral the rational choice, year after year. We followed a single…
If you’ve spent any time inside the hospitality industry, or adjacent to it watching from the technology side, you’ve probably developed a working theory about where innovation comes from. Outsiders, most people say. Founders who looked at the industry from a distance and saw problems that operators, buried in operations, couldn’t see clearly enough to…
Imagine a general manager at a 200-room hotel. She has been running this property for eleven years. She knows its rhythms — the winter conference season, the summer leisure surge, the shoulder months that require a different kind of discipline. She has watched every major technology wave move through the industry: the migration to online…
What most people experience as a trip is, in reality, the coordinated output of dozens of independent technology systems that were mostly built separately, by different companies, for different purposes, and asked to work together after the fact. Pick a trip. Any trip. A long weekend, a conference, a family vacation. It doesn’t matter where…