The word hospitality has been flattened. In common usage it describes an industry category, a line on an org chart, a section of the stock market. Underneath the modern usage is something older. The weight of the original word has been worn away by proximity to the transaction it was meant to transcend. Xenia is…
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,…