Research and public thinking
Insights & Writing
Hospitality knowledge becomes more valuable when it can move—across companies, disciplines, and generations.
The Proxenos’ Ledger
Ideas should accumulate, not disappear after the conversation.
The work is ongoing. The argument develops over time through research, analysis, and long-form writing on hospitality, technology, human experience, and the structural conditions that shape what gets built.
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The Proxenia Thesis
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.…
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The Best Time to Plant
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…
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The Gathering Storm
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…
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The Invisible Interchange
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…
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The Research Frontier Next Door
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…
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Hidden in Plain Sight
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…
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What Hospitality Cities Get Wrong
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.…
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The Pressure That Won’t Relent
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…
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Where the Innovation Actually Comes From
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…
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The Economics of Standing Still
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,…
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The Guest Journey is a Technology Stack
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…
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The Most Overlooked Innovation Platform in the World
Walt Disney World employs roughly 80,000 people, making it the largest single-site employer in the United States and one of the largest concentrated workforces anywhere in…