Why investing in people, processes, and technology will define hotel success

By Paul Isaacson

Budget season isn’t just about numbers—it’s about vision. As a hotel finance executive, I have found that success in 2026 will come down to discipline, collaboration, and clarity. Hoteliers face a marketplace defined by uncertainty: shifting demand patterns, evolving technology, rising operating costs, and persistent talent pressures. Yet, uncertainty is precisely why a strong, collaborative budgeting process is essential.

When it comes to budgeting, the process should begin at the property level. General managers, directors of sales, and operations teams know their markets best. They provide the ground-level insights—market trends, client mix, event calendars, and competitive positioning—that form the foundation of revenue assumptions. From there, it’s important to layer in top-down guidance, normalizing assumptions to ensure comparability across the portfolio.

Once revenue direction is established by mid-September, October becomes the month for deep dives into expenses—labor, operations, and margin optimization. By November 1, business plans and budgets are finalized and delivered to ownership. This collaborative rhythm ensures we are not just budgeting for a property but aligning a portfolio for sustainable growth. At Hospitality America, this rhythm is anchored in commercial alignment—ensuring sales, marketing, and revenue strategies move in unison with financial planning to optimize profitability across the portfolio.

Technology as a Growth Multiplier

If one theme defines 2026 budgeting, it is this: speed is everything and knowledge is king. Hoteliers must invest in tools that sharpen decision-making and enhance productivity. That means evaluating and implementing new benchmarking, consumer intelligence, and AI-driven forecasting tools.

These platforms allow us to:

• Understand competitive positioning in real time.
• Segment customers more effectively.
• Forecast labor needs with precision.
• Enhance housekeeping and maintenance productivity.

Investing in these systems enable hotel companies to “do more with less,” a necessity as operating costs rise while guests remain price sensitive. Importantly, technology is not an expense line item—it’s a margin growth driver.

Labor and Culture: The Human Advantage

Even with the best technology, hotels run on people. Recruiting, retaining, and engaging talent is one of the most significant cost pressures—and one of the greatest opportunities. After all, culture is a company’s differentiator. It keeps turnover low and engagement high. Recognitions, awards, and intentional connectivity between corporate and property teams aren’t just cultural touchpoints, they’re budget priorities. Investing in training, development, and employee engagement tools ensures our teams feel valued and remain committed. A strong culture doesn’t just save money on turnover—it creates better guest experiences and stronger owner returns.

Supply chain challenges, tariffs, and rising logistics costs remain a reality, especially for furniture and fixtures for properties under renovation. The solution is planning early, sourcing strategically, and aligning closely with brand standards.

Food and beverage costs, while often managed by third-party operators, also impacts the guest experience and event profitability. Sourcing locally and leveraging group buying can help offset inflationary pressures, but operators must remain vigilant in balancing cost control with guest satisfaction.

Preparing for the Shifts Ahead

Market dynamics are shifting. It’s important to look at corporate vs. leisure demand, group vs. transient mix, and cyclical event calendars. Hoteliers must be agile in reallocating resources and rethinking market strategies. A “set it and forget it” approach to budgeting won’t cut it. Instead, we must build assumptions that anticipate change and give teams the tools to adapt quickly.

Ultimately, budgets are not just internal planning documents, they are commitments to owners. It’s the operator’s responsibility to translate ground-level realities, market intelligence, and cultural investments into business plans that drive revenue, optimize margins, and deliver returns. Owners trust us to manage their assets wisely. That means clear assumptions, disciplined planning, and flawless execution.

Budgeting for 2026 is not about predicting the unpredictable—it’s about preparing teams and owners for what’s ahead with clarity, collaboration, and confidence. It’s also an opportunity to sharpen our competitive edge, invest in our people and technology, and position our hotels for long-term success.

At Hospitality America, our promise to owners is clear: we treat every budget as an investment strategy designed to maximize returns. By aligning sales, marketing, and revenue initiatives with disciplined financial practices, we protect and grow asset value while strengthening market position. Our collaborative approach ensures transparency, accountability, and profitability, giving owners the confidence that their investments are being managed with passion, excellence, and foresight.

Experiential technology is merging with AI to reshape guest expectations, early investment in booking systems backed by an Agentic AI infrastructure will win market share, loyalty and more

By Brad Van Orsow

As summer winds down and the robust vacation season slows, it’s time for resort and venue operators to shift gears and ramp up for budget season. Fall offers the perfect opportunity to take a step back, evaluate what worked, what didn’t, and new opportunities to improve both operations and revenue in the coming year. With advances in experiential technology and AI, businesses can plan smarter, crafting memorable guest experiences that align with evolving expectations while staying budget conscious.

With Fall also comes a surge in experiential travel. September, October, and November are revered for their weather and immersive experiences tied to nature, food, sports, and cultural traditions. Fewer crowds, lower prices, better deals, and the need for a pre-holiday reset also beg for last-minute getaways. Unlike peak summer vacations, fall travelers often spend more on short, experience-rich getaways. ‑2025 shows that one-night trips cost an average of $700 per night, compared to $396 per night for week‑long vacations, a clear signal that guests are willing to pay a premium for quality, experience-rich escapes.

Now is the ideal time for hospitality venues to market local experiences and monetize fall-themed offerings, such as:

• Sports & Tailgating Experiences – Football season consistently drives demand, and operators don’t need to wait for the playoffs to see results. Packages built around college and pro games such as pre-game parties, fan lounges, and stadium transportation, create strong opportunities to capture fan bookings.
• Culinary & Harvest Events – Seasonal dining and beverage experiences remain a top draw. Wine tastings, brewery tours, farm-to-table dinners, and chef-led culinary events can be complemented with guided hikes, photography outings, and rooftop gatherings designed for fall travelers.
• Festivals & Cultural Events – Oktoberfest celebrations, local craft fairs, and music or arts festivals bring visitors into secondary and tertiary markets. These can be elevated with wellness-focused offerings such as spa packages, yoga sessions, fireside lounges, and weekend retreats that align with cooler weather.

While these activities are a big draw to travelers, the actual “booking” of these events can be a real turn-off, especially if each activity needs to be scheduled independently on multiple sites, and the systems facilitating the reservations are fractured and do not connect or communicate with one another. So, what does it take to remove this chaos and turn frustrated lookers into one-click bookers?

It requires an Agentic AI infrastructure to serve as the backbone of booking, personalizing, routing, and converting every guest signal into real-time conversational commerce journeys, and a (PXMS) to monetize and manage the experience-based inventory such as pool-side cabanas, restaurant reservations, lounge tables, small conference rooms, equipment rentals and much more, either as packages or a la carte bookings. Operators who prioritize these technologies in their budgets will be the ones capturing more revenue and guest loyalty.

Experiences are the draw, but it’s the AI infrastructure powering the booking process and the guest itinerary crafted by the resort’s PXMS that drives the loyalty, repeat visits, and incremental income. With AI agents communicating at the front end, and PXMS monetizing experiential bookings on the back end, everyone wins.

Rooms will remain the foundation of hotel revenue, but the modern guest journey is far richer and more dynamic. Every seat, space, and experience is an asset that can now be dynamically priced, booked in advance, and easily tied into the larger guest ecosystem.

Fall Season is Budget Season

As AI reshapes how guests’ book, taking a “wait and see” approach is no longer viable. The budgets set this fall will decide which operators capture tomorrow’s most significant ancillary revenue streams.

Early adopters will gain not just diversified revenue but also the intelligence that comes from every transaction with data that sharpens personalization, pricing, and product strategy. Guests will gravitate to properties that make experiences easy to discover and book, leaving the laggards behind.

Budgeting for PXMS and Agentic AI now isn’t just about keeping up, it’s about claiming a leadership position in 2026 and beyond. The winners will be the operators who turn every seat, space, and service into a sellable, scalable part of the guest journey.

More choice for travelers. More direct revenue for hotels. More total control for travel.

By Brad Brewer

The future of hotel distribution is not a mystery. It will either be owned by OTAs or owned by protocols. The choices hotel operators make today—from every global brand to independent inns and three-room B&Bs—will determine whether their businesses thrive or vanish.

Last week I asked ChatGPT and Gemini to provide . Results were as expected . . . coming from the OTAs and Google Travel . . . that was it. These intermediaries control visibility. Why? Because they were first to support global real-time availability, rates, and inventory (ARI) capabilities, optimize the funnels, and capture the guest journey.

The hotel industry must adapt to the rise of generative AI technology.  Keep procrastinating and watch out. AI-native hotel distribution is coming. If you aren’t ready, there won’t be time to brace for impact; rather, prepare for wipe out.

Once Model Context Protocol (MCP) is fully opened by the gatekeepers, every type of lodging provider will be able to compete for surface share directly alongside Expedia and Booking.com. That’s the promise of . It offers more choice for travelers. More direct revenue for hotels. And more total control for the travel industry.

Distribution is no longer about scale. It’s about structured, machine-readable infrastructure.

Why Infrastructure Matters in Agentic Hotel Distribution

AI is not a plugin; it’s infrastructure. AI agents don’t “see” hotels unless the data is structured. The OTAs invested early in making their ARI feeds machine readable. That’s why—when AI agents answer—OTAs show up and hotels don’t.

This isn’t a UI problem. It’s an infrastructure problem.

Harman Singh Narula, co-founder of Canary Technologies, has already shown the industry how AI can lift revenue through up-sell and engagement. The next battlefield is distribution itself. Europe is leading the way. Its Digital Markets Act (DMA) forced Google and Booking to open access. Lodging schema APIs are evolving. OTA preference is fading.

The U.S. will follow—whether by regulation or competition. In his column, “,” Doug Rice reminds us that that identity and personalization belong to the guest, not the platform. Distribution is no different: ARI and loyalty logic must travel with the guest, not remain locked inside an OTA.

A Strategic Call to Action

For hotels, suppliers, and providers, the path forward is clear. Become MCP-ready with structured ARI. Publish loyalty logic as portable data. And control orchestration, don’t delegate it.

Anil Aggarwal, CEO of Milestone and widely known for his thought leadership in hospitality marketing, noted in HSMAI’s annual conference that “the marketing funnel is collapsing into one conversation.” He warned hoteliers about the threat posed by OTAs, saying the traditional, multi-step marketing funnel is being replaced by a single, real-time conversation with a consumer powered by AI. They need to make their content, loyalty logic, and booking flows machine readable so they show up in AI-driven conversations. He cited generative AI as a key technology that will consolidate the travel planning and booking process.

Not only was he right, but Anil urged hoteliers to recognize this fundamental shift and invest in the technology and strategy needed to maintain a direct relationship with their guests.to make sure hotels do show up. But this is not just about hotels. The future of travel distribution will be powered by an ecosystem:

Throwing a Lifeline at Destination AI

This month at the, those leading the way in AI-powered hospitality and building the necessary protocols and infrastructure for hotels will discuss Agentic Hotel Distribution in detail and explain why the infrastructure-first initiative was developed and how hotels can remain visible, competitive, and profitable in the AI-native era of travel distribution.

Those interested in learning more about this pressing topic and its three key principles: MCP (Model Context Protocol) Readiness, Portable Loyalty and Identity, and Orchestration Control, should click  to register.

The travel industry is being refined by AI. Are you ready to ride the AI wave or will you be “rag-dolled?”

By Rob Schneider | August 13, 2025

Colliers’ mid-year report said that while total transaction volume was down markedly, the average price per key was up 18%.

INTERNATIONAL REPORT — Hotel M&A trade volume is down 26% year-over-year for the first half of 2025 while the average price per key is up 18%, according to Collier’s “INNvestment Canada Mid-Year Hotel Investment Report”.

The approximate hotel trading volume was $963 million, down 26% from the first half of 2024, with 72 hotels sold, down 15% YOY. The average price per key was $192,000, up 18% YOY.  The average deal size was $13.4 million, down 13% YOY. 

The full-service segment represented half of that trade volume with $475 million in transactions with an average price per key of $283,000. Focused service volume was $238 million with an average price per key of $228,000, while limited-service volume was $250 million with an average price per key of $110,000.

The report said strong operating performance and ample capital availability continue to drive hotel investment activity, with several transactions across key metro areas, including Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa, closing in the second quarter. Investor confidence remains high and is fueling robust pricing across all service segments.

Heightened competition and strong valuations have driven favorable sell-side conditions, though limited product availability continues to constrain deal flow, with more buyers than sellers in the market.

Looking ahead, several large-scale transactions have already closed in the third quarter, surpassing total Q2 volume. Based on the current pipeline, Colliers forecasts year-end transaction volume to approach $2 billion, in line with 2024 levels.

Canada’s major markets have fueled $550 million of hotel transactions, accounting for nearly 60% of year-to-date volume. The report said investor interest is growing in Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec, though activity is constrained by the limited availability of hotels for sale. Alberta accounted for 18% of national volume, followed by British Columbia and Quebec at 10%, led by high-value transactions in the Calgary, Vancouver and Montreal metro areas. Ontario remains dominant, representing 52% of national transaction volume, driven largely by trades in the Toronto area.

Hotel sales in Eastern Canada represented $695 million of volume and 55 hotels, while Western Canada represented $268 million and 17 hotels.

Performance-wise, hotels in Canada in the first half of 2025 had an average occupancy of 69.7% (up 0.9% YOY), ADR of $216 (up 2.5%) and RevPAR of $150 (up 3.4%). Domestic air passenger traffic was up 5.2% YOY, while international inbound traffic was up 3.3% and transborder traffic was down 4%.