The article explores AI agents as new decision-makers entering the hotel booking journey. Voyagier founder Daniel Gardner argues that hotels need to optimize structured data rather than just human-facing marketing, and the GDS may become more valuable for providing standardized data. He advises hotel tech teams to use AI to describe their hotel to identify data gaps.
Hospitality middleware and CDP provider Ireckonu warns that the primary barrier to AI adoption is poor quality, fragmentation, and governance of guest data, not AI model capability. Legacy PMS architectures are room-centric, leading to fragmented profiles and duplicate records, and AI amplifies these flaws. Hotels should establish guest-centric data foundations, governance, and identity resolution before deploying AI.
SAP Concur's CFO Insights report, based on a survey of nearly 1,000 finance leaders, reveals cybersecurity as the top external challenge (46%), with data breaches averaging $4.4 million. Leaders also struggle with AI ROI measurement, data quality, and skills gaps. Recommendations include strengthening governance, using new KPIs for AI ROI, and investing in data foundations and upskilling.