By Pablo Revale
April 29, 2026 · 6 Minutes
Adapted from Originally published in Unstoppable Hospitality on LinkedIn.
There’s a book I keep going back to. "Competing in the Age of AI" by Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani from Harvard Business School. It was published in 2020 and it reads like a warning letter addressed to hospitality in 2026. The book’s central example haunts me. Airbnb assembled 7 million rooms in just over a decade. Marriott took 60 years to build comparable inventory. Same consumer need. Completely different operating model. One runs on properties and people. The other runs on data and algorithms. That’s not a story about home rentals disrupting hotels. That’s a story about what happens when a data-native company enters a data-poor industry. Hospitality is living that story right now. And most of the industry is watching it happen in real time without realizing they’re the Marriott in the analogy.
Every guest interaction generates data. Every booking. Every restaurant order. Every spa appointment. Every complaint at the front desk. Every WiFi login. Every time someone opens the hotel app at 2am to check the pool hours. Hotels generate tons of data. They capture almost none. The PMS holds reservation data. The CRM holds marketing data. The loyalty system holds tier data. The POS holds dining data. The WiFi system holds device data. None of these systems talk to each other. The guest is known in six places and understood in zero. Meanwhile, the OTAs capture every click. Every search. Every comparison. Every abandoned booking. Every return visit. They know what the guest wanted before the guest knew they wanted it. That’s future value. And the gap is just growing each second.
Iansiti and Lakhani make a distinction that hospitality needs to internalize. There’s a difference between creating value and capturing value. A hotel creates value when it delivers an incredible stay. When the concierge remembers your name. When the room is set to the right temperature before you arrive. When someone notices you’re celebrating and sends up a bottle. A hotel captures value when it turns that interaction into intelligence. When it records that you prefer a high floor. That you always book the spa on day two. That you spend more at the restaurant when you’re traveling with your partner than when you’re alone. Creating value without capturing value is, as we say in Argentina, bread for today, hunger for tomorrow. You’re giving away insights that future yourself could use to generate future value.
Remember Blockbuster. They had 9,000 stores. They had the brand. They had the customer relationships. They had more data about movie preferences than anyone in the world. Netflix had a website and an algorithm. Blockbuster’s mistake wasn’t ignoring Netflix. They actually tried to compete. They launched their own online service. Too late. With too little conviction. While still protecting the revenue model that was already dying. Hospitality is in a Blockbuster moment right now. The difference? The window hasn’t closed yet. AI is reshaping distribution but hasn’t fully arrived. Guest expectations are changing but hotels still have a massive advantage: the physical experience. The thing that can’t be digitized. No AI agent can replicate the feeling of walking into a hotel lobby and having someone smile and say your name. But that advantage only matters if hotels build the digital infrastructure around it. Without that infrastructure, the physical advantage erodes, because the OTAs and AI platforms will keep getting better at mimicking understanding, and hotels will keep falling further behind at actually having it.
Here’s what surprises me. The investment required isn’t massive. Not relative to the stakes. A mid-size resort spending $500K on a modern data architecture, a proper API layer, and an AI-powered guest intelligence system would see ROI within 18 months. That’s not my opinion. That’s the math. Hotels shifting just 10% of OTA bookings to direct save 8 to 15% of total commission spend. For a medium-sized resort doing $20M in annual bookings, that’s $1.6M to $3M back in margin. Every year. But most hotels won’t make that investment. They’ll wait. They’ll watch. They’ll attend conferences and nod along when speakers talk about digital transformation. And they’ll go back to the same PMS, the same disconnected systems, the same 3% technology budget. That’s rational in a stable industry. But hospitality is not a stable industry anymore. No industry is stable anymore. The ones who invest now won’t just survive the disruption. They’ll define it. Nobody is late yet. But most will be if they keep waiting for permission to start.
