Connection Over Code: A Human-First Vision for Hotel Tech
Because here's the thing. Hotels don't run on code. They run on people. On housekeepers who notice the little things. On engineers who fix problems before guests know they exist. On frontline teams who deliver comfort, care, and calm when travelers need it most.
In a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO, Simon Sinek spoke about the danger of over-automating what should remain deeply human. His point? AI may scale information, but it can't replace the nuance of human judgment, emotion, and care. Hospitality, more than any industry, lives in that nuance.
So when we talk about technology—and especially AI—we can't afford to talk about replacement. We have to talk about reinforcement. Support. Empowerment. The role of tech in hospitality should be to help people do their jobs better—not make them feel like they're being replaced by a dashboard.
We should be asking: Will this help someone be more present? Will it reduce noise, not add to it? Will it make space for more meaningful interactions?
If we get it right, tech becomes the connective tissue—quietly linking people, teams, systems, and signals. It disappears into the background, letting humans do what only humans can: read the room, calm the tension, deliver delight.
This isn't just about improving service—it's about protecting the experience of work itself. The best hospitality tech helps teams feel confident, clear, and connected. It strengthens culture. It reduces stress. It brings people back to the reason they chose this industry in the first place.
Right now, many hotel teams are burned out. They're working short-staffed. They're trying to deliver excellence without the right support. Technology alone won't fix that—but thoughtfully applied technology can help. It can remove guesswork. Streamline handovers. Surface urgent needs. And when done well, it can restore a bit of joy to the job.
This is the future I believe in. Not a world where AI takes over, but one where it helps us tune in more deeply. Where it handles the friction, so we can focus on the feeling.
And that's the challenge—and opportunity—facing hospitality today: to keep evolving, but never lose touch.
At Unifocus, we've embarked on this very journey. With the recent launch of XiQ—our reimagined guest experience platform—and the emergence of our new Communications pillar, we're laying the foundation for a future where technology works in service of connection. It's the start of something bigger: a hospitality ecosystem where insight, action, and alignment flow naturally—because people are at the center of it all.
About Unifocus
Unifocus is a global leader in workforce management technology, serving properties in 68 countries and 31 languages. Designed for hotels, Unifocus boosts hotel performance with intelligent analytics that automate labor budgeting and forecasting, delivering precise staffing levels and workloads by streamlining Planning & Scheduling, Time & Attendance, and Operations Management tools. Employees love the mobile app for seamless communication, with features like effortless shift swaps using the award-winning Shift Genius, and real-time prioritization of guest requests, housekeeping and maintenance tasks. Operational efficiency is accelerated with compliance alerts that allow managers to focus on what truly matters: maximizing guest satisfaction and fostering a productive, engaged workforce. Discover the future of hotel operations with Unifocus. Visit Unifocus.com today.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hospitality Net
7 days ago
- Hospitality Net
The Lesson Behind Delta's AI Pricing Drama: Transparent, Not Personalized
As AI continues to redefine the boundaries of business optimization, a growing debate has emerged around the ethics of AI-driven pricing. The recent controversy surrounding Delta Airlines' CEO and the suggestion of 'personalized pricing' has rightly triggered public backlash. It also opens an important industry-wide conversation: how should AI be used in pricing and where do we draw the line? Personalized pricing—where different people are charged different prices for the same product or service based on personal data—is more than controversial. It's exploitative. Why This Moment Matters There's a growing risk that public perception will start to treat all AI-powered pricing as suspect, simply because some approaches cross ethical lines or are misunderstood. That would be a mistake and a missed opportunity. Personalized pricing based on individual data points is just one (problematic) branch of AI pricing. We need to distinguish between exploitative personalization and market-driven dynamic pricing, before the entire category becomes unfairly discredited. AI has the potential to make pricing smarter, fairer, and more adaptive but only if we're clear about how it's being used. The Ethical Line: Personalized Pricing vs Market-Based Pricing Personalized pricing might sound innovative, but it crosses a dangerous line. By using personal data—like customer profiles, demographics, or income proxies—AI systems can charge people different amounts for the same service based solely on who they are. This erodes trust, undermines fairness, and introduces bias that's hard to detect, let alone correct. Worse, it treats the individual as a target for extraction, not a participant in a fair transaction. But AI doesn't need to work this way. There is a better path: pricing that adapts to changing market conditions, not personal identity. This is where Causal AI comes in. Enter Causal AI: Learning From Demand Causal AI represents a new class of machine learning that focuses not just on correlations but on cause and effect. In pricing, this means understanding how market-level demand changes in response to different pricing strategies. Instead of asking, What is this individual likely to pay?, dynamic AI-pricing asks What is this particular room on this night worth? It's similar to how the market dictates the price of gold, it's only worth what the market is willing to pay at a moment in time, but the entire market gets the same price at the same moment. This shift is profound and powerful because 1) It enables dynamic pricing that adjusts in real time to demand conditions. 2) It avoids using sensitive personal data, focusing instead on observable patterns in aggregated behavior. And 3) It is explainable, because causal models reveal the 'why' behind pricing decisions, not just the 'what.' In short, causal AI enables pricing strategies that are not only effective, but also ethical and accountable. Transparent Pricing Builds Trust—and Performs Better Causal AI doesn't just avoid the pitfalls of personalization. It offers tangible advantages: Greater transparency : Businesses can clearly articulate how and why prices are changing. : Businesses can clearly articulate how and why prices are changing. Fewer regulatory risks : Avoiding personal data sidesteps many emerging privacy and fairness concerns. : Avoiding personal data sidesteps many emerging privacy and fairness concerns. Better long-term outcomes: When customers trust the pricing process, they're more likely to return—and recommend. Dynamic pricing doesn't have to mean dynamic trust. With causal inference, businesses can adapt intelligently to real-world conditions without alienating their customers. A Call to the Industry This moment, sparked by growing public concern, is a chance for our industry to reset. Let's reject opaque personalization models in favor of methods that align with fairness, transparency, and trust. Let's embrace AI not as a black box that guesses willingness to pay, but as a tool to learn how markets respond to price, and to act accordingly. If we don't make this distinction now, we risk AI pricing being misunderstood and rejected wholesale by consumers, journalists, and policymakers alike. That would be a disservice to the real innovation happening in this space; innovation that can improve outcomes for businesses and customers alike without compromising ethics. Whether you're a hotelier, an airline, a retailer, or a technologist: if you're thinking about how to apply AI to pricing, start with this question: Am I learning from demand? Or am I profiling the customer? The difference matters more than ever. TakeUp ensures pricing is fair for both sides—maximizing what your property is worth in the market while aligning with what markets are willing to pay at any given moment. Visit to learn more. TakeUp is an AI-powered revenue optimization platform built for independent hospitality properties, including boutique hotels, inns, bed & breakfasts, and glamping retreats. By leveraging AI-driven insights and expert revenue strategists, TakeUp helps properties maximize revenue and save time, seamlessly integrating with leading property management systems to drive profitability and operational efficiency. For more information visit Kelly Campbell Marketing Director TakeUp View source
Hospitality Net
04-08-2025
- Hospitality Net
Will AI Make Hotel Websites Obsolete? Not Quite, but...
In my writings over the past decade, I have frequently returned to the notion that artificial intelligence is not merely an additional layer in the technological stack, but rather a reconfiguration of the Internet's ontological architecture. It redefines not only how we book, but also how we come to know, how we choose, and ultimately how we experience. AI is not simply the new interface, it is the new epistemology. And yet, in the face of this tectonic shift, the assertion that hotel websites are on the verge of obsolescence feels, at best, premature and, at worst, epistemologically superficial. Let me unpack that. Some years ago, I proposed that we were witnessing a transition from an HTML-based internet to a generative, semantic web; a post-indexed realm where large language models no longer retrieve content, but actively compose it. This is not a cosmetic enhancement of user experience. It is the dissolution of the interface itself. When I say that "AI is the new UI," it is not a rhetorical flourish, but a forecast grounded in the trajectory of computational cognition. In this emerging paradigm, the user journey is no longer mediated by drop-down menus or carousel sliders, but by intent inference, probabilistic reasoning, and neural prediction. Within this agentic ecosystem, AI agents will likely communicate directly with a hotel's CRS, PMS, or ARI endpoints through APIs, bypassing the traditional front-end entirely. And, truth to be told, platforms such as or Google have already positioned themselves as the primary substrates for these interactions, not because users consciously choose them over other options, but because synthetic agents prefer them. They are structured, annotated, schema-rich environments that are legible to machine intelligence. This preference is not incidental. In virtually every single test I've done with autonomous travel planning so far, agents consistently bypassed altogether, defaulting instead to OTAs. The reason is both simple and telling: Booking speaks machine. Your most likely, does not. But this does not mean the hotel website will vanish. Rather, it will mutate. The nostalgic vision of a potential guest arriving at your homepage, absorbing your brand narrative, exploring a meticulously (hopefully!) crafted UX, and being emotionally moved by persuasive copy still retains symbolic value within human-centric marketing, but it plays almost no role in the decision-making processes of synthetic agents. Agentic AI has no regard for the elegance of your serif fonts. What it seeks is structured rates, inventory metadata, cancellation policy logic, amenity taxonomies, and room categorization defined in schema. org-compliant JSON-LD. That is the syntax of its world. And that is precisely why the hotel website, while no longer a performative space, remains infrastructurally indispensable. The generative web still depends on anchors. It cannot synthesize meaning in a vacuum. It must hook into structured information that can be parsed, weighted, and recomposed. Those anchors (your ARI, your review aggregates, your canonical descriptions, your media repositories, your microdata, and, if you dare to innovate, your own autonomous hotel agent) are the raw material from which these models derive knowledge. And if you fail to provide them, the only handshake your property will offer is with the OTAs (and we all know the cost of that embrace). So no, hotel websites are not becoming obsolete. They are becoming invisible. If Max's question is whether websites, as we have traditionally known them, will disappear, then the answer is likely yes, and it may happen within this very decade. However, framed differently, one could argue that they will endure as repositories of structured truths, rather than as stages for aesthetic persuasion. The guest will not see your website, but their agent will inhabit it. The strategic imperative for hoteliers, therefore, is not to redesign websites for human eyes (or at least not as a first priority) but to reimagine them as machine-readable ecosystems. This means investing in composable architectures, headless CMSs, semantic data layers, and generative model optimization. In this light, the more pertinent question is not "Will AI make hotel websites obsolete?" but "What is the function of a hotel website in a world where AI sees on our behalf?" The answer, though stripped of glamour, is simple: to be visible to machines, to be interoperable, to serve as a semantic backbone in an increasingly agentic web. Not very poetic, I know. But, I'm afraid, also very true.
Hospitality Net
01-08-2025
- Hospitality Net
Izzatbek Mambetov has been appointed Front Office Manager at 25hours Hotel One Central in Dubai
25hours Hotel One Central has announced the appointment of Izzatbek Mambetov as front office manager. With a decade of hospitality experience and a proven track record in guest satisfaction, Mambetov steps into his new role ready to elevate the guest arrival experience. In his new role, Mambetov will oversee all guest-facing operations, champion a high-performance team culture and help reinforce 25hours Hotel One Central as one of the city's most welcoming and surprising places to check in and switch off. Mambetov joins the team from Radisson Blu Hotel Dubai Media City, where he held dual leadership roles as rooms division manager and previously front of house manager. Over his four-year tenure, he drove substantial improvements across guest satisfaction metrics, introduced new onboarding and feedback programs, led system migrations and helped push the property to regional performance highs — including increased Radisson Rewards enrolment and a leap in online reputation scores. His leadership was integral to the successful rollout of new systems such as EMMA and Fiori PMS, as well as initiatives that boosted F&B upselling revenue and public review scores on and TripAdvisor. Originally from Uzbekistan, Mambetov holds a Diploma in International Hospitality Management from the London School of Business & Finance in Singapore, where he also trained with Accor Hotels. He is fluent in English, Uzbek, and Russian and is known for his attention to detail, solution-focused mindset and people-first approach.
