Welcome to RemoteHotelier!
In today’s newsletter:
💸 AI costs rise faster than the staff savings they're supposed to replace
📊 Is Ennismore the proof that investing in tech actually pays off?
🕐 Marriott is telling employees to clock off on time… and it’s working
📉 94% of hotels don't exist in AI search
🔍 Who shows up when AI recommends a hotel?
🌍 South Africa is becoming a hotel tech hub
🔴 Oracle lays off 30,000 people
🚀 + 4 new product updates
💼 + 3 new jobs in hotel tech
MAIN NEWS
#1 AI costs rise faster than the staff savings they're supposed to replace
Two new studies show that AI spending in customer service is rising fast and human service is heading toward becoming a paid extra.
Gartner predicts that a lot of companies will spend more on customer service technology over the next few years. However, it won’t reduce the number of people working in customer service.
Automation can't fully replace human agents without serious operational risk and a worse customer experience, according to the report.
Nearly half of consumers expect that in 10 years they'll deal only with AI and not humans directly.
More than two thirds of those same consumers believe human service will become a feature of premium and luxury experiences.
The big question is what will happen with the actual customer service staff? My guess is that the role will transition into things like AI agent oversight, quality control, or escalation handling.
#2 Is Ennismore the proof that investing in tech actually pays off?
Accor's latest annual filing confirms that Ennismore is its best performing brand with €205 million in EBITDA, which means 17% of the group's total.
Ennismore manages 36% of Accor's lifestyle rooms, roughly 48,948 rooms worldwide.
This was the first time Accor disclosed the EBITDA figure for Ennismore in its annual report.
Accor has a 62% stake in a potential IPO for Ennismore.
I happen to know this case very well, and two things immediately came to my mind: a) this isn’t a surprise considering Ennismore has been performing for years, and b) technology is to Ennismore what an engine is to a car. They treat technology as infrastructure, investing heavily in it across operations, guest experience, and distribution. It clearly pays off.
#3 Marriott is telling employees to clock off on time… and it’s working
Shocking, right? Jokes aside, Marriott India is tackling the talent crunch with an initiative that pushes hotel teams to actually leave on time. And according to Marriott, it's working. The hospitality sector in India has been losing young staff to low wages and long hours for years, so Marriott wants to test this assumption: fix the conditions, and the talent will come.
Here’s the thing though: getting people to adopt any new habit at work, especially one that involves repetition, requires something frictionless. And that usually means (at least) a good mobile app. I’ve seen great initiatives fail for not being engaging enough. And also the opposite.
I wonder if Marriott could be testing this in India and planning to roll whatever tech they’re using to more markets. Certainly the talent problem isn’t unique to India.
#4 94% of hotels don't exist in AI search
I came across this report and wanted to share it because it might come in handy: Nokumo's new research across five European markets finds that 94.3% of hotels are completely invisible to AI search.
Booking.com appeared in 95.3% of all AI queries tested.
Only 5.7% of accommodation websites were detected by any AI model.
77.1% of accommodation websites have no booking engine visible to AI at all.
The average property scores 38.1 out of 100 on digital readiness for AI search.
The (painful) takeaway I got from this is that if someone asks ChatGPT or any other AI model to recommend a place to stay, almost every independent hotel is invisible. But Booking.com is not. The full report contains more useful insights, especially if you're responsible for a hotel's digital presence, and it’s free to download.
#5 Who shows up when AI recommends a hotel?
And closely related to the previous news, if you’re interested in how LLMs recommend OTAs, Meltwater published this table with how frequently they appear across the most famous AI chatbots:
Credit: Meltwater
#6 South Africa is becoming a hotel tech hub
If you’re into startups and innovation, you should know that South Africa's online travel market is currently valued at $2.54 billion and it’s expected to hit nearly $6 billion by 2033.
More interesting than the numbers is who's building there. The country has attracted 57% of all hospitality tech venture capital investment across the whole African continent between 2019 and 2024.
Not only that, South Africa is already a hub for quite a few hotel tech companies. And according to this data, the number is only going to grow. As of today, two thirds of South African hoteliers already have an AI strategy, and direct bookings grew 24% year over year last summer. That's a market moving fast.
#7 Oracle lays off 30,000 people
I’m ending the section with a bittersweet meme that made me chuckle. Oracle announced 30,000 new layoffs through a cold email last Monday at 6am (🤌).
Despite the increasing profits, they’re letting go of 18% of the workforce. We don’t know yet if this affects directly the Opera team, but it probably will one way or another.
I know the feeling of being terminated myself, and honestly it’s awful. If you know someone who’s part of these layoffs, I’d be happy to help them however I can.
This week, I’m partnering with Intrepid because they published a report with valuable insights that could be useful for you.
Inside you’ll find things like:
How their customer satisfaction hit a record high despite trip incidents increasing 30%.
How they managed to explore AI solutions to reduce costs while implementing a new system.
How they cope with the same squeeze hotels feel with customer acquisition costs being in a record high.
I hope you like it:
Leadership lessons from a record year of purpose-led growth
37 years in business. 2025 was Intrepid's biggest yet, with revenue up nearly 30%. The Integrated Annual Report gets into what drove that growth, what the leadership team got wrong, and how they reset their climate strategy along the way.
PRODUCT UPDATES
🆕 Actabl launches AI Asset Setup as a new feature inside its asset management platform. Maintenance teams can now capture asset data using the device camera, and the tool automatically extracts the equipment type and serial numbers and structures everything into the system.
🆕 Towne Park, the parking and hospitality services company, rebrands to Towne and launches Nexity, a platform that consolidates parking access, payments, data, and revenue optimization in one place.
🆕 Mirai announces a new architecture that lets hotels complete reservations directly inside a conversation, with no redirects to a booking page. It works across chat, WhatsApp, email, and AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude, using MCP to connect directly to live inventory and pricing.
🆕 PriceLabs launches Revenue Accelerator to its existing dynamic pricing platform. The update has new features aimed at property managers who want to pair automation with their own judgment before making portfolio changes.
JOB BOARD
💼 Enterprise/ Strategic Account Executive | Remote (based in the US) | Canary Technologies.
💼 Client Sales Executive | Remote (based in the UK) | Mews.
💼 Enterprise Program Manager | Remote (based in Barcelona) | Lighthouse.
That’s all for today, thank you for reading. If this was helpful, share it with someone who'd find it useful too.
See you next week!
Jose