Welcome to RemoteHotelier!
In today’s newsletter:
💰 How much do top hotel CEOs actually make?
📊 Google's new hotel tracking tool
💬 Hot debate about AI at work
🤖 Hyatt gives ChatGPT Enterprise to employees across the company
🎬 White Lotus Season 4 is filming at two real luxury hotels
⚖️ Booking.com gets in legal trouble (again)
🍎 Tim Cook steps down as Apple CEO
🚀 + 7 new product updates
💼 + 3 new jobs in hotel tech
MAIN NEWS
#1 How much do top hotel CEOs actually make?
Curious about what top hospitality CEOs actually make? We can get this from the 2025 annual filings. This is the source, but it’s paywalled, sorry… it’s the best I could find. Here are some of the numbers:
Anthony Capuano (Marriott) leads with $39.5 million.
Christopher Nassetta (Hilton) came in second with $35.1 million, having led compensation rankings in both 2023 and 2024.
Mark Hoplamazian (Hyatt) ranks third approximately $24.8 million.
Elie Maalouf (IHG) got roughly $13.9 million.
And Patrick Pacious (Choice Hotels) took home $7.8 million.
The full tally comes to a modest quantity of over $120 million combined. How are they going to cope with the increasing cost of living?
#2 Google's new hotel tracking tool
Google's new hotel price tracking feature lets you search for a specific hotel, enter your travel dates, and opt in to email updates when the price changes.
Before this, Google's hotel tracking only worked with filters. You could monitor prices for hotels that matched criteria like brand, star rating, or amenities, but you couldn't pin a single property.
Now you can. Pick one hotel, pick your dates, and Google emails you when the rate moves.
This is different from the Flight Deals AI tool Google launched last year, which helps flexible travelers find destinations rather than track specific ones.
This is a small feature, but I think it’s important to know it exists. For hotels, it raises the stakes on rate parity and last-minute discounting. If a guest is watching your property and sees you cut the rate on OTAs before your direct channel, it could be an issue. The tools guests use to shop are getting sharper.
#3 Hot debate about AI at work
Found this Reddit post from r/Marketing (through the Link In Bio newsletter) and I wanted to share it with you for 2 reasons:
Source: r/marketing
Do you know someone like this? Because it seems (at least in my circle) that this is more common that you’d expect.
The debate got pretty intense, but there are some interesting takes. Something that kind of reinforces my question above.
#4 Hyatt gives ChatGPT Enterprise to employees across the company
And speaking about AI at work: Hyatt is deploying ChatGPT Enterprise across its finance, marketing, and operations teams. Employees can now use it for content creation, communications… and maybe also call it “best buddy”, like in the example above 🤷♂️.
#5 White Lotus Season 4 is filming at two real luxury hotels
Full disclosure: my wife and I are huge White Lotus fans (especially the first season and the crazy charismatic GM), so I might be slightly biased.
Season 4 is filming on the French Riviera, in two different properties: the Airelles Château de la Messardière in Saint-Tropez and the Hôtel Martinez in Cannes by Hyatt.
They’ll both have fictitious names, but as someone who has worked in hotels, I can’t help but wonder two things:
How they manage to close the hotel (if they do it at all) to film.
The return on the investment they must have from the publicity.
As I write this, the cheapest night for a random Wednesday in the Hyatt property is €374:
Source: Hyatt.com
#6 Booking.com gets in legal trouble (again)
Italy's regulators just opened an antitrust investigation into Booking.com. They accuse the platform of misleading users through its preferred partner program, where hotels can pay higher commissions to get better visibility in search results. According to the investigation, hotels appear objectively better when in reality they're really just paying more. Two comments on this:
Duh 🤌
Borrowing the definition from the gaming world: this is the good old and reliable pay to win.
#7 Tim Cook steps down as Apple CEO
The unrelated but related with hotel tech news of this week is that Apple's current CEO, Tim Cook, will be replaced by John Ternus, the current head of hardware engineering.
We all know how successful Apple is, but I wasn’t aware of how incredible has Tim Cook’s tenure as the CEO has been. So, as the saying goes, an image is worth a thousand words:
Source: @MorningBrew
I mean, seems like John Ternus is a legend because he was the brain behind the first AirPods and iPad. But boy… saying that he has big shoes to fill would be the biggest understatement of the history.
RESOURCES
📍 Next Event: Hotec Operations (8–10 June).
📅 See the full hotel tech event calendar.
💼 Check which hotel tech companies offer remote jobs.
💻 Get your cloud PMS comparison list.
PRODUCT UPDATES
🆕 If you live in London, you'll see driverless taxis very soon because Waymo is testing robotaxis in the city starting very soon, with a public rollout expected by September. The service works like a standard ride-hailing app, but without a driver. They’ll use technologies like cameras, radar, and light detection to navigate one of the world's most complex urban environments.
🔌 RMS integrates with GoCardless to let hospitality operators collect direct bank payments alongside cards in a single platform. It covers direct debit and real-time payments, targeting the 1.5–3% card processing fees that eat into hotel margins.
🔌 hotelkit integrates with DialogShift to bring guest chat messages and chatbot interactions directly into the hotelkit platform. Staff get instant notifications with links to the original request, can assign statuses, and coordinate via mentions without switching between systems.
🔌 Klarna partners with Aven Hospitality to bring flexible payment options to around 10,000 hotels. Guests can pay in full, split into interest-free installments, or opt for longer financing at checkout, across six markets including the US, Sweden, and Germany.
🤝 HotelRunner, the hotel management platform, has been named as a Booking.com Premier Plus Connectivity Partner, placing it among a select group chosen from over 600 connectivity partners. The platform currently processes over 2 million booked room nights and maintains more than 135,000 active Booking.com listings daily.
🤝 eviivo has been named a 2026 Airbnb Preferred Software Partner, one of a select few to receive this status reflecting the reliability of its connection for property managers using both platforms.
🤝 Pricepoint joins HotelMinder as a new partner. The RMS uses smart pricing with independent strategies per property and room type based on real-time demand signals, booking behavior, and willingness to pay. It also detects demand spikes from events before competitors react, while keeping revenue teams in control with override capability.
JOB BOARD
💼 Business Development Representative | Remote (based in the United States) | Duetto.
💼 Sales Director - Strategic Accounts | Remote (based in the UK) | Apaleo.
💼 Product Marketing Manager | Remote (based in the UK) | Canary Technologies.
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