Welcome to RemoteHotelier #77!
In today’s newsletter:
🧮 Aimbridge builds its own labor tool instead of buying one
🤔 Why is Marriott betting on a TV company for guest experience?
🏨 Airbnb hires a Booking veteran to run its hotel push
🤝 + 3 new partnerships
🆕 + 3 new product updates
💼 + 3 new jobs in hotel tech
📊 + A new Market Pulse
🧮 Aimbridge builds its own labor tool instead of buying one
Aimbridge Hospitality is rolling its own labor insight & forecasting tool out across its entire portfolio to standardize how hotels plan and schedule staff.
It pulls labor data from multiple systems, including PMS data and time and attendance, into one connected view.
The tool uses AI forecasting to flag when staffing and demand are drifting apart before it becomes a problem.
It's built inside a platform operators already use daily, not a separate app.
Pilot hotels reported real labor productivity gains, especially in housekeeping and laundry, plus fewer scheduling overruns.
Food and beverage scheduling is next on the roadmap.
Aimbridge Hospitality is the world's largest third-party hotel management company, meaning it doesn't own hotels itself but runs the operations for hotel owners. The big question is why would they build this instead of buying something off the shelf? Because at Aimbridge's scale, "buy" usually means duct-taping five tools together and hoping it doesn’t break.
There's something else here worth mentioning: Aimbridge didn't just build a new tool, they made sure it lives inside the system operators already open every day. They know that half of the success of a new system dies the moment you ask hotel staff to learn one more login. When a product forces a new habit instead of fitting an old one, you can expect the same resistance that killed a dozen of “game changing“ tools before it.
I must admit that I love how they decided to not reinvent the wheel with the name of the product: the name of this new labor insight & forecasting tool is LIFT. Just brilliant 🤜🤛
🤔 Why is Marriott betting on a TV company for guest experience?
Marriott will sign a long term deal with LG Electronics to co-develop a cloud platform that turns hotel room TVs into a hub for content, room controls and entertainment.
The new cloud system gives guests access to 250 channels, more than 40 apps and full streaming from the TV.
The same platform lets Marriott monitor device health across properties and brands from one place.
A pilot will run across 40 hotels in the US and Canada before a wider rollout.
We tend to think of LG as a TV maker, but they build way more than screens, and that's exactly why this partnership is important. Marriott isn't just buying hardware, it's getting a company that already knows how to manage connected devices at scale, which is the boring but critical part for this kind of technology.
In-room entertainment tends to break more often than not: apps go stale, remotes get confusing, half the channels don't load right. If LG's device monitoring actually catches that before a guest complains at the front desk, this could contribute towards a positive guest experience.
📢 Six PMS vendors agree: fragmentation is costing you more than you think
We looked at what six property management companies (Cloudbeds, Lodgical Solution, WebRezPro, Skyware, Stayntouch and Mews) tell hoteliers to fix first. Different products, same four answers:
Every extra tool outside your PMS means another login, another invoice, another version of the truth.
Automation should take busywork off your team, not replace the moments guests remember. Night audits, sure. Greeting guests by name, no.
Most PMS platforms already hold years of guest preference data nobody uses. That's why repeat guests still get treated like first timers.
AI in a PMS isn't one thing. Some tools suggest, others act on real time data alone. Know which one you're buying.
So what? Six competing vendors landed on the same four problems without comparing notes. If your PMS can't tell you who a guest is, that's not a missing feature. That's the whole point of having one.
RESOURCES
📍 Next Event: Skift Global Forum (22–24 September).
📅 See the full hotel tech event calendar.
💼 Check which hotel tech companies offer remote jobs.
💻 Get your PMS comparison spreadsheet.
💸 Get your RMS comparison spreadsheet.
🏨 Airbnb hires a Booking veteran to run its hotel push
Credit: PhocusWire
Airbnb named Pepijn Rijvers, a Booking veteran and former Viator president, as its new chief business officer to lead its push into hotels.
Rijvers ran Booking's hotels and STR business and also served as its CMO for around five years, including launching its China business.
The move follows Airbnb adding thousands of boutique hotels across 20 cities in August.
So why hire someone from the “enemy” territory? Because knowing how to compete against Booking is worth less than knowing how Booking actually built its hotel business from the inside. Rijvers spent over a decade doing exactly that.
Airbnb isn't just adding a new executive, they're buying institutional memory of the one company that already solved the problems Airbnb is about to run into.
PARTNERSHIPS
🤝 Highline Hospitality Partners taps Otelier: to centralize and normalize financial and operational data across its entire hotel portfolio. [Link]
Otelier is a hospitality data platform, so the idea is to have a single clean data feed reconciling numbers instead of a pile of disconnected property systems.
🤝 Staypineapple partners with Abra Hospitality: to roll out its AI guest intelligence platform across the brand after a successful pilot in Chicago. [Link]
This tech works like a kind of hotel CRM on roids. It works with the PMS and other systems to record every interaction with the guests so you can generate insights from it.
🤝 Stayntouch joins HotelMinder as a 2026 Preferred Tech Partner: adding its cloud PMS to the platform's tech index. [Link]
Interesting to see how PMS vendors want visibility inside comparison platforms now, not just direct sales leads.
PRODUCT UPDATES
🆕 Mews launches Mews POS in North America: letting hotels run property management, food and beverage, and payments on one system. [Link]
Mews POS (formerly Bizzon before Mews acquired it) is already live in more than 20 countries, so this brings North America up to speed.
🆕 Brand Atelier launches a new intelligence platform: connecting hotel performance data, market context, and AI analysis to turn fragmented reporting into faster decisions and execution. [Link]
It's built for independent hotels without a big analytics team, which is exactly where scattered dashboards hurt the most.
🆕 Cendyn joins Google's closed beta for Search Campaigns for Travel: feeding live rate and inventory data into Google's AI to sharpen hotel search ads. [Link]
Cendyn is a hospitality marketing platform, so better signal going into Google's bidding engine should mean fewer wasted impressions on travelers who were never going to book.
MARKET PULSE
Company | 7 Day % |
🇫🇷 Accor | +2.8% |
🇺🇸 Choice Hotels | +1.9% |
🇬🇧 IHG | -0.4% |
🇺🇸 Hyatt Hotels | -0.9% |
🇺🇸 Wyndham Hotels | -1.6% |
🇺🇸 Marriott | -1.7% |
🇺🇸 Hilton | -2.4% |
🇬🇧 Whitbread | -2.9% |
🇨🇳 H World Group | -5.9% |
📈 AC.PA (Accor), +2.8%: Accor went green in a week when almost every other hotel name went red. US lodging got hit by rate worries after a hot jobs report. But Accor is European, so the noise that dragged Marriott and Hilton down didn't touch it. [Source]
📉 HTHT (H World Group), -5.9%: China's domestic tourism is softening faster than people expected. There's an active price war in Chinese hotels, and H World lives and dies on this market. [Source]
JOB BOARD
💼 Senior GTM Strategist | Remote (based in the US) | Lighthouse.
💼 Sales Development Representative | Remote (based in Spain) | Canary Technologies.
💼 Senior Specialist, Market Insights | Remote (based in the US) | Duetto.
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