Welcome to RemoteHotelier!
In today’s newsletter:
🚨 OpenAI kills Instant Checkout, what does it mean for hotels?
📈 It means that OTAs rub their hands... for now
💡 Lighthouse opens a new distribution channel
📊 Major hotel chains say AI is finally paying off. Is it too soon to celebrate?
🤔 We should ask again in 12 months
🌍 Do the most valuable hotel companies also invest the most in tech?
🚀 + 7 new product updates
💼 + 3 new jobs in hotel tech
MAIN NEWS
#1 OpenAI kills Instant Checkout, what does it mean for hotels?
OpenAI pulls back the Instant Checkout feature from ChatGPT, which was the main enabler to make direct hotel bookings inside the AI chatbot.
This feature was launched in September 2025, but only about a dozen merchants went live with it.
Users browsed inside ChatGPT but rarely completed purchases there, exposing a clear gap between research behavior and buying behavior.
Things like inventory accuracy, tax remittance, and fraud liability are issues OpenAI never solved.
Just to be clear, OpenAI is far from giving up on commerce. Instead, they want OTAs and brands to build the apps, do the operational heavy lifting, and still plug into ChatGPT… and perhaps take a cut?
#2 It means that OTAs rub their hands... for now
As of today, ChatGPT doesn't take any commission when hotels get booked through it. But my guess is that this model won't last forever. OpenAI needs to find new revenue streams very quickly to justify the gazillions poured into data centers, and the options they have are rather limited.
Funny enough, Expedia shares jumped more than 12% and Booking Holdings climbed about 8% after this news.
#3 Lighthouse opens a new distribution channel
Speaking of ChatGPT, Lighthouse and The Hotels Network launch the first direct booking app for hotels inside the chatbot, giving properties a commission-free channel inside AI conversations for the first time ever.
The app is available to hotels of all sizes on a flat fee subscription with zero booking commissions.
Hotels can control their full brand narrative (descriptions, photos, rates, etc.) inside ChatGPT conversations instead of relying on scraped or outdated data.
When a traveler clicks to book, they're redirected to the hotel's own website, keeping the transaction commission-free.
This could be the worst time ever, but it’s still worthy of admiration. Independent hotels are usually at a disadvantage in distribution because they don't have the budget to compete with major chains or OTA advertising. At least with this, they have the option to put their content directly inside AI conversations if they want to.
#4 Major hotel chains say AI is finally paying off. Is it too soon to celebrate?
According to this article, major hotel companies are starting to move from pilots, and they expect to produce measurable earnings gains in 2026.
Hyatt reported its group sales teams are roughly 20% more productive since deploying AI tools.
Wyndham said its AI call centers have cut labor costs for franchisees.
Honestly, this feels a bit premature. Productivity gains don't automatically translate into earnings, and the hotel industry has surprised everyone before… but never by adopting tech quickly.
#5 We should ask again in 12 months
Although there's a first time for everything, in my opinion these "gains" could simply be the result of late tech implementation finally kicking in. And even if they're real, I'd wait at least one more year to measure actual performance.
That said, it's hard to tell someone investing millions to wait another year for results. So you kind of have to give them something.
💡 If you want context on how the hotel industry got here, this deep dive on the history of hotel tech is a good place to start.
#6 Do the most valuable hotel companies also invest the most in tech?
This week I came across a post with the top 20 most valuable hotel companies. It looked outdated, and some weren't even fully hotel companies. I wanted to check if there's a pattern between the hotels that invest most in technology and the ones the market values most.
So I did my own research and rebuilt the top 10 using actual data from financial markets:
The top 3 alone (Marriott, Hilton, and IHG) represent roughly $174B in combined market cap. That's more than the remaining 7 companies on the list put together. In hospitality, value (and by extension, tech investment) is heavily concentrated at the top.
Most of these companies don't own many buildings. They just own the brand, the systems, and the data.
Only two non-Western companies make the top 10: H World (China) and IHCL (India). Both are largely invisible (at least to me) in the global hotel tech conversation. But still, they are highly valued.
Ryman at #9 is the “unexpected” one (again, at least for me). They seem to focus almost entirely on large convention hotels, which says a lot about the current value of event-driven hospitality.
So mostly yes. The companies that dominate the list are also the usual suspects announcing the biggest investments in technology (with a few exceptions). And that’s probably not a coincidence.
RESOURCES
📍 Next Event: International Hotel Technology Forum (21–23 April).
📅 See the full hotel tech event calendar.
💼 Check which hotel tech companies offer remote jobs.
💻 Get your cloud PMS comparison list.
PRODUCT UPDATES
🆕 Affixify, a platform that matches hotels with hospitality software, adds a new asset management category to help hotel owners find the right professionals to protect asset value and improve financial performance.
🆕 Hilton launches an AI travel planner. The tool helps travelers find destinations, compare properties and explore options through conversational search.
🆕 Flexkeeping launches Workflow Builder, an automation tool that lets hotel teams build custom workflows using operational triggers without a single line of code. They call it the "Zapier for hotel operations", and it's already live for some users.
⚙️ IDeaS upgrades Spotlight (its marketing optimization tool) with a new feature to tell commercial teams which dates, segments, and room types are still responsive to promotions, so they stop spending budget where demand is already locked in.
💰 Breezeway secures a strategic investment to accelerate product development. They plan to use the funding to improve tools for housekeeping, maintenance, guest communication, and vendor coordination.
🤝 FLYR Hospitality becomes the exclusively recommended revenue management and business intelligence provider for Preferred Hotels & Resorts, with more than 625 independent properties.
🤝 Guesty names Casiola as its new official PMS partner. This deal puts Guesty in a good position to standardize operations as it expands internationally.
JOB BOARD
Content Writer - Spanish + English | Remote (based in Portugal) | HiJiffy.
Customer Engagement Specialist | Remote (based in Barcelona) | Lighthouse.
Client Sales Executive | Remote (based in the UK) | Mews.
That’s all for today, thank you for reading. If you found this useful, please forward it to someone who’d also benefit.
See you next week!
Jose