🔫 Storytelling becomes hotel tech's secret weapon

Welcome to RemoteHotelier!

In today’s newsletter:

🔄 What this rebrand tells us about where hotel tech is heading

📖 Storytelling is the new best competitive advantage

💡 Travel inspiration that goes beyond the usual stuff

📊 Is the experiences trend finally slowing down?

🏔️ How a 10 property hotel group uses tech to compete with global chains

🔌 Another hotel giant bets on AI as a distribution channel

🚀 + 8 new product updates

💼 + 3 new jobs in hotel tech

Mews just unveiled a new brand identity, and it reflects where the company is heading. They're positioning themselves as a hospitality operating system, not just a PMS.

The new visual identity centers around a fluid brand mark inspired by the original meaning of a "mews" where individual parts come together as a larger enterprise. It's their way of saying: we're not selling software, we're selling infrastructure.

If you’re curious, this is how the new image looks.

Storytelling is becoming the most valuable currency in tech. LinkedIn job postings mentioning "storyteller" doubled in the past year alone. That's not a coincidence.

You can find roles like "Head of Content" or "Brand Storyteller" at companies that five years ago would’ve just hired a generic marketing manager (with huge salaries in some cases).

Mews knows this too. They've been consistently publishing content that goes beyond blog posts. But they're not alone. Two other examples in hospitality tech that come to mind are Perk and more recently Cloudbeds, who also doubled down on brand storytelling. When you read their content, you can tell someone thought carefully about how they want to be perceived, not just what they sell.

So why is this happening now?

AI broke the good old equation. When everyone can produce high quality content in seconds, the only differentiator left is the trust you've built over time. You can write a blog post in seconds, but you can't automate five years of consistently saying things that turned out to be right. Funny enough, AI didn't make storytelling less important, but rather the opposite.

This has a very practical implication. Hotels are skeptical buyers because they've seen way too many pitches that promised to change everything. The products winning right now aren't necessarily the best on paper. They're the ones whose name comes up when a GM asks a colleague for a recommendation.

That kind of reputation is built through storytelling, not advertising. And the companies that figured this out early are now investing real money to build it and protect it.

Speaking of storytelling, one of the things I love the most since I started this newsletter is the amazing people I get to meet and the cool projects they share with me. This week I got this digital magazine.

The idea behind this magazine is to partner with travel content creators that focus on meaningful travel like accessible tourism, sustainability, slow travel… the kind of stuff that actually matters beyond Instagram. I thought it was worth sharing with you all.

By the way, do yourself a favor and open it on desktop if you can. The interactive design is just beautiful… you even might feel a sudden urge to visit Switzerland.

And one more recommendation this week. If you also appreciate charts and insights, I'd recommend checking out this newsletter. They share great data visualizations across travel, mobility, and tech once a month.

This week I found the chart below particularly interesting. For two decades, experiences kept going up while spending on material goods declined.

But the latest data shows that trend is actually slowing down:

This small hotel group is proving that you don’t need hundreds of hotels to make membership models work if you know which buttons you have to push (no pun intended).

I loved this story of how a small hotel group can punch above its weight with the right technology approach. The point isn't in the specific tools they use, but the philosophy behind them. They built their tech stack around the membership, not around the rooms. They’re opening their 10th hotel so they must be doing something right.

Wyndham announces a new partnership with Google, Anthropic, and ChatGPT to let guests discover and book hotels through AI conversations.

Their logic is simple: if people are already asking ChatGPT and Gemini where to stay, why not show my hotels in that conversation? The hope is, of course, that these bookings cost less than OTA commissions.

🔌 Shiji connects Daylight PMS with FLYR Hospitality, letting hotels use the commercial optimization platform directly inside their PMS for automated pricing, real time forecasting, and unified performance analytics.

🔌 RateGain adds Stripe to its booking engine, giving hotels embedded payments that support multiple currencies and new methods like digital wallets. The integration aims to reduce checkout drop offs and improve payment completion for international bookings.

🆕 Lighthouse launches Revenue Agent, an AI commercial agent that monitors and optimizes hotel actions across multiple departments. It uses a dataset of more than 3 billion data points per day to scan market signals, flag anomalies and opportunities, and recommend high priority actions with guardrails defined by the hotel.

🆕 Operto rolls out AI agents for independent hotels that automate common guest service requests and operational tasks from a single platform. This tool aims to cut response times and reduce staff workload by handling routine interactions and workflows automatically.

🛒 S4BT acquires HotelHub, a platform that helps travel management companies aggregate hotel content from GDS systems into a single interface.

💰 Otamiser raises $2 million to scale its hotel distribution platform, which helps properties manage and optimize OTA listings, pricing, and content from one place.

💰 Odynn raises $9.5M to scale its platform that lets banks and fintechs launch fully branded travel booking portals in weeks, not years. Companies use these portals to offer hotel rooms, among other things.

💰 RobosizeME raises $2 million in seed funding to automate back-office hotel processes like reservations, finance, revenue management, and guest services. The Czech startup, founded in 2022, integrates directly with PMS and POS systems.

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