Experiential technology is merging with AI to reshape guest expectations, early investment in booking systems backed by an Agentic AI infrastructure will win market share, loyalty and more

By Brad Van Orsow

As summer winds down and the robust vacation season slows, it’s time for resort and venue operators to shift gears and ramp up for budget season. Fall offers the perfect opportunity to take a step back, evaluate what worked, what didn’t, and new opportunities to improve both operations and revenue in the coming year. With advances in experiential technology and AI, businesses can plan smarter, crafting memorable guest experiences that align with evolving expectations while staying budget conscious.

With Fall also comes a surge in experiential travel. September, October, and November are revered for their weather and immersive experiences tied to nature, food, sports, and cultural traditions. Fewer crowds, lower prices, better deals, and the need for a pre-holiday reset also beg for last-minute getaways. Unlike peak summer vacations, fall travelers often spend more on short, experience-rich getaways. ‑2025 shows that one-night trips cost an average of $700 per night, compared to $396 per night for week‑long vacations, a clear signal that guests are willing to pay a premium for quality, experience-rich escapes.

Now is the ideal time for hospitality venues to market local experiences and monetize fall-themed offerings, such as:

• Sports & Tailgating Experiences – Football season consistently drives demand, and operators don’t need to wait for the playoffs to see results. Packages built around college and pro games such as pre-game parties, fan lounges, and stadium transportation, create strong opportunities to capture fan bookings.
• Culinary & Harvest Events – Seasonal dining and beverage experiences remain a top draw. Wine tastings, brewery tours, farm-to-table dinners, and chef-led culinary events can be complemented with guided hikes, photography outings, and rooftop gatherings designed for fall travelers.
• Festivals & Cultural Events – Oktoberfest celebrations, local craft fairs, and music or arts festivals bring visitors into secondary and tertiary markets. These can be elevated with wellness-focused offerings such as spa packages, yoga sessions, fireside lounges, and weekend retreats that align with cooler weather.

While these activities are a big draw to travelers, the actual “booking” of these events can be a real turn-off, especially if each activity needs to be scheduled independently on multiple sites, and the systems facilitating the reservations are fractured and do not connect or communicate with one another. So, what does it take to remove this chaos and turn frustrated lookers into one-click bookers?

It requires an Agentic AI infrastructure to serve as the backbone of booking, personalizing, routing, and converting every guest signal into real-time conversational commerce journeys, and a (PXMS) to monetize and manage the experience-based inventory such as pool-side cabanas, restaurant reservations, lounge tables, small conference rooms, equipment rentals and much more, either as packages or a la carte bookings. Operators who prioritize these technologies in their budgets will be the ones capturing more revenue and guest loyalty.

Experiences are the draw, but it’s the AI infrastructure powering the booking process and the guest itinerary crafted by the resort’s PXMS that drives the loyalty, repeat visits, and incremental income. With AI agents communicating at the front end, and PXMS monetizing experiential bookings on the back end, everyone wins.

Rooms will remain the foundation of hotel revenue, but the modern guest journey is far richer and more dynamic. Every seat, space, and experience is an asset that can now be dynamically priced, booked in advance, and easily tied into the larger guest ecosystem.

Fall Season is Budget Season

As AI reshapes how guests’ book, taking a “wait and see” approach is no longer viable. The budgets set this fall will decide which operators capture tomorrow’s most significant ancillary revenue streams.

Early adopters will gain not just diversified revenue but also the intelligence that comes from every transaction with data that sharpens personalization, pricing, and product strategy. Guests will gravitate to properties that make experiences easy to discover and book, leaving the laggards behind.

Budgeting for PXMS and Agentic AI now isn’t just about keeping up, it’s about claiming a leadership position in 2026 and beyond. The winners will be the operators who turn every seat, space, and service into a sellable, scalable part of the guest journey.

More choice for travelers. More direct revenue for hotels. More total control for travel.

By Brad Brewer

The future of hotel distribution is not a mystery. It will either be owned by OTAs or owned by protocols. The choices hotel operators make today—from every global brand to independent inns and three-room B&Bs—will determine whether their businesses thrive or vanish.

Last week I asked ChatGPT and Gemini to provide . Results were as expected . . . coming from the OTAs and Google Travel . . . that was it. These intermediaries control visibility. Why? Because they were first to support global real-time availability, rates, and inventory (ARI) capabilities, optimize the funnels, and capture the guest journey.

The hotel industry must adapt to the rise of generative AI technology.  Keep procrastinating and watch out. AI-native hotel distribution is coming. If you aren’t ready, there won’t be time to brace for impact; rather, prepare for wipe out.

Once Model Context Protocol (MCP) is fully opened by the gatekeepers, every type of lodging provider will be able to compete for surface share directly alongside Expedia and Booking.com. That’s the promise of . It offers more choice for travelers. More direct revenue for hotels. And more total control for the travel industry.

Distribution is no longer about scale. It’s about structured, machine-readable infrastructure.

Why Infrastructure Matters in Agentic Hotel Distribution

AI is not a plugin; it’s infrastructure. AI agents don’t “see” hotels unless the data is structured. The OTAs invested early in making their ARI feeds machine readable. That’s why—when AI agents answer—OTAs show up and hotels don’t.

This isn’t a UI problem. It’s an infrastructure problem.

Harman Singh Narula, co-founder of Canary Technologies, has already shown the industry how AI can lift revenue through up-sell and engagement. The next battlefield is distribution itself. Europe is leading the way. Its Digital Markets Act (DMA) forced Google and Booking to open access. Lodging schema APIs are evolving. OTA preference is fading.

The U.S. will follow—whether by regulation or competition. In his column, “,” Doug Rice reminds us that that identity and personalization belong to the guest, not the platform. Distribution is no different: ARI and loyalty logic must travel with the guest, not remain locked inside an OTA.

A Strategic Call to Action

For hotels, suppliers, and providers, the path forward is clear. Become MCP-ready with structured ARI. Publish loyalty logic as portable data. And control orchestration, don’t delegate it.

Anil Aggarwal, CEO of Milestone and widely known for his thought leadership in hospitality marketing, noted in HSMAI’s annual conference that “the marketing funnel is collapsing into one conversation.” He warned hoteliers about the threat posed by OTAs, saying the traditional, multi-step marketing funnel is being replaced by a single, real-time conversation with a consumer powered by AI. They need to make their content, loyalty logic, and booking flows machine readable so they show up in AI-driven conversations. He cited generative AI as a key technology that will consolidate the travel planning and booking process.

Not only was he right, but Anil urged hoteliers to recognize this fundamental shift and invest in the technology and strategy needed to maintain a direct relationship with their guests.to make sure hotels do show up. But this is not just about hotels. The future of travel distribution will be powered by an ecosystem:

Throwing a Lifeline at Destination AI

This month at the, those leading the way in AI-powered hospitality and building the necessary protocols and infrastructure for hotels will discuss Agentic Hotel Distribution in detail and explain why the infrastructure-first initiative was developed and how hotels can remain visible, competitive, and profitable in the AI-native era of travel distribution.

Those interested in learning more about this pressing topic and its three key principles: MCP (Model Context Protocol) Readiness, Portable Loyalty and Identity, and Orchestration Control, should click  to register.

The travel industry is being refined by AI. Are you ready to ride the AI wave or will you be “rag-dolled?”

By Rob Schneider | August 13, 2025

Colliers’ mid-year report said that while total transaction volume was down markedly, the average price per key was up 18%.

INTERNATIONAL REPORT — Hotel M&A trade volume is down 26% year-over-year for the first half of 2025 while the average price per key is up 18%, according to Collier’s “INNvestment Canada Mid-Year Hotel Investment Report”.

The approximate hotel trading volume was $963 million, down 26% from the first half of 2024, with 72 hotels sold, down 15% YOY. The average price per key was $192,000, up 18% YOY.  The average deal size was $13.4 million, down 13% YOY. 

The full-service segment represented half of that trade volume with $475 million in transactions with an average price per key of $283,000. Focused service volume was $238 million with an average price per key of $228,000, while limited-service volume was $250 million with an average price per key of $110,000.

The report said strong operating performance and ample capital availability continue to drive hotel investment activity, with several transactions across key metro areas, including Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa, closing in the second quarter. Investor confidence remains high and is fueling robust pricing across all service segments.

Heightened competition and strong valuations have driven favorable sell-side conditions, though limited product availability continues to constrain deal flow, with more buyers than sellers in the market.

Looking ahead, several large-scale transactions have already closed in the third quarter, surpassing total Q2 volume. Based on the current pipeline, Colliers forecasts year-end transaction volume to approach $2 billion, in line with 2024 levels.

Canada’s major markets have fueled $550 million of hotel transactions, accounting for nearly 60% of year-to-date volume. The report said investor interest is growing in Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec, though activity is constrained by the limited availability of hotels for sale. Alberta accounted for 18% of national volume, followed by British Columbia and Quebec at 10%, led by high-value transactions in the Calgary, Vancouver and Montreal metro areas. Ontario remains dominant, representing 52% of national transaction volume, driven largely by trades in the Toronto area.

Hotel sales in Eastern Canada represented $695 million of volume and 55 hotels, while Western Canada represented $268 million and 17 hotels.

Performance-wise, hotels in Canada in the first half of 2025 had an average occupancy of 69.7% (up 0.9% YOY), ADR of $216 (up 2.5%) and RevPAR of $150 (up 3.4%). Domestic air passenger traffic was up 5.2% YOY, while international inbound traffic was up 3.3% and transborder traffic was down 4%.

Leveraging Agentic within the hotel PMS powers a fully orchestrated hospitality model, where staff, systems, and guest signals stay aligned in real time without added complexity

By Lisa Jane Wheaton

The business community has welcomed artificial intelligence as a key means of adapting to today’s changing workforce and recommending actions based on data analytics; however, according to experts, the hotel industry has yet to leverage it fully. A recent study by McKinsey found that as many as 78 percent of respondents say their organizations use AI in at least one business function, a 6-percentage-point increase from 2024. With so many core processes now informed by AI, hoteliers must bring these capabilities into the heart of their operations: the property-management system.

Today’s AI technology is reactive; it must wait for input from users before making decisions based on new information the system receives. While it is valuable for chatbots, training tools, and customer service, many believe it’s still too early for machines to take the wheel and start making decisions. Think again.

AI is already helping hotels reduce manual work through automations like scheduled reports, pre-programmed workflows, and dynamic pricing recommendations. But these tools still rely on human instruction at every step. These restrictions, however, may be coming to an end with the debut of Agentic AI — identified as the No. 1 trend in Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025. Leveraging AI “agents” as intuitive collaborators will enable hotel operators to learn new information, adjust their approach to problem solving, and take immediate action.

More Information, Less Hassle

The Harvard Business Review has referred to Agentic AI as a “digital teammate” capable of expanding a business’ efficiency as well as creating more resilient collaboration over time. The publication highlighted advancements in human resources that help connect job seekers with their ideal role, as well as website design to optimize the customer journey at all times. This flexibility demonstrates how this next wave of AI technology will provide hospitality leaders with additional ways to connect with travelers while preserving the human element.

As Agentic AI makes its way into hotel PMSs, operators will have the opportunity to extend these same capabilities to every corner of their commercial operation. For example, an active Agentic AI scheduling tool can eliminate the guesswork of staffing your property with the agent quickly adapting to changes in worker availability and updating calendars in real-time. Adopting this strategy can help operators provide dynamic schedules that benefit all team members, without adding additional complexity to your property workflow.

One-Click Confirmation

Leveraging Agentic AI within the hotel PMS powers a fully orchestrated hospitality model, where staff, systems, and guest signals stay aligned in real time without added complexity. Click here to see how a hotel PMS + Agentic AI can return a fully personalized, pre-filled cart — ready for one-click confirmation — as soon as the PMS starts listening to the guest’s intent throughout the booking journey.

AI is helping hoteliers adapt to a changing marketplace in ways that would never have been possible, and it is helping guests create new memories associated with your properties. As Agentic AI becomes more widely available for businesses and users, hoteliers should align themselves with technology partners who are willing to take this innovation and its challenges — seriously.

This means ensuring your approach to security and data aligns with that of your partners, as well as the level of accountability they include in the decision-making process, to ensure operators never fully cede control to automation. Hoteliers must also take security and accountability seriously when considering Agentic AI, including building controls into the PMS to reduce or expand its capabilities on the fly. This will be crucial to avoid potential situations, such as when AI hallucinates the ability to offer a discount or presents a rate that isn’t available.

While Agentic AI is still in its early stages within the hospitality sector, its rapid development signals where PMS capabilities are headed. Leveraging Agentic AI in the hotel PMS will allow operators to offer the “agile” hospitality experience guests, workers, and owners have been looking for. By cementing the hotel PMS as your command center, supported by AI teammates and intelligent automation, hoteliers will pioneer the next level of guest satisfaction for years.