AI lessons for hoteliers from Web Summit 20226

At Web Summit 2026, Avi Arya highlightes how artificial intelligence, short-form content, and authentic storytelling are reshaping travel marketing. His insights underline the need for travel brands to adapt quickly, engage audiences effectively, and build stronger consumer connections within an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Guest Column

By Avi Arya, Founder, Internet Moguls

01. Why I Went to Vancouver

I’m writing this from Delhi. Black coffee. A touch of jet lag. The kind that comes not from flying, but from four days of back-to-back conversations with people building things you haven’t seen yet.

Web Summit Vancouver, May 11 to 14, 2026. Over 400 companies on the exhibition floor. I walked every aisle. I sat down with 77 of them — not as a tech investor, not as a curious tourist, but as a hotelier who has been running Internet Moguls for 16 years and who still personally oversees Hotel Ajanta in New Delhi and The Tamarind in Goa.

My question at every booth was the same: “Can this help a hotel make more money — or run better?”

Most could. And that is exactly what concerns me — because your competitors will figure this out. Some already have.

What I came back with is not a list of products. It is a pattern. A gap. Something every hotel owner in India needs to understand before their competition does.

02. The Intelligence Lag

In four days in Vancouver, I watched companies demonstrate tools that can replace 6 to 8 hours of daily manual work in a hotel. Tools that respond to leads in 30 seconds. Draft proposals in 4 minutes. Automate follow-up sequences across WhatsApp and email. Flag operational bottlenecks before they surface as complaints.

Most of these tools cost less than a single OTA commission on a weekend group booking.

Your guests — the ones choosing between your property and a competitor — are already using AI every day. For travel research. For price comparison. For reviewing options. They arrive at your hotel more informed than ever. Meanwhile, your reservations team still responds to enquiries in 47 minutes on average.

This newsletter is about what I saw in Vancouver. Not as a technology showcase. As a practical map of where the revenue opportunities are — across every stage of your hotel’s sales and operations cycle.

What I Was Looking For — And What I Found

I have sat through hundreds of product pitches in 16 years at Internet Moguls. I know the difference between a tool that looks impressive in a demo and one that changes how a hotel actually operates.

At Web Summit, I found both kinds. This newsletter contains only the ones that matter to you — hotel owners, GMs, and revenue leaders who make real decisions.

I have organised what I saw into four categories: Before sales. During sales. After the booking. Inside your operations.

03. Before You Close — AI in Pre-Sales

Stage: Pre-Sales

The enquiry arrives. What happens in the next 30 minutes decides the booking.

Your front desk is occupied. The reservations manager is on a call. The inquiry — via your website, via WhatsApp, via email — sits. For 47 minutes on average, according to hospitality industry data from 2025.

By the time your team responds, the guest has checked two other properties. One of them replied in under 3 minutes. That property gets the booking.

At Web Summit, I visited the Ringable AI booth. They showed me something I have been thinking about since I landed back in Delhi.

Their AI voice agent responds to inbound enquiries in under 30 seconds. Not a chatbot message. Not an auto-acknowledgment email. An actual voice conversation — qualifying the lead, answering questions about room types and rates, and routing the serious prospect to your reservations team with a complete brief already prepared.

Thirty seconds versus 47 minutes. The math is not complicated.

BeeMessage takes the follow-up angle. The moment a guest enquires, a personalized WhatsApp sequence begins — room options, rate visibility, and a follow-up message at 24 hours if there is no response. Done automatically. Done at scale. Without your reservations team typing a single message manually.

04. While You’re Talking — AI in Active Sales

Stage: During Sales

The conversation has started. Now your team spends the next 3 hours writing a proposal.

I have watched hotel sales teams spend entire mornings on proposal documents. Custom cover pages. Room inventory tables. Rate sheets. Banquet menus and capacities. Cancellation policies formatted differently for every corporate client.

The same structure. Repeated every time. Just different names and dates.

At Vancouver, I sat with two companies that are solving this directly.

The best sales teams close more not because they are better at selling. They close more because they spend less time on documentation between conversations.

Clairify.ai eliminates the reading overload. YouWo eliminates the writing lag. Together, they return 2 to 3 hours to your sales team every single working day. Those hours go back into conversations, site visits, relationship building — the actual work of selling rooms and banquets.

The best sales teams close more, not because they are better at selling. They close more because they spend less time on documentation between conversations.

Clairify.ai eliminates the reading overload. YouWo eliminates the writing lag. Together, they return 2 to 3 hours to your sales team every single working day. Those hours go back into conversations, site visits, relationship building — the actual work of selling rooms and banquets.

They were not solving tech problems. They were solving business problems — lead response, proposal generation, client follow-up, meeting documentation, and operational visibility.

These are hotel problems. They have had hotel problems for three decades. The difference is that the solutions now exist — and most of them are affordable today.

 

05. After the Yes — Guest Journey & Retention

Stage: Post-Booking

The booking is confirmed. Then your hotel goes completely silent for the next two weeks.

Between confirmation and arrival, most hotels communicate exactly once — the auto-generated booking confirmation from your PMS. Room type. Check-in date. Cancellation policy. That is it.

Nothing for 7 to 21 days. While the guest is sitting with an upcoming stay, still open to upgrade suggestions, still interested in dining and spa packages, still capable of being converted from an OTA transaction into a genuine hotel relationship.

At Web Summit, I visited Pulsery by OmniLabs. Their platform watches how guests and leads behave across your communications — which emails they open, which links they click, how long they engage — and then automatically personalises what that guest receives based on those behavioural signals.

A guest who clicks your spa page in the confirmation email receives a pre-arrival spa offer three days before check-in. A guest who spent time on your restaurant menu receives a dining package recommendation. Automatically. Personally. Without your team writing a single email.

This is what large international chains have been doing with ₹50 lakh enterprise CRM systems for the past decade. Pulsery puts the same intelligence in the hands of a 60-room mid-segment property at a fraction of that cost.

06. Inside the Building — AI in Hotel Operations

Stage: Operations

The revenue leak is not always in sales. Often, it is in what your team wastes every day.

Monday morning meetings that could have been a 2-minute brief. GM reports arriving 48 hours after the data was generated. Reservations staff manually copy information between systems. Department heads were waiting on approvals that no one realised were pending.

Operational waste in a hotel is invisible because no one has built the systems to see it. Two companies I visited in Vancouver are changing that.

I also spent time at the Cleanlist AI booth. Their platform takes your existing guest database — the data your PMS has been accumulating for years — and segments it in ways your current system cannot. By stay frequency. By booking channel. By room preference. By spend history. By enquiry source.

Most hotels are sitting on 5 to 8 years of guest data that is doing nothing. Cleanlist AI turns that into targeted outreach — for direct booking campaigns, loyalty offers, and corporate account development. Data you already own, finally put to work.

07. The Companies I Researched — Shortlisted for Hospitality

08. What the Intelligence Lag Costs — In Rupees

Let me put it together for a mid-segment Indian hotel. 100 rooms. ₹5,500 ADR. 62% occupancy.

Not a luxury property. Not a budget chain. A well-run, independently operated hotel that is managing its day-to-day competently — but has not yet adopted these tools.

Annual Revenue Left on the Table — The Intelligence Lag Estimate	Impact
Slow enquiry response (3 lost bookings/day)	₹90L – ₹1.1Cr
No pre-arrival upsell communication	₹60L – ₹99L
Manual proposal writing (8 hrs/week not redeployed)	₹25L – ₹40L
Operational bottlenecks and task delays	₹20L – ₹35L
Weak hotel visibility on Google and AI search	₹30L – ₹50L
Total recoverable revenue per year	₹2.25Cr – ₹3.35Cr

Based on pattern averages across 500+ hotel partners over 16 years, validated against conversion data shared by companies at Web Summit Vancouver 2026. For a hotel already running at 62% occupancy, without adding a single new room.

These numbers are not speculative. They are pattern averages. The leaks exist in every hotel I have reviewed in the past 3 years — regardless of category, location, or star rating.

The question has never been whether this money exists. The question is whether your hotel is the one that recovers it — or continues to leave it there, year after year, while calling it “the nature of the business.”

09. Two Types of Hotels Will Come Out of This Decade

Avi’s Take — From the Floor

I didn’t go to Vancouver to find the next shiny thing.

I went because I wanted to see what the world’s most ambitious companies are building right now — and ask whether any of it was genuinely useful to a hotel owner.

The answer was yes. Repeatedly. Across category after category.

I have watched this fork in the road before — when OTAs arrived, when social media became essential, when Google Ads changed direct bookings forever.

Every time, the hotels that moved first won. Not because the technology was magical. Because they moved.

 

 

Hotels that adopted the intelligence available to them. And hotels that didn’t.

The first group will respond faster, propose better, retain more, and operate leaner. Their cost per booking will fall. Their repeat rate will rise. Their team will spend more time on guests and less time on paperwork that a machine can now handle.

The second group will still be running the same enquiry response process they ran in 2019. Still drafting proposals by hand. Still sending the same post-stay survey that 90% of guests delete without reading.

I have been inside hotels for 16 years. I have watched this kind of divergence before. It always starts at a moment when the technology becomes accessible — not just to the large chains with enterprise budgets, but to every independently operated property.

Disclaimer: This is a guest column. TRAVTALK may or may not agree with the views expressed by the author.