Writing & Perspectives

Rate tiers got hotels through the OTA era. Content got them ranked on Google. Neither survives what's coming next. Why the two things hotels built most deliberately are now working against them.

Hotels handed their customer relationships to OTAs by treating a strategic decision as a sales problem. AI is about to repeat the pattern. Here is what the board-level question actually looks like.

AI disrupts hotel distribution one layer earlier than OTAs did — at the aspiration stage, before brand preference forms. This is a governance problem, not a marketing problem.

Brand trust is the only thing that still belongs to you when the transaction is intermediated. The operators who survived the OTA era are about to win the AI era for the same reason.

Every technology that promised to give us our time back made us busier instead. The Jevons Paradox applied to knowledge work — and what to do about it before the window closes.

The quality of what you get back from AI is almost entirely determined by the quality of what you put in. The actual setup: tools, voice profile, Council of AIs workflow, and what really moved the needle.

Governance isn't about control. It's about creating the conditions for good decisions to be made — especially when the stakes are high, the timeline is political, and the margin for error is thin.

Most consultants deliver a report. S.T.A.R. delivers a system. Strategies, Tactics, Actions, Results — and a feedback loop for when outcomes don't match expectations.

An operator has skin in the game. A consultant has a slide deck. After 40 years building, losing, and rebuilding, here's what the difference actually looks like.