NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Guest booking behaviors are no longer what they used to be. Pandemic- and recovery-era patterns have merged with current economic trends to make a revenue manager's job more complex.
During the "Orchestrate Your Demand Mix" panel at the 2025 Hotel Data Conference, revenue-management experts spoke about how the landscape is evolving and what hoteliers need to do to keep up.
The most important thing for revenue managers, senior leaders and hotel owners to understand is that the path to purchase by guests is no longer linear, said Phill Burgess, vice president of sales and revenue at Athena Hospitality Group. It’s algorithmic. When considering Google’s dominance, meta searches and the growing influence of artificial intelligence-driven optimization, a hotel’s visibility, rates, pricing and relevancy are being dictated by machine-learning in real time.
“It’s as if AI is the new frontier,” Burgess said. “We have to discover the rules of the terrain to just survive and thrive, so it’s like the wild, wild west of modern revenue management."
That applies to all the systems, said Lori Kiel, senior vice president of revenue management at Pyramid Global Hospitality. Technology is growing so much faster than the hotel industry can track.
“We get lots of calls from all of our great tech friends that want to show us something, sell us something, and to be quite honest, it’s a little overwhelming right now because it’s really hard to just keep up with what we have,” she said.
Embrace the chaos
AI is transformative, said Nic Owen, global director of strategic accounts at SiteMinder. Everyone is still trying to figure it out, but that doesn't mean waiting to let others figure it out.
“Don’t wait for AI,” Owen said. “Really lean into it. Start using it and learning about what you can do with it.”
Today’s successful hotel revenue managers are using AI to complete tasks within seconds that would normally take much longer, he said.
Starting to use AI had been an intimidating prospect for Kiel given that she was still using legacy systems in certain cases. She said the trick was to start with ChatGPT after a colleague showed her how to use it by asking for a solution to a problem. That was the a-ha moment for her, she said.
“It’s no different than the search, except I don’t have to do the work to solve because now it solves for me, and that’s where it’s a game changer,” she said.
When using something like ChatGPT, it’s critical to maintain critical thinking, Kiel said. While she can analyze a report from A to Z, using AI means she can have ChatGPT do the work from A to L and she can pick it up the rest of the way.
“The reality there is I know if it's taking me on a journey that is not in the right direction because I ultimately know how to do that work,” she said. “So, that's where it is important. It should assist. It should not substitute.”
Demand capture
AI searches might miss out on key details about a hotel based on how the AI agent is "reading" the website. Hotel websites typically offer photo galleries of the property, Burgess said. The company hires someone to do a photo shoot, and the marketing team picks out the ones to use from 1,000 photos. They all have 16-digit numbers, and they should rename the photos they pick to reflect what’s in the photo because of how meta searches work on Google now.
“If you have an indoor pool, that shot needs to be called ‘indoor pool shot one,’ ‘indoor pool shot two,’” he said.
Hotel brands are starting to push franchisees to make these changes so they can work with the meta searches, Burgess said.
“If you've got a ‘8816327- -4,’ you're not going to pull a lot,” he said.
The booking windows are definitely shorter, said Jason Pirock, head of marketing and brand at Springboard Hospitality.
“There’s a lot of implications for that, but I think, too, it stands out there is this unknown,” he said. “People being a little bit uneasy about booking and when they’re going to book and getting a little bit closer to when it feels comfortable.”
Guests are getting smarter, too, Pirock said. They’re checking other spaces for pricing, and they’re taking more risks. They’re trying to get a great deal.
For hoteliers, that means being consistent, he added.
“You want to be consistent in your storytelling across the board,” he said. “So when you have that moment of getting in front of them, all roads are leading to booking.”
The hotel industry historically has been so focused on bottom of the funnel when it comes to capturing guest demand, Pirock said.
“But you can’t get the bottom of the funnel unless you have the top, so spend time, invest in top of funnel,” he said. “It doesn’t always yield up front, right? That’s why people always spend on bottom, but the more you can spend on prospecting, not branding, those types of things are going to help long term.”