More than 6,000 hospitality executives and operators gathered in San Antonio last week for the annual HITEC hospitality technology conference, including leaders from Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Hyatt, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Starwood Hotels, and hundreds of independent properties.

The big topic: whether the industry’s AI investment is actually working. IDC forecasts that 30% of all travel bookings will be made by AI agents by 2030. But the gap between where the industry is headed and what it’s currently equipped to support is wide.

While 25% of hospitality businesses report actively scaling AI today, fewer than 10% are considered “AI future-built,” according to BCG—meaning they have AI embedded across core operations, a supporting data foundation, and measurable returns to show for it. “A lot of companies are throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks,” said Dale Gomez, associate teaching professor in hospitality technology at Florida International University. “They want to see ROI.” 

Other shifts are already underway. Many hospitality businesses still lack the modern financial infrastructure needed to fully benefit from the automation, speed, and interoperability AI is expected to drive. Payment systems once considered “good enough” are now costing measurable revenue, and rising guest expectations have turned inefficient technology from a minor inconvenience to a reason not to return. 

Across four days and over 50 meetings, four trends stood out.

The race for direct bookings has moved from search rankings to AI answers

For years, the hospitality industry’s answer to online travel agency (OTA) dependency was SEO: invest in content, improve search rankings, and convert guests before they end up on Expedia or Booking.com. That approach is becoming less effective.

Jack Wang, principal solution engineer at Salesforce, offered data that spotlights a shift: 65% of Google searches that trigger an AI Overview now end without the user clicking any website. On mobile, that number climbs to 78%. Traditional search traffic is declining roughly 25% across the industry, as AI-generated summaries replace the ranked link lists that SEO was designed to win. 

Inclusion in an AI-generated answer requires something different from what SEO rewards. SEO responds to keyword density, backlinks, and page authority. AI inclusion responds to the accuracy and machine-readability of structured property data, like room types, amenity details, policies, local context, or cancellation terms. A hotel can rank well in traditional search and be invisible to an LLM: over 90% of accommodation sites are still undetected by AI models.

We’re already seeing a downstream effect. According to Phocuswright research, 56% of travelers have used AI for trip planning, booking, or in-destination assistance in the past 12 months. For operators, the first step is an audit, not an investment. Can the LLMs your prospective guests are using accurately describe your property’s room categories, amenities, policies, and local context? If the answer is no, that gap is likely costing you bookings.

Today, hotel chains have access to the same checkout and payment tools as OTAs, including local payment methods and currencies, one-click checkout, and global fraud protection. The travel brands capturing agentic demand are combining AI-driven discoverability with accurate real-time inventory and a modern checkout experience that converts demand efficiently.

Most hospitality AI is falling short in a predictable way

An uncomfortable truth surfaced repeatedly throughout HITEC: much of the AI scaling happening across hospitality is fragile. The majority of businesses are adopting AI without the strategic clarity, data foundation, and operational architecture to sustain it.

The root cause is often fragmented data. Siloed property management, CRM, loyalty, food and beverage, and payment systems each hold partial views of the same guest—and AI recommendations are only as accurate as the content they draw on. The same data problem that breaks AI personalization shows up in finance as excessive reconciliation time, in operations as incomplete guest profiles, and in the guest experience as friction. 

Amanda Sharp, Salesforce lead solution engineer, reframed the problem as AI operationalization rather than adoption, calling for “vibe operating”: hospitality’s answer to vibe coding. Building AI features is now feasible for many hotel brands. Running them reliably in production, integrated into actual workflows that trigger real actions, is harder.

The businesses doing this well have clean, connected data that delivers useful intelligence directly into the workflow while there’s still time to act. At Delta Air Lines, for example, a live AI concierge is built into the mobile app and uses SkyMiles profile and operational data to provide context-aware support as part of the customer care experience. At Wynn Las Vegas, revenue managers receive predictive alerts when performance is trending below target, along with recommended actions attached.

For most travel operators, the bottleneck is data connectivity rather than model quality.

Payments friction has a measurable cost, but most hotels still don’t know what it is

The hospitality industry has historically treated payments as a cost and commodity: something to keep running, minimize fees on, and keep out of the way. Many of the payments-specific conversations we had at HITEC revolved around how that approach is changing, along with a growing recognition that payments have become a key factor in how hospitality brands compete. Our own data supports this: in a Stripe-commissioned survey of nearly 400 hospitality executives, 90% said payments are important to growth, and 37% said that a lack of payment options has the greatest negative impact on the guest experience. In addition, 58% said their fraud systems block legitimate transactions, and 74% reported that fragmented systems cause their teams to spend excessive time on reconciliation.

Those figures highlight why payments have become a structural advantage. OTAs can afford to staff payments at scale because their revenue justifies the head count. Independent hotels and smaller operators can’t match that investment directly, but a lean team on the right infrastructure can now support payment methods across dozens of countries at a fraction of the cost of a large in-house operation.

A coverage gap translates directly to lost bookings. “The moment we don’t support [a payment method] is the moment this guest goes elsewhere, to a platform or channel that supports their preferred way to pay,” said Sebastien Leitner, VP of strategic partnerships at Cloudbeds. Guests book where their preferred payment method works. A property that doesn’t support the dominant method in a target market isn’t just creating friction—it’s routing that booking to an OTA that does.

The best hospitality technology is the kind that goes unnoticed

“There is zero empathy for technology that doesn’t work,” said Tanya Pratt, global VP of strategy and product management at Oracle Hospitality. “If it’s not working, it’s going to cause more frustration than if there’s a line at the front desk, because people are used to that.” When technology fails, guests don’t always complain. They just don’t come back.

The real gauge of success is when technology works well enough that guests don’t think about it at all. Denise Walker, CIO of Starwood Hotels, described the vision: a returning guest arrives to a room at the right temperature, with their preferred channels on the TV, and pillows of their preferred firmness on the bed. No one announces how they knew. “It doesn’t have to be delivered in a way that says, ‘How did you know that?’”

Shannon McCallum, VP of hotel operations at Resorts World Las Vegas, went further. “We’re moving from ‘I told you this, so you know it about me’ to ‘I didn’t tell you anything, and now you’re predicting it.’”

Both the invisible personalization and the human moments it enables require a foundation of connected data—tech that integrates across your existing stack, consolidating guest information into a single system. That infrastructure allows businesses to recognize the same guest whether they’re browsing your website or standing at the front desk.

How Stripe can help

Increasingly, guests will find your property through AI assistants rather than search engines. The bookings they make might be completed by agents. And the revenue that distinguishes high-performing operators will come from payment experiences that convert, payment methods that cover every market, and financial systems that work together. Stripe Data Pipeline connects payments data with your booking and customer systems, giving operators a unified view of revenue without stitched-together reporting.

Stripe’s payments infrastructure helps hospitality operators protect revenue, boost guest spend on-property, and simplify operations. 

Drive direct bookings. Across the payment methods guests actually use and in every market you serve, payment experiences that convert help keep bookings on your direct channel. As agentic commerce scales, that means fraud detection that runs on every Stripe transaction by default and payment tokens that allow agents to transact without exposing guest credentials. 

Increase trip spend. Ancillary revenue from dining, experiences, and partnerships requires payments infrastructure that works across the property, supports new business models, and connects with external partners. Stripe Billing handles the recurring payment logic behind membership and loyalty programs, including automatic renewals, tiered pricing, and failed payment recovery—without requiring operators to maintain that infrastructure themselves. Cloudbeds, for example, saw 15% revenue growth for businesses using Cloudbeds Payments and a 14.8% average increase in revenue for businesses expanding payment methods by directly removing payment friction through its Stripe partnership.

Cut costs. More efficient B2B money movement and fraud protection reduce reconciliation work and limit losses, freeing up margin without adding staff.

Learn more about how Stripe supports hospitality businesses, or get in touch.