No Vacancy Live!

Wyndham Hotels & Resorts just knocked Marriott International out of the #1 spot in U.S. News & World Report 's 2026 hotel rewards rankings — and the reason comes down to something travelers are clearly reacting to: devaluation. I talked with senior travel editor Elizabeth Von Tersch about this year's rewards rankings, plus a brand new list for road warriors. A few numbers worth knowing: Wyndham he...

Morris Tiedemann, General Manager at AYANA Midplaza Jakarta, joined Glenn and Suzanne from halfway across the world to explain how a hotel competes in a market flooded with luxury. Morris took a job in Urumqi in 2003 when he had to buy a book to figure out where it was. Twenty-two years in China taught him to move fast. Then AYANA came calling, and he had to slow down. Indonesia rewards patience....

Hotel technology shouldn't just look impressive. It should help guests enjoy their stay and help hotels make more money. The Hotel Communication Network Inc. CEO Kevin Bidner showed me how the company combines in-room tablets with AI to create a much more useful guest experience. Guests can request extra towels, explore room-service options, discover hotel amenities, research local restaurants and...

Lauren Bennett McGinty, Executive Director of Explore Minnesota, sat down with Glenn to explain how a state agency generates $25 billion in economic impact and what hoteliers can learn from it. The state welcomed 81 million visitors in 2024 and generated nearly $15 billion in visitor spending. Lauren breaks down how Explore Minnesota subdivides 5 major regions into 11 micro-regions to distribute v...

James Hansen showed up with a Paloma. Sarah Becherer poured a digestif. Craig Sullivan had his beer. Glenn was doing whatever Glenn does. This is how you open a conversation about parking. They're from  Ocra , which turns empty hotel parking lots into cash. We got there eventually. First we had to sort out Chicago cocktail pricing, why Sarah wants to launch a podcast about parallel parking, and th...

Liza Amlani, The Chief Merchant, spent 20 years as a merchant at Ralph Lauren. She now studies what retail can teach hospitality. The parallels are closer than you think. Both industries live and die by customer experience. Both rely on frontline workers whose voices too often get ignored. Both are trying to figure out how to bridge strategy from the corporate office to what actually happens on th...

Julie Kee, Director of Sales and Marketing at the Belize Collection, just revealed why her hotels are winning. It's not what you'd expect. The Belize Collection owns real estate. Spans jungle to reef to private island. Partners with local communities in ways that feel authentic because they are. And that's become their competitive advantage. But how do you actually turn that into a business model...

Your guests are done waiting in line at check-in. Wallet key technology just made that line disappear. 🔑 Tap your phone to your room. It opens. That's it. No app. No Bluetooth. No waiting. Apple Wallet, Google Wallet, Apple Watch — NFC technology that actually works. 📱 The old digital keys had 2% adoption because they were clunky. This one? Glenn tested it at Harrah's Las Vegas and it was so smo...

We had a guest cancel at the last minute, so Craig, Suzanne, and I opened drinks and talked about my absolute disaster of a travel day. I'm not giving away the whole thing, but yesterday involved delayed flights, a plane too hot to board, a jammed wheelchair, Atlanta airspace doing Atlanta airspace things, a sick flight attendant, a Popeyes dream that died quickly, a late-night LIRR miracle, and t...

Jonathan Tisch helped shape Loews Hotels for 45 years, built some of the company's most important projects, and still talks about hospitality as a people business before anything else. Dr. Producer Suzanne Bagnera cohosts this conversation with Jonathan Tisch, retired executive chairman of Loews Hotels, and we get into the decisions behind Loews Miami Beach, the long relationship with Universal Or...

We drove through the Las Vegas Loop in a Tesla with Cami Christensen, President/GM of Westgate Las Vegas, and she's got 25 years of stories to tell from inside one of Vegas's most connected properties. 🏨 Westgate is about to be the first Vegas hotel with direct airport access through The Vegas Loop. End of June. You step off a plane, hop in a Tesla, and you're in your room — no traffic, no surfac...

Your mid-market property is about to get a neighbor it didn't expect. Bruce Ford, SVP of Lodging Econometrics, explains why 158 luxury conversions are coming — and what that means for everyone else. Luxury used to be exclusive. Expensive to build. Hard to convert. Not anymore. Brands are loosening their grip. Third-party operators are moving in. Mid-market properties are being stripped down and re...

Your owners are making decisions blind. PM Hotel Group just fixed that. Steve Marino, VP of IT and Hotel Systems at PM Hotel Group, explained at HITEC how they're using AI as their competitive differentiator — not to replace anyone, but to move owners from reactive to proactive. Most owners aren't hoteliers — they're investor-class people who don't know how to navigate systems or run reports. So t...

Here's obvious: Hotel energy prices aren't coming down. Rick West, CEO at Commercial Green Solutions, and Kenny Weston, VP at Commercial Green Solutions, explained why hoteliers need to stop treating utility costs as fixed. ⚡ The "double whammy" is real: your kWh costs are up AND your demand charges are through the roof. But there's $50 billion in rebates sitting in utility programs that most hot...

Kartik Yellepeddi, Chief Product Officer at Duetto, says AI in pricing is stuck at level one: algorithms that recommend prices. That's the problem. Building three levels is the solution. 🎯 Foundation (pricing and forecasting algorithms), layer two (explaining why the AI decided what it decided), and layer three (performance engineering that guides humans across sales, marketing, and distribution)...

Hotels are asking the wrong question at check-in — and Alliants just proved it. 🔑 Apple Wallet and Google Wallet keys at Resorts World Las Vegas are table stakes. Member Pass is the real play: loyalty recognition built into the digital key so repeat guests see their benefits the moment they arrive. 🎯 One customer captured additional guest names from 13,000 out of 20,000 check-ins. Hotels book on...

Matthew Bright, SVP and Head of IT at Davidson Hospitality, made a promise not to talk about AI. He broke it 54 seconds in. 🔒 AI is making security worse and easier at the same time — phishing emails with zero typos, sophisticated language models doing the work bad actors used to do by hand. 🎯 Large hospitality companies getting breached makes the whole industry a target. People now understand w...

Deena Baikowitz is a cat whisperer, networking extraordinaire, and the funnest, loudest (the good kind) person you'll ever meet. She joins Friday Night Audit alongside myself, Craig Sullivan and Suzanne Bagnera, PhD, CHA, CED from Toronto (where she's "in exile" from New York) and the crew immediately put her to work on the pet peeves hotel tournament. 🐱 The parallels between training introverted...

Brent Hayhurst, VP at Curator Hotel and Resort Collection , won't look at a new technology until he knows what KPI it's supposed to move. 💸 Labor is the largest line item on any hotel owner's balance sheet, and that's the number Curator's tech decisions chase. 🏚️ Curator skips the big splashy booths and goes straight to the fringes of the show floor, where the new ideas show up first. 🧪 A pilot...

Steven Moore, CEO at Actabl, says you shouldn't need to log in to answer your owner's question. 💬 Altitude, Actabl's new product, lets you have conversations with your data instead of clicking through dashboards and pulling reports. 📊 Instead of logging in, finding the right sheet, and comparing — "What were my labor expenses last two weeks?" takes a conversation. 👥 The payoff: get property man...

Keryn McNamara, CIO at Aimbridge, told me AI fails the moment it replaces a human instead of freeing one up. 💰 She's bringing a labor productivity and forecasting tool to market within weeks, built on Aimbridge's scale and data. 🚪 Her go-to comparison: elevator operators disappeared, but new jobs replaced them. She thinks the same thing happens with AI in hotels. 🚩 Her test for separating real...

Denise Walker, CIO at Starwood Hotels and Resorts, started her career on a TRS-80. Thirty years later, she told me AI is the first technology she's never had to explain to anyone — people already see why it matters. 🏨 Smaller hotel companies can move faster than legacy chains that placed big AI bets last year, before pricing models and guest expectations shifted again. 🔐 Fear keeps guest data ha...

At HITEC, I talked with Michael Grove of HotStats, which is now part of Duetto, about why hotel performance has to move beyond rooms revenue. Michael came with actual numbers on profitability, but the conversation went quickly into how owners and operators should read the business. Demand and rate only tell part of the story. Profit depends on where revenue comes from, what it costs to capture it,...

Hotel operators don't lack AI options. They lack a clear way to evaluate them. At HITEC, I talked with Shannon McCallum, VP of Operations at Resorts World Las Vegas, about the HFTP AI Collective and how operators can make smarter decisions around AI tools, robotics, chatbots, reporting, and vendor partners. 🤖 Robotics came up, from food prep to concierge support. 📊 Back-of-house reporting came u...

During HITEC in San Antonio yesterdayn, I talked with Robert Matsuoka of Duetto about Duetto Labs and how AI could change the daily work of hotel revenue teams. Revenue managers already spend too much time pulling data from different systems, building reports, checking forecasts, and trying to figure out what needs attention first. Robert's view is that AI should cut through that noise so smart pe...