Hotel Business spoke exclusively with Klaus Kohlmayr, chief evangelist and development officer at IDeaS, just before the start of the ITB Travel Trade Show in Berlin. He spoke about what’s on the minds of travel and hotel professionals worldwide.
It’s hard to read the headlines in 2026 without hearing about AI, disruption caused by global instability and a continuing fragile economic picture for hotel owners. What have you been hearing from the global hotel community before ITB and as you travel across time zones?
There’s no question it is a volatile time—a time of true uncertainty.
Hoteliers I’m speaking to are encountering this on a number of different levels: Cost pressures and the challenge of labor continue to be foremost. Wide divergences in booking patterns continue to make operational forecasting challenging. And, of course, political upheaval can cause volatility not just in bookings, but also in group travel patterns, currency fluctuations and even in development timetables for owners and brands.
At the same time, new horizons are opening up that we could not have foreseen a decade ago.
Technology is expanding at an unprecedented pace, including in revenue management and property management. With the advent of AI, hotel owners and managers are empowered to process transactions more quickly, build revenues more optimally and provide a more personalized guest experience than ever before.
So, in a way as uncertainty grows, the tools for managing it grow more powerful at the same time.
Tell us more about what AI really means to hoteliers—and how it is transforming the area you know best, revenue management.
I like to say that the hospitality industry is entering a moment where AI is no longer an abstract promise but an operational reality. Hotels everywhere are experimenting with new capabilities—forecasting aids, demand signals, pricing automations, guest‑facing interactions—but adoption has raced far ahead of genuine confidence. What executives increasingly recognize is that the challenge is no longer “Where can AI fit?” but rather “When can we trust it to lead, and when must it step back?”
This is a double-edged sword.
Over the last few months, we have seen many tech providers simply bolt AI features on top of existing logic without addressing the fundamental requirement of modeling uncertainty. In a domain as variable and noisy as hospitality, deterministic answers can be dangerously misleading. Demand patterns shift unpredictably, events distort baselines, booking windows compress and segments behave inconsistently.
At the same time, prudent application of AI will prioritize trust, transparency and scientific rigor over speed. Leaders must demand systems that express uncertainty honestly, communicate the rationale behind recommendations and integrate seamlessly across the commercial stack. They must look for architectures built from the ground up to handle volatility rather than stitched‑together layers that obscure it. And they must steer their teams toward a future where AI is not a tool deployed at moments of convenience, but a foundational element of commercial performance—an intelligent partner that knows not only how to act, but when not to.
This is what we have tried to do at IDeaS—a revenue optimization system which, in truth, has had AI at its core for some time.
For example, when we used to install a new system, it could take as long as three days to configure. Now, we have reduced the time to just a few hours to get more than 70% or 80% of the way there. We are also using AI to take in huge datasets that can improve not just operational time investment, but also concrete pricing results. We utilize AI in customer support, productivity and reporting—all with the idea of making people more efficient in the use of a revenue management system, increasing their productivity, with the system and its users exchanging data more efficiently than ever.
That sounds exciting. What other innovations are you hearing about that will improve hoteliers’ workflows and business outcomes?
I am fortunate to be participating on an ITB plenary panel with C-Suite executives from other tech leaders such as Cloudbeds, SiteMinder and Mews, all of whom have recently brought out interesting new solutions.
SiteMinder, for example, has partnered with IDeaS to make dynamic revenue management available to independent hotels around the world, a solution we launched at ITB 2025. It enables hotels to have both access to live market intelligence and take immediate action on their bookable inventory, pricing and distribution strategy. It has the potential to change the game for thousands of hotels worldwide.
Property management companies are also innovating, helping to make managers’ lives easier and more profitable through more advanced and seamless workflows, freeing up more time to concentrate on providing guest service and building more business. Apaleo, for example, has launched an Agent Hub, an AI agent marketplace, and a Modely Context Protocol (MCP) server, tools that enable hotels to deploy autonomous AI agents that read data, take actions and handle routine tasks, and manages guest requests.
And this is just the beginning. The potential for developing new agentic hospitality solutions quickly, is now literally limitless.
What advice do you have for owners and managers looking out at the new landscape and making business decisions for the future—especially with respect to AI?
It is that the future of AI in hospitality will not be defined by systems that produce more answers—and as a result create more work, not less. It will be defined by systems that understand the boundaries of their own confidence, treat uncertainty as a first‑class input and elevate human judgment instead of bypassing it. In a world where precision is increasingly expected but volatility is increasing even faster, the real differentiator will not be smarter systems—but the ones that make decisions you can trust.
