Gautam Lulla

In my last post, I wrote about how the discovery layer in hospitality is being rewritten — AI agents mediating the guest journey before a traveler ever visits your website — and this is the other side of that conversation: what happens to the website itself. Short answer — it needs to become two things at once, and the way most hotel websites are built today, they're not really equipped to be either.

More than a year after the fact, it’s still stunning to look back at the performance figures across the travel industry from April 2020. Numbers cratered in every category. Overall RevPAR for US hotels fell to $17.93—a 79.9% YoY decrease from 2019. Business and operations teams were stripped down during that month, with more than 70% of hotel employees laid off. Airlines saw a 96% decrease in passengers. Search volumes for travel on Google fell to a fraction of their normal benchmarks.

We're seeing a dramatic shift in the hotel distribution landscape right now. For the last decade, there's been a boom in the number of new hospitality technology providers entering the market. These companies introduced fresh ideas and products into a tech landscape that had long been stagnant.