Welcome to the Hotel Moment Podcast, presented by Revinate, where we discuss how hotel technology shapes every moment of hoteliers’ experiences. Join us as we explore cutting-edge technology that is transforming the hospitality industry and hear from experts and visionaries who are shaping the future of the guest experience. The Hotel Moment podcast features insights and interviews with top players in the hospitality industry across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Once a week, we speak with hospitality professionals who have a real sense of what it’s like to work in this industry and what the direction of travel and consumer trends mean for the world right now. Technology is changing the hotel industry faster than we know. Tune in to the show to discover more about how the latest developments in AI and other technologies are shaping hospitality, and enjoy hearing from our community of hoteliers.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Dylan Cole, Managing Director, EMEA, Revinate, sits down with Lily Wecker, CEO of Aethos, a next-generation hospitality brand built on experiential luxury and meaningful connection. With leadership experience at Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Lily shares how a personal health scare reshaped her definition of luxury, from material ownership to internal validation, and why Aethos designs its properties for "high emotional density" instead of privacy. From the brand's emotion-first marketing philosophy to its new London restaurant Mitsu, Lily makes the case that the future of luxury hospitality is connection, not seclusion.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, we're bringing back one of our favorite conversations where Karen Stephens engages in a thought-provoking conversation with Bashar Wali, founder and CEO of Practice Hospitality and This Assembly. Bashar, with over three decades of experience in hospitality, shares his passion for creating memorable hotel experiences that transcend the ordinary. He discusses how hotels can balance technology and human connection, why points aren't true loyalty, and how the industry should look outside itself for innovation. With candid insights and practical examples, Bashar challenges hoteliers to focus on making emotional connections with guests rather than chasing trends.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens sits down with Lydia Bates, Director of Sales and Marketing at Dream Inn Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz's only exclusive beachfront hotel. Lydia explains why independent lifestyle hotels win on storytelling rather than transaction, how Dream Inn's on-site reservations team begins curating the guest experience from the very first call, and how targeted email campaigns convert OTA visitors into loyal repeat guests. She also shares how Dream Inn fights seasonality with creative campaigns like "Ride Out the Storm" and leverages sister property partnerships through Ensemble Hospitality to build cross-property guest loyalty.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens sits down with Chris Anderson, Professor at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, who has spent more than two decades studying how pricing, distribution, and revenue management shape global hospitality. Chris explains why pricing guests differently based on willingness to pay is heading for legal prohibition, why AI will shift customization from price to offer set, and why being in the AI consideration set is already harder to earn than a first-page Google ranking. His central argument: hotels that are still waiting for AI to settle before acting are already behind.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, host Karen Stephens, CMO of Revinate, sits down with Dina Niekamp, SVP of Brand and Marketing at Aparium Hotel Group, a lifestyle hospitality company known for building hotels that feel deeply rooted in the neighborhoods around them. Dina explains why emotional connection, not just amenities, has become the new standard for luxury travel, and why she believes AI will never replace the most important skill in hospitality: reading the room. Dina shares the story behind Aparium's "As Told By" campaign, which puts local collaborators and small business owners at the center of each property's marketing, and breaks down the philosophy of "translocal" spaces, where a business traveler and a neighborhood local can feel equally at home at the bar. She also introduces Aparium's "fifth meatball" mindset, a simple internal philosophy that empowers every team member to create small, unscripted moments of delight. With eight hotels currently operating across cities like Seattle, Fargo, Kansas City, Detroit, and Alexandria, Virginia, and several more in the pipeline, Aparium offers a clear blueprint for building hospitality brands that feel genuinely local rather than mass-produced.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens sits down with Jeff Michael, Area Director of Revenue Management at Sage Hospitality Group, who brings more than 25 years of hospitality experience spanning operations and commercial leadership. Jeff explains why the explosion of hotel data has created a new kind of paralysis, why "commercial alignment" so often fails when departments chase different incentives, and how AI is finally turning guest lifetime value into a metric hotels can actually use. His core message: stop drowning your team in reports, tie every department back to one profitability goal, and let AI take on the analyst work so revenue managers can think like strategists again.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens, CMO at Revinate sits down with Dylan Cole, Managing Director EMEA at Revinate, to unpack the most consequential shift in hotel distribution in years: the rise of AI-powered booking discovery. With insights from leaders at Starwood Hotels, Highgate, and Twilio woven in, Karen and Dylan trace the arc from Google's Universal Commerce Protocol announcement to the not-so-distant future of agent-to-agent vacation planning. Their message is direct: properties that invest in clean data, direct booking infrastructure, and first-party data strategy now will be positioned to compete before everyone else starts scrambling.
In this recast episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens sits down with Wilhelm Luxem, head of quality commission at Swiss Deluxe Hotels and former GM of the iconic Baur Au Lac hotel. With 50 years in luxury hospitality, Wilhelm shares his philosophy on technology adoption in five-star hotels, emphasizing that tech should always complement service DNA while staying in the background. From his experience with a seven-generation family-owned hotel to his insights on evolving guest expectations, Wilhelm offers valuable perspectives on maintaining luxury standards while embracing innovation.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens, Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate, sits down with Jarrett Tomback, Vice President of Digital Strategy and CRM at Starwood Hotels, for a conversation that moves from rethinking loyalty to the most urgent distribution question in hospitality: how do hotels win direct bookings in a world where AI search models give guests three to five recommendations instead of pages of links? Across 1 Hotels, Baccarat Hotels and Resorts, and Treehouse Hotels, Jarrett has built guest engagement strategies grounded in purpose, clean data, and a human-first AI approach that keeps the brand at the center of every interaction.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Dylan Cole, Managing Director EMEA at Revinate, sits down with Robert-Jan Woltering, Managing Director of De L'Europe Amsterdam, to make a case the luxury hotel industry needs to hear more often: cutting costs is easy, but it is the wrong strategy. With more than 30 years across five continents and a 130-year-old Amsterdam landmark celebrating three Michelin keys under his leadership, Robert-Jan shares why top-line revenue maximization, authentic guest experience, and entrepreneurial ownership thinking are the only levers that actually build a luxury hotel's long-term position.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens welcomes back Aaron Miller, Senior Vice President of Digital Marketing and CRM at Highgate, for a grounded conversation on AI's real role in hospitality. Drawing on more than 20 years across brands like The Venetian Resort Las Vegas, Trump Hotels, and Turning Stone Enterprises, Aaron explains why the direct booking renaissance depends on hotel-owned content, why guests still want a curated website over a chat window, and how Highgate is pivoting its FIFA World Cup demand strategy from inbound international travel to local markets, staycations, and packaged offers.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens, Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate, and Bailey Yeats, Marketing Manager at Revinate, recap NAVIGATE 2026, the annual Revinate customer conference held this year at the Wigwam in Phoenix. Featuring clips from CEO Bryson Koehler, Suncadia's Colton Bean, Pyramid Global's Abby Waski, Cote Hospitality's Angelo Fernandes, and Noble House's Jennifer Barnhart, the episode moves from the opening question that set the tone: 75% of the room had used ChatGPT to book travel in the last six months, through the AI strategies, product roadmap reveals, and customer perspectives that defined a conference where hoteliers arrived anxious about artificial intelligence and left with a plan.
In this webinar episode of Hotel Moment, Bailey Yeats, Marketing Manager at Revinate, sits down with Amanda Wasco Brown, Director of Revenue at Old Edwards Hospitality Group, for the final session of the 2026 Benchmark Report Leadership Series, focused entirely on the voice channel. Amanda has spent eight of her 14 years at Old Edwards embedded in reservations, managing a team of seven agents who handle rooms, dining, spa, and golf across four hotels and three golf courses. Together, she and Bailey translate the benchmark data into a practical voice channel playbook: inbound call volume for staffing, conversion rates as a coaching diagnostic, non-booked lead spikes as a revenue intelligence tool, and outbound calls generating $1,164 in incremental revenue per room annually.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, host Karen Stephens, CMO of Revinate, welcomes back Adam Mogelonsky, Partner at Hotel Mogel Consulting Ltd, to discuss preparing for FIFA World Cup 2026, which will bring 72% ADR premiums to 16 host cities. Adam shares how pandemic-era refundable policies created lead time volatility making labor forecasting difficult despite increased service expectations at premium rates. He explains the science of balancing non-refundable versus refundable rates through data harmonization that associates guest sentiment with rate plans. The conversation covers packaging strategies that balance operational delivery against OTA channel friction while leveraging fenced offers for direct bookings. Adam reveals how the voice channel is the most data-rich but least harmonized, with call recording and speech-to-text building FAQ content for AI search while capturing non-booker leads for callbacks. He introduces the story-driven guest concept, which transcends luxury definitions to encompass boutique properties delivering bespoke experiences that attract lookalike audiences.
In this webinar episode of Hotel Moment, Bailey Yeats, Marketing Manager at Revinate, sits down with Gitti Hernández, Digital Marketing Manager at Casa de Campo, one of the Caribbean's most iconic luxury resorts to unpack what the 2026 Revinate Hospitality Benchmark Report reveals about database health, and what Casa de Campo's decade of data work looks like in practice. From a pre-arrival itinerary program that lifted guest satisfaction scores by 40%, to merged guest profiles that made a targeted Ultra VIP anniversary segment possible, Gitti demonstrates that the real value of a clean database is not storage, it is what you can finally do once the data is reliable.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Dylan Cole, Managing Director EMEA at Revinate, sits down with Tomas Bäcklund, Chief Marketing Officer at Elite Hotels of Sweden, for a wide-ranging conversation on the most overlooked revenue strategy in hospitality: brand. Tomas arrived in the hotel industry from a creative agency background and has spent five years making the case that as costs rise and margins compress, the hotels that can charge more — without guests feeling overcharged — are the ones that have invested in brand strength. Under his leadership, Elite Hotels has grown its direct website booking share by nearly ten percent. His framework is simple and backed by data: strengthen brand, fix your website, and think beyond the five percent of guests who are ready to book today.
In this webinar episode of Hotel Moment, Bailey Yeats, Marketing Manager at Revinate, sits down with Christine Malfair, Fractional CMO for Independent Hotels at Malfair Marketing, to translate the 2026 Revinate Hospitality Benchmark Report's email findings into actionable strategy. With 2.8 billion emails analyzed globally in 2025, the data is unambiguous: cart abandonment campaigns hit 63% open rates and 6.8% conversion, targeted segments under 5,000 recipients convert at ten times the rate of mass blasts, and confirmation emails are generating $93 per booking in upsell revenue. Christine's fifteen years working with independent hotels, including a decade as a hotel GM, give every benchmark number a practical context that marketing teams can act on immediately.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Dylan Cole, Managing Director EMEA at Revinate, sits down with Diego Calvo, CEO and Co-Founder of Concept Hotel Group, to explore what it really takes to build a hotel brand with genuine cultural soul. Diego has spent 25 years in hospitality and founded a group of nine distinctive brands on the island of Ibiza, where he grew up — achieving 35 to 43% direct bookings not through marketing spend but through brand identity so compelling that guests search properties by name. From a conceptual briefing process that begins with music playlists and lobby photography before a single architect is involved, to a loyalty programme that values room nights over revenue, Diego shares the philosophy and the detail-obsessed discipline behind one of Europe's most distinctive independent hotel groups.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens, Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate, welcomes back Evan Crawford, Vice President of Marketing at Pyramid Global Hospitality, for a wide-ranging conversation on guest data strategy, AI adoption, and the marketing habits that actually move revenue. Evan makes the case that mass outreach without segmentation is a shrinking asset. From connecting OpenTable reviews to hotel CRM profiles, to his grounded take that Revinate emails still outperform ChatGPT as a last-click revenue source, Evan brings the operational credibility of someone managing data at scale across a major hospitality portfolio.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens, Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate, sits down with Chris Koehler, Chief Marketing Officer at Twilio, for a candid conversation on what personalization in hospitality actually requires — and what is still getting in the way. With over 25 years across marketing, customer success, and product leadership, Chris arrives not just as a technology executive but as a frequent luxury traveler with high expectations and very specific preferences. From Twilio's State of Customer Engagement data showing only 45% of consumers agree brands deliver good engagement, to a hotel still asking a ten-time guest if he has ever stayed before, Chris reveals why the personalization gap is a data activation problem — and how AI is about to change every part of the equation.
