Do you think the future is tech-enabled hospitality?
It’s super important that the entire hospitality industry focuses on it. I think there’s two aspects that we look at particularly and that’s, for one, the guest expects to be using technology, the guest is evolving. I think simple interactions with your smartphone in your everyday life is embedded now and that is something they expect from hospitality as well. To be able to use their smartphone, their subscriptions—that’s probably like Netflix, Spotify and Co and we know it through the airlines as well, right? They’ve been working with wallets, boarding passes for a while. So I think pretty much from a guest perspective, it is expected.
If you look at the operational perspective, which is also a very, very important part – operational efficiencies—we believe that especially with staff shortages, tech is the only way forward.
How can hoteliers maximize tech investments for revenue, efficiency, and guest experience?
I think the first thing that is really important is: what are your goals? You need to define those goals, put them down in metrics, make them measurable. What do you want to achieve? Understand your guest even further—who are you targeting?
Once you know all of these KPIs, also look at your employees—what do you want to achieve on that end? What are the operational efficiencies you want to drive? What is the service you want to conduct?
Once you understand that, there’s a wide array of people and companies you could be talking to but it’s important that you take your time analysing who can help you from a technological perspective—achieving those targets and continuously evolving. That’s very important because the world is ever so changing. Therefore you need a partner on your side that can evolve with you over time.
I understand it may be a bit difficult because the landscape is so vast and you might need to have some outside help as well. There are consultants out there, people specialised in bringing in project management. So sometimes you might even say, “Hey, I don’t have that internal resource, and I might just externally source it” and that’s absolutely fine. There’s a lot of companies that can help hoteliers with navigating through that space.
Amid ITB’s innovations, how can hoteliers stay agile and choose the right tech?
It’s along their KPIs and their targets again. If, for example, you’re looking to reduce waiting times at front office, that means you’re looking for a software that can help you take part of what a front desk agent would do.
It goes along the lines of capturing all of these details. It’s really important to look at the exact process, the exact KPI. Then you go out into that space. There’s various review platforms that they could leverage—for example, Hotel Tech Report is a good one—where you go into categories and look at feedback from other hotels in that space.
Also, what you shouldn’t underestimate is your existing partners might be able to help you to direct you into that right space. There’s customer success managers in almost every tech company now, and they might be able to help you find the right partner through their local marketplaces as well.
How can technology help hoteliers unlock new revenue beyond room sales?
I think it’s really important because we’re not just looking at room revenue now. Total revenue is what you should be looking at. Just an overnight stay might be important to you as an economy hotel, but there’s so many other additional parts you can sell.
Technology plays an important role because it can take away the pain of upselling certain elements. Somebody might want to book an economy room and is fine with that, but they also might need a parking space, they might want to check out later. All of these elements are brought together.
Rather than putting a front desk agent into that position to say, “Hey, would you like a parking space?”, why don’t you give that option digitally—prior to arrival—to mix and match their stay?
It goes even further than that. Maximising space and utilising all the space you have in your property is really important. That’s where additional revenue sources open up. For example, you could transform a breakfast-only area into a co-working space for the rest of the day and upsell it. Or use a hotel room not in use during the day for a home office. We saw that during the pandemic—lots of creative ideas came out of it.
Technology can help facilitate that need early on and advertise it—so a guest can actually mix and match their stay to their personal requirements before even arriving on property.
Is the future of hospitality tech in specialized platforms or all-in-one solutions?
Knowing that hospitality businesses and guests are so different—both will always exist. Both approaches—best-of-breed software, mixing and matching, specialized software together versus an all-in-one solution.
It really depends on the complexity of the property and the hospitality business overall, but also on guest expectations. A hotel wanting a much smaller, lean operation might lean towards best-of-breed technology because they need something specialised, I’m thinking conference hotels, for example. Then, larger all-inclusive resorts could lean more towards an all-in-one solution that’s more specialised in that area. Both of them have a place in this industry and both are valid—it just depends on the business and who’s behind the business, and what they personally prefer.
What are you most excited about for Like Magic in the next year?
AI is the overall topic—we’ve seen that here at ITB as well. Everyone’s coming out with solutions, really jumping on that. I see that looking at everyday life as well—how we’ve started to leverage AI, chatbots, ChatGPT, Claude AI—all of that in our daily lives.
I’m really excited to see what’s happening on that end. We’re already integrating with AI technology—primarily for messaging and operational efficiency. But you could go even further.
I hope that at some point you don’t necessarily need an operations platform anymore. You could just use an AI tool to run your everyday through commands, or whatever it is.
I’m really excited about what that space will add to Like Magic as well. That’s an absolute focus for us—to go further and really enable operations and employees.
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