The hotel industry is no stranger to tech innovation. From contactless check-in to smart in-room systems, hotel operators have been successfully using digital technology to improve the guest experience for many years.
But as we all know, nothing stands still in our modern digitised world; innovation is a process, not an end. New ideas and new capabilities are emerging all the time. So what are the emerging tech trends ready to take future hotel experiences up another level? Here are three to watch out for in 2026.
Agentic AI: Taking the mental load off bookings
Agentic AI is the new generative AI. It’s AI that doesn’t just provide you with information or create digital content for you. It’s AI that takes action on the user’s behalf. Such as booking a holiday or making a hotel reservation.
There’s a lot of excitement around agentic AI precisely because it opens up new possibilities in all forms of commerce. Customer tells AI what it wants, AI does all the donkey work scouring options and comparing prices. Then, most importantly of all, the AI makes a decision based on what it already knows about the user and their preferences. It’s personalised shopping for the AI age.
There’s a lot of interest in this in the travel and hospitality sectors, specifically because searching and choosing hotels can be a time-consuming and at times frustrating process. While comparison sites like Booking.com have revolutionised the industry, they do create a certain tyranny of choice. All those options, all those filters. Choosing where to stay can feel like hard work.
So for guests, giving an AI a set of dates, a location and preferred amenities, and then letting it do the rest – potentially right down to negotiating prices – sounds very appealing. There are benefits for hotel operators, too. Letting their own AI tools handle bookings will support things like dynamic room pricing in response to demand, and optimising staffing levels based on accurate forecasts of guest numbers.
The downside is that it will require a fundamental reshaping of digital infrastructure and content. If a hotel wants to be found and chosen by an AI agent, it must have its digital presence optimised for discovery by machines as well as people – plus be set up for handling machine-to-machine negotiations over price, facilities, guest perks etc.
Predictive Personalisation: Giving guests what they want, without them having to ask
The hotel industry is steeped in knowledge about meeting guests’s every need. From room upgrades to late night room service, and catering for everything from special occasions to special dietary requirements, every hotelier knows the value of keeping customers happy, not least for securing return visits and lasting loyalty.
And in today’s data-fuelled age, that’s creating opportunities to go a step further and give guests exactly what they want, before they even have to ask. When every booking, request, upgrade and, yes, complaint is carefully logged on your systems, you have all the information you need to automatically personalise someone’s next stay. Or, as AI can do with increasing accuracy, extrapolate patterns from the vast amounts of data you hold on all guests to guesstimate the preferences of individuals.
Thinking as a guest, imagine how great it would be to turn up at a hotel and find the minibar stocked up with your favourite drinks and snacks, your mattress firm or soft according to your tastes, the temperature control set just right, your favourite breakfast pre-ordered and a programme of suggested activities all planned out – all without having to go to the trouble of asking. That’s how personalisation really adds value to a stay, and locks in that all-important loyalty.
One app to control it all
Finally, agentic AI and the next phase of guest personalisation are also likely to breath new life into the branded hospitality app. There was a time when getting a mobile app built felt like the next big thing for all commercial businesses. But offset against the benefits of having full control over the CX in a unique environment was the fact that a) apps couldn’t really do anything a standard website couldn’t do and b) people didn’t want to load their phones with hundreds of apps.
However, people will download apps when there is a genuine benefit to doing so. An app is the ideal gateway to both uber-convenient AI-led bookings and personalised experiences. Via an app, a customer can store all their bookings, travel history, preferences. That’s the perfect resource for an AI booking agent to predictively and semi-autonomously handle their future bookings for them. And for hotels to shape the experience just so.
On top of that, you can build loyalty features into an app, so users accrue points and redeem benefits automatically. And they can also be used for payments, remembering credentials so guests can make purchases during their stay with a simple tap or swipe, or automatically creating a tab which gets settled at checkout. The fact that payments are linked to a guest account makes it easier for operators to sell more and encourages greater revenue diversification through retail.