27 years ago, OmniHyper started with a stubborn idea: that a hotel should own its guests, own its data, and own its revenue, rather than rent all three back from somebody else at a commission. That idea has taken us across the Pacific, into Southeast Asia, and through the UK and Europe.

Today we have two things to announce.

OmniHyper is open for business in the United States and across the Americas. And we could not be more excited to introduce Haley Payne, who joins us as Vice President of Growth, Americas, to lead the charge.

We keep meeting hotels and hospitality businesses that could be doing so much better. Not marginally better. Genuinely, materially better. Beautiful properties with brilliant teams, an online presence that does not do them justice, and acquisition handed to intermediaries by default. Direct revenue, the most profitable revenue in the building, is not being ignored in these businesses. In almost every case it is top of mind. What is missing is a clear way to actually move the needle online.

That is not a technology problem. It is a strategy problem wearing a technology costume. We know how to fix it, because we have done it repeatedly, in real hotels, with real owners looking at real P and Ls. The end of that story is a hotel that owns its own demand: guests arriving through its own channels, a far healthier cost of acquisition, and commission money that stays in the business rather than leaving it.

So why have we not been there already? Footprint. We have never wanted a client in Dallas waiting overnight for an answer to a question they asked at lunchtime, and we were not prepared to solve that by asking our own people to live permanently at both ends of the day. We are not a 9 to 5 organisation and never have been, and our teams go above and beyond as a matter of course. But there is a point where early mornings and late nights stop being commitment and start being unrealistic.

That constraint is gone. The Pacific, Southeast Asia, the UK and Europe are covered. The Americas are next, and as of today they are on the map.

We met some genuinely lovely, seriously impressive people in the United States. The standard was exceptional. Haley stood out for three reasons.

First, hospitality is in her blood. Her mother was a hotel GM, and Haley effectively grew up on property, bussing tables, rolling silverware, working the front desk and turning over rooms from the age of 6. She went on to spend around 12 years as a hotel General Manager herself, worked task force with Thayer Lodging Group, sat on the corporate team at Remington Hospitality, and has built genuine relationships across the industry, including with management companies and ownership groups like Aimbridge and Davidson. She knows what a hotel needs. Just as importantly, she knows exactly what the pressure to perform feels like at 6am on a Monday when the numbers are not where they should be.

Second, she has spent her career bringing technology into hotels and making it earn its keep. Most recently as Chief Commercial Officer at Pure Wellness, where she was one of the first people through the door and helped build the business from an idea into a $20 million enterprise, including a master service agreement with a 71 hotel ownership group. She has installed the systems, written the playbook, and stood in front of owners who quite reasonably wanted to know what the return was going to be. She knows how to work alongside hotel teams, coach staff, lift ADR and occupancy, and make an asset perform. She is also a certified revenue manager through e-Cornell and holds an AI Professional certification through Google.

Third, she is an entrepreneur with a hunter’s instinct. Haley is the person you want on your side of the table. She gets our culture immediately, no ego and no micromanagement, and she is the sort of operator who does whatever it takes to make clients successful, which in turn is what makes us successful. As she put it to me during the process: “You need to have 100% trust that the person you choose can get on and do the job. It is not reliant on you. It is reliant on the person.”

We have that trust. We are genuinely excited to begin this journey with her.

Outside of work, Haley is a die hard LSU fan, so consider yourself warned during football season. Geaux Tigers. She also runs a small cattle farm in Texas with horses, donkeys and a dog named Winston, scuba dives whenever she can, and answers to Gigi for her granddaughter, Corley.

As Vice President of Growth, Americas, Haley’s territory runs across the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America. Her early focus will be management companies, boutique portfolios and independents, starting in Texas and Florida, with the full weight of our team behind her.

If you are a hotelier, an owner, an asset manager or a management company in the Americas and any of the above sounds like a conversation worth having, Haley would love to hear from you.

Haley Payne
Vice President of Growth, Americas

To navigate the zero-click shift and protect your direct booking share, your digital asset strategy must pivot around three core mandates:

• Optimize for Citations, Not Just Rankings: In a zero-click ecosystem, being cited as the verified source inside an AI summary earns over 120% more engagement than ranking lower on a legacy list. Structure your property’s key facts, pricing models, and event specs using machine-readable JSON-LD schema.
• Build Thematic Entity Authority: AI answer engines evaluate the entire property entity. Replace flat PDF brochures for MICE, dining, and spa facilities with dedicated, schema-rich digital modules that algorithms can extract into complete itineraries.
• Deploy Conversion-Ready On-Property Software: Once an AI-driven referral lands on your digital footprint, eliminate friction immediately with dedicated white-label mobile concierge and booking apps (such as Resort or MICE Apps) to secure the direct relationship before the guest checks in.

If you are reading this in Sydney, Auckland, Singapore, London or Dublin, let us be very clear about what this is and what it is not.

This is not us moving on. Nothing about our commitment to the properties, groups and partners who built this business with us changes by so much as a degree. The teams you work with stay exactly where they are, doing exactly what they do.

What actually happens is that everyone gets more. Guest behaviour, channel economics and the shift away from intermediated bookings are global patterns playing out at slightly different speeds. The more markets we operate in, the faster we see what is coming and the sooner we can put it to work for you. A bigger footprint means a bigger pool of learning, and all of it flows back into your results.

We are not trading one market for another. We are widening the aperture.

To our clients, partners and friends across every market we serve, thank you. The next chapter is going to be a good one.

With 25+ years in hotel digital marketing, Michael has driven success for Accor, IHG, and Marriott worldwide.