A whitepaper landed in my inbox recently from Agilysys and HSMAI — From Data to Delight: How AI Is Powering Experiential Travel Across APAC — and honestly, it’s one of the better pieces of industry research I’ve read this year.

If you work in hotels across APAC, there’s a good chance it arrived in your inbox too. It’s been doing the rounds.

The data is strong, the narrative is clear, and the central argument is hard to argue with: AI is no longer optional in

hospitality, and personalisation has shifted from a nice-to-have into a genuine commercial imperative. For anyone in a GM, Director of Sales & Marketing, or Commercial leadership role, it’s worth reading. But here’s the thing. As good as it is, I kept finding myself reading the same gap over and over. The report does an excellent job of explaining what AI can do once a guest is in the funnel. What it doesn’t address — and what I think is actually the more pressing conversation right now — is what’s happening before the guest even gets there.

Let me give credit where it’s due, because this research matters.

The report draws on survey data from over 1,000 travellers across Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Singapore, alongside findings from the 2026 AI Impact Study and the 2026 Hotel Operations Index. That’s a serious evidence base, and the numbers it surfaces are genuinely illuminating.

A few that stood out to me:

73% of guests say they would return to a hotel if the experience felt tailored to their preferences — yet only 37% currently rebook the same property. That gap isn’t a loyalty problem. It’s a personalisation execution problem.

67% of hotels already report using Generative AI in some capacity. That’s a majority. The technology is in the building. The question is how well it’s being used.

80% of hotel operators rank real-time personalisation as the most important AI capability they want to develop. Interestingly, 80% also prioritise predictive demand forecasting — suggesting that commercial leaders are increasingly seeing personalisation and revenue optimisation as two sides of the same coin, not separate priorities.

The report maps this AI capability across the full guest journey: pre-arrival intent capture, in-stay context-aware recommendations, post-stay re-engagement, and the intelligent guest profile as a commercial asset. It’s a well-structured framework and a useful operational lens.

The data on operational fragmentation is also telling. Only 11% of hoteliers report their technology stack is fully integrated, 27% rely on more than seven platforms to manage their operations, and 91% still report some level of manual reporting even within automated processes. These are the real barriers between hotels and the personalisation they want to deliver.

The report’s conclusion — that AI amplifies what is connected and exposes what is siloed — is one of the most honest lines I’ve seen in an industry whitepaper in a while.

If you haven’t read it yet, you can download the full Agilysys and HSMAI report here → From Data to Delight: How AI Is Powering Experiential Travel Across APAC

The report is built around the guest journey from booking through to post-stay. And that’s valuable. But in focusing on conversion, upsell, and retention, it largely sidesteps a question that I think is becoming increasingly urgent for hotel commercial teams:

How did the traveller decide where to stay in the first place?

That’s not a minor detail. That’s the top of the funnel. And right now, the top of the funnel is changing faster than almost anything else in digital hospitality.

The report briefly touches on the fact that Millennials and Gen Z travellers — expected to represent up to 83% of hotel guests by 2030 — have digital-first lifestyles that shape how they plan, book, and experience travel. It acknowledges that the booking window represents a powerful opportunity. But it doesn’t follow that thread all the way upstream.

Because upstream is where the behaviour has fundamentally shifted.

Travellers are no longer just searching for hotels. They’re increasingly asking for them.

“Where should I stay in Bali for a romantic long weekend?” “What’s the best boutique hotel near the CBD for a business trip?” “Which hotel in Phuket is good for families with young kids?”

These aren’t search queries being typed into Google and filtered through a list of blue links. They’re conversational questions being put directly to AI tools — ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, and a growing number of travel-specific platforms — that return a curated recommendation, not a ranked list of options to scroll through.

The discovery behaviour that has shaped hotel digital marketing for two decades is being rewritten. And most of the industry is still optimising for the old model.

This gap in the report actually mirrors something I noticed at AHICE South East Asia earlier this year. Across sessions and conversations, AI was one of the most common themes — operational AI, efficiency, productivity, automation behind the scenes. All genuinely important.

But when it came to how AI is reshaping the front end of the guest journey — discovery, research, shortlisting — the conversation was largely absent.

The industry is applying AI inside the hotel. It hasn’t fully started applying strategic thinking to AI outside the hotel, where demand is actually being created.

That’s the gap the Agilysys/HSMAI report reinforces, even if unintentionally.

The report proves — with solid data — that AI-driven personalisation increases conversion, that relevance outperforms choice for younger travellers, and that digital-first behaviour is reshaping planning and booking patterns. Each of those findings points directly toward a question the report doesn’t ask: if travellers respond to relevance, and if they are increasingly using AI to plan travel, then what does your hotel look like inside those AI environments?

Are you being recommended? Or are you invisible?

Here’s the way I frame it for hotel commercial teams:

There have been two defining shifts in hotel distribution over the past 25 years. The first was the rise of OTAs, which moved discovery online and created a new intermediary layer between hotels and guests. The second was the growth of Google search, which gave hotels a direct channel — but also a new dependency.

We may be entering a third shift.

As AI tools become the default starting point for travel research — particularly among younger, digitally-native travellers — visibility within those environments will become a commercial priority. Not because it’s interesting technology, but because that’s where the audience is.

The hotels that appear in AI-generated travel recommendations won’t just be the ones with the best rates or the most OTA listings. They’ll be the ones with the strongest digital presence, the most consistent and structured content, and the clearest articulation of what makes them worth recommending.

This is already starting to happen. The question is whether hotels are paying attention to it.

The Agilysys/HSMAI report rightly argues that hotels need strong data foundations to deliver on AI-driven personalisation. That’s true for the conversion and retention work it describes. But the same principle applies upstream.

Visibility in AI search environments depends on the quality, consistency, and authority of the information that exists about your hotel across the web — your website, your listings, your reviews, your content. AI tools don’t just pull from a single source. They synthesise signals from across the digital ecosystem. Hotels that have invested in structured, coherent, and credible digital content are better positioned to appear in those environments.

The report highlights that 60% of hotels are already using Generative AI for marketing, and 53% for customer service chatbots. That early adoption is a foundation. But the marketing application of AI needs to extend beyond content creation and into content strategy for AI visibility — understanding what information AI platforms use to form recommendations, and ensuring your hotel is well represented within it.

For GMs and Directors of Commercial, this is increasingly part of the commercial conversation, not just a marketing or digital footnote.

To be clear: I’m not dismissing the work Agilysys and HSMAI have done here. The research is credible, the framework is useful, and the finding that personalisation is now a commercial imperative rather than a differentiator is one every hotel leadership team should internalise.

But the complete AI opportunity in hospitality spans the entire guest lifecycle — and that lifecycle now starts earlier than most of the industry is acknowledging.

AI shouldn’t just optimise demand once it arrives. It should help hotels capture it before it goes anywhere else.

That’s the chapter that still needs to be written — and it’s the conversation the industry needs to be having.

At HyperHotels, we work with hotel commercial teams across APAC to build visibility in AI-driven search environments — the platforms where the next generation of travellers are already making decisions.

If you’d like to understand where your hotel stands in AI search, and what it would take to improve it, we’d welcome the conversation.

Nick Hollows is a hospitality commercial strategist focused on AI-driven growth for hotels across APAC. This article references findings from the Agilysys and HSMAI whitepaper From Data to Delight: How AI Is Powering Experiential Travel Across APAC (2026).