What HSMAI 2026 Kept Saying (Whether It Meant To or Not)

I spent June 16-17 at the HSMAI Commercial Strategy Conference in San Antonio, where Sales, Revenue Management, and Marketing all gather under one roof to solve problems, align strategies, and occasionally argue about attribution. 

Dane Robinson, a multi-talented keynote speaker and TV fitness coach, served as MC. He showed up with full Ric Flair energy and somehow turned a room full of hotel commercial leaders into a pep rally. Clap clap, WOOOO. At one point, he said “RevPAR” out loud, and it sounded like he knew what he was talking about. I respected it.

But somewhere between the WOOOs and the breakout sessions, a few themes kept showing up across completely different topics. Here is what I think the conference was actually saying.

Your Guests Are Still Spending. Act Like It.

Consumer sentiment is at a record low right now. The data backs that up. What the data also backs up is that it does not seem to matter.

According to Tourism Economics, tourism spending is up 3.5% year-to-date through April. Hotel demand is up 2.0%. The most recent 8-week hotel demand average is running 4.6% above the 2025 full-year average. Business travel is picking up midweek. Group demand is increasing.

Gas prices are up, and headlines are bad, but actual spending behavior does not reflect the doom the news cycle is selling. People are spending more than they have coming in, and savings rates are low. That is not the behavior of a consumer who is done traveling or actually concerned about their bank account.

If you’re waiting for the headlines to improve before investing in marketing, revenue strategy, or guest experience, you may be waiting for a signal that’s never coming. Consumers are telling us one thing in surveys and doing something entirely different with their wallets.

Stop Measuring Everything and Own Something

One of the breakout sessions tackled what presenters Amy Infante, founder & CEO of GitGoGroup,  and Kim Snow, VP of Commercial Strategy at Aimbridge, described as one of the most common breakdowns in commercial organizations: too many KPIs, unclear ownership, and meeting rhythms that do not match how decisions actually get made.

The three culprits that came up were blurry ownership of who is responsible for what, too many metrics with no clear priority, and a meeting cadence misaligned with how the business actually moves. When any of those break down, execution slows regardless of how good the strategy is.

The fix is not complicated, but it requires an honest conversation most teams avoid. 

• Who owns what, actually? 
• What are the two or three numbers that matter most? 
• And are the right people in the room when decisions get made, including operations? 

GMs do not always get pulled into commercial strategy conversations. They should be.

Honestly, I see this all the time. Teams spend half a meeting debating whose number is right instead of discussing what they’re going to do about it. At some point, reporting becomes a distraction from execution.

Hospitality Is Free. We Just Forget to Use It.

This one came up in several sessions, and it is the thing I keep thinking about.

When we are deep in ROAS targets and pace reports, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that we work in an industry built on making people feel something. Lance Fensterman, Fanatics Events CEO and former hotel employee, made the point that people do not just want a place to stay – they want to belong somewhere, even temporarily. They want an experience worth telling someone about.

That theme showed up again in another session with an example that stuck. A hotel served chocolate chip pancakes to a young guest who said they were great, but could use more chocolate chips. The next day, the GM made sure her pancakes had extra.

Cue the Pixar-mom tears. 

As a mom, that’s the stuff I remember. Not the thread count. Not the room type. Not the mobile check-in experience. The fact that someone paid attention to my kid.

There are a lot of moms making travel decisions. We remember those moments.

That is it. That is the whole story. No budget line. No campaign. Just someone paying attention.

The message that came out of multiple sessions was the same: empower your team to make moments, not just fulfill requests. “The message your brand sends should be the moral of the story, not the plot,” Kelly McGuire – Kasa. Figure out how you want guests to feel when they leave, and work backward. That part does not cost anything.

AI Is Already Deciding Where Guests Stay

This session, led by Michael Goldrich, felt less like new information and more like confirmation of what we have been talking about at Cogwheel for a while now when it comes to SEO and GEO.

AI agents are already recommending hotels. The next step is booking them directly. The question is whether your property is recommended by AI and whether it shows up accurately.

A few things that came out of the session:

• Be specific. Generalizations do not extract well. “Beautiful amenities” means nothing to an AI. “Rooftop pool open year-round with private cabanas available for groups of up to 12” does.
• Structure matters. Schema markup and clean page architecture signal to AI what your property is and what it offers. This is not optional anymore.
• Consistency across platforms. If your property information varies across OTAs, your website, and third-party listings, AI will not know what to trust. Neither will your guests. One slide from this session made it plain: when a traveler asks a follow-up question, AI verifies your amenities across review sites, business listings, and travel forums. Your own website is no longer enough proof. That means the pet-friendly travel sites, the local CVB and chamber listings, the wedding directories, the travel blogs that mentioned you three years ago,  all of it is fair game. If your amenities, policies, or property details are inconsistent or outdated across those sources, AI picks up the discrepancy. And it does not give you the benefit of the doubt. 
• Editorial coverage counts. Being mentioned in credible external sources signals authority to AI, and this goes beyond backlinks. AI learns from what is written about your property across the open web. That includes press releases, but only when distributed to publicly crawlable sites. A release sitting behind a wire paywall does essentially nothing. One that gets picked up by local media, your CVB, or trade publications creates the kind of consistent digital footprint AI systems recognize. We wrote about this recently – let’s just say it was validating to hear the room aligned on it.  
• Get rid of PDFs. If important information lives in a PDF, there’s a good chance AI isn’t finding it. Menus, packages, and event details should be actual website pages.

We spent years optimizing for Google. The next few years will be about optimizing for whatever answers the question before a guest ever reaches Google.

Which, if we’re being honest, feels a little “I’m watching you, Wazowski. Always watching.” Except now it’s AI scanning your website, OTAs, listings, and third-party mentions, trying to decide whether you’re worth recommending.

Not creepy at all.

The properties that get this right now will have an advantage that is going to be very hard to close later.

The Thing Nobody Said Out Loud

The thing nobody said outright, but I felt in almost every session, was that hospitality is heading back toward fundamentals.

For years, we’ve chased more dashboards, more automation, more channels, more data.

The message I kept hearing was surprisingly simple: know your guest, know your numbers, and make it easy for people to find you.

Technology matters. AI matters. Revenue strategy matters. Hospitality matters. 

But none of it works if the guest leaves feeling like nobody noticed they were there.

The interesting thing about HSMAI wasn’t that any of these ideas were revolutionary. Most of them weren’t.

The interesting part was hearing the same themes repeated by revenue leaders, marketers, operators, and technology providers who all came from different corners of the industry.

That’s usually a sign that something important is happening.

Guests are spending. Simplicity beats complexity. Hospitality still matters. And AI is changing how travelers find us, whether we’re ready or not.

Sonya Taylor –  Connect with Sonya on LinkedIn.

Source: View the original article at Cogwheel Marketing.