The room
in Tenerife
Last June I was invited by eMascaró to speak at their third WOW event, held at EcoHotel El Agua in Tenerife. The room was a mix of tourism professionals, technologists, and creative practitioners — exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary audience that forces you to argue from first principles rather than industry shorthand.
The brief I gave myself was simple: be honest about what AI actually threatens, specific about where the genuine opportunities are, and practical about what to do in the next twelve months. No hype in either direction. The hospitality industry has had enough of both the utopian pitch and the dismissive reaction.
The argument that emerged from that afternoon in Tenerife is one I’ve continued to sharpen in client work since. It has three parts: a clear-eyed account of what is genuinely at risk, a case for where the real opportunities sit, and a framework for acting on both simultaneously rather than sequentially.
What AI actually threatens
The instinct in hospitality is to frame AI as a tool — something you add to the stack to improve efficiency at the margins. That framing is comfortable but incomplete. The more accurate framing is that AI represents a structural shift in how value is created and captured across the tourism industry, and some of what currently generates margin for hotels will not survive it.
The clearest near-term threat is to administrative roles. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned publicly that AI could eliminate roughly half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. In hospitality terms, that translates directly to reservation processing, rate loading, reporting, content management, and supplier communication. These aren’t marginal back-office activities — they constitute a significant share of headcount in most hotel groups, and the tools that automate them exist now.
The second threat is less visible but more strategically significant: the discovery layer. For a decade, the hospitality industry has optimised relentlessly for search — investing in SEO, metasearch positioning, OTA rankings. As AI assistants become the primary interface between travellers and travel decisions, the ability to rank on Google loses much of its meaning. The ability to surface in AI-mediated recommendations becomes the new distribution question. Hotels that have built their entire digital strategy around search are entering a world where that investment may not transfer to the next system.
Neither of these is speculative. Both are already in motion. The question is whether your organisation is treating them as future risks to monitor or present realities to respond to.
Where the
real opportunity sits
The opportunities are equally real, and they sit in two distinct places.
The first is operational. Yield optimisation, demand forecasting, predictive maintenance, shift planning, revenue reporting — these are the back-of-house applications where AI creates genuine and immediate leverage. The operations that adopt them early will have a cost structure advantage that compounds over time. The barrier is not technology access. It is organisational readiness and data quality.
The second opportunity is the one most operators underestimate, and it is the one I spent the most time on in Tenerife. As AI-generated content floods every channel — generic itineraries, templated reviews, algorithmically assembled travel guides — the scarcity premium on genuinely human experience increases sharply.
As AI-generated content floods every channel, the scarcity premium on genuinely human experience increases.
A meal designed by a local chef with a real point of view. A guide who grew up in the destination and knows its textures. A property with a history that isn’t performed but lived. These become harder to replicate algorithmically, not easier, as the models get better. The boutique and independent sector is structurally better positioned for this shift than the branded chains — not because of scale, but because of specificity. The question is whether operators understand this as a strategic asset and invest in it deliberately, or treat it as a vague value that’s hard to operationalise.
Authenticity has always mattered in hospitality. What has changed is that it is becoming a competitive moat — and the width of that moat grows with every AI-generated travel recommendation that sounds like every other one.
Acting on
three horizons at once
The argument I made in Tenerife, and the one I keep returning to in client work, is that the response to AI disruption requires simultaneous action across three horizons — not sequential. Waiting for the threat to become undeniable before responding is not a strategy. Neither is solving for the long term while ignoring what is urgent now.
Audit your AI visibility
This is not the same as an SEO audit. It means structured data, machine-readable content, and a clear LLM-legible description of what your property is and who it is for. Hotels that do not address this in the next twelve months will find themselves invisible to the recommendation systems that are already shaping where travellers go next.
Build the data architecture
A single, structured, queryable record of your commercial performance is the foundation every AI application sits on. Without it, you are adding intelligence to a broken information system — amplifying the noise, not the signal. This is unglamorous work. It also determines everything that comes after it.
Invest in what doesn't automate
Human connection. Local knowledge. Authentic experience design. These are not soft values for a brand deck — they are the competitive moat that gets wider as AI gets better at producing the generic version of everything else. The operations that invest in this deliberately will have pricing power in five years that their competitors will not.
The room in Tenerife was engaged in the way rooms get engaged when an argument lands somewhere the audience already half-knows from their own experience but hasn’t had articulated clearly. That is the conversation worth having across the industry right now — not whether AI is coming, but what it means to be ready for it on your own terms, with a strategy that holds the short and the long together.