Hotels Keep Buying AI Tools Before They Have an AI Strategy — Here's the Fix

Digital transformation coach Are Morch argues AI’s real value for hotels isn’t automating existing tasks — it’s surfacing demand signals hidden across the guest journey. He defines a “signal” as an observable clue that changes how a hotel interprets a guest need: repeated questions about remote-work spaces, for instance, reveal an unmet market segment rather than a simple feature request. Morch structures the argument around five journey stages — dreaming, planning, booking, experiencing, sharing — and argues AI should read signals across all five to build a complete picture of the guest relationship, rather than optimizing isolated touchpoints.

Before any of that, he lays out a five-part readiness framework hotels should assess: leadership direction, data foundations, team skills, workflow integration, and governance. Notably, he reframes employee resistance to AI tools not as simple change-aversion but as a signal in itself, often rooted in failed past technology rollouts or job-security fears that leadership should diagnose rather than dismiss.

That diagnosis echoes a sharper critique from earlier this year. LodgIQ’s Mark Charlinski argued the industry treats “AI” as a marketing buzzword rather than a defined strategy, writing that “a system that predicts a rate is a fundamentally different proposition from a system that decides to change it without asking” — and that most hotel organizations start with the technology itself and search afterward for a problem to apply it to, instead of starting from a real operational problem.

Morch’s “ownership gaps” concept — hotels losing track of the customer relationship across up to eight intermediated touchpoints — gives Charlinski’s critique a structural cause: without a readiness framework to work from first, hotels default to buying point solutions for whichever touchpoint is loudest, rather than building the data foundations and workflow integration that would let AI actually read demand signals end to end.