Lifestyle Hotels Have a Sameness Problem — And Mews' CEO Thinks AI Personalization Is Part of the Fix

Lifestyle hotels have become homogenized, argues Locke and edyn co-founder Eric Jafari in a Hospitality Net opinion piece — major groups replicated the same lifestyle-hotel design aesthetic using the same design studios and color palettes, until true lifestyle properties became indistinguishable clones, a problem compounded by loyalty-program incentives that make it hard for guests to justify paying a premium. His fix runs on two axes: wellness and technology.

On wellness, Jafari argues the industry misreads demand — guests don’t want spa treatments, they want communal, active experiences like running clubs and group-breathwork saunas. “It’s communal. It’s loud,” he says, and hotels should draw in local participation rather than sealing wellness off as a private amenity.

The technology axis is where the AI angle lands, via Mews CEO Matt Welle’s comments from a “Matt Talks Hospitality” podcast episode: Mews is pushing toward an operating system where “AI has the whole guest picture to act on” — integrating dietary preferences, drink orders, and special occasions across property-management, point-of-sale, and housekeeping systems so staff can act on personalized cues in real time, rather than personalization living in a single guest-facing chatbot.

That “whole guest picture” framing matches a move one layer up the stack: IHG’s new AI conversational search beta lets guests describe travel needs in natural language and book directly with cash, points, or a blend inside that same flow, making IHG the third major hotel group — after Hilton’s AI Planner and Marriott’s Ask Bonvoy — to bet on AI-native discovery. Put together, both moves are converging on the same idea from different ends: the property that knows the guest before they arrive, and can act on that knowledge across every system that touches them, is the one that keeps them coming back — not the one with the best-designed lobby.