The Hive Mind of Hospitality: Why Your Data Needs a Bigger Village
Synopsis
There’s no shortage of hype around AI right now. Everyone’s talking, posting, paneling. But here’s the thing: most of it misses the point. If you’re in hospitality, the question isn’t whether AI matters, it’s how you make it matter for your business. Not in some distant future, robots running the lobby kind of way, but in the here and now. In the everyday moments where performance is won or lost. Because while the spotlight stays fixed on shiny AI travel assistants and chatbots with witty comebacks, the real advantage, the one that moves the needle, is quietly waiting behind the scenes.
It’s the kind of AI that doesn’t just talk smart. It works smart. It connects the dots, closes the gaps, and helps you stop guessing. And that’s exactly what this article is about.
How do you think about AI?
There’s been a lot of buzz… scratch that, a swarm around artificial intelligence lately, and it’s easy to get lost in the noise. For hotel operators trying to make sense of it all, it helps to break things down into three simple use cases:
- Agentic AI, which supports consumers – think AI-powered travel assistants booking a weekend getaway.
- Operational AI, which lives in customer-facing tools like service bots and automated upsells.
- And Performance AI – the underappreciated, unsung hero that essentially makes the biggest difference for a hospitality business, quietly working in the back office, helping teams become more efficient, reduce costs, and drive profits.
Let’s talk about that last one.
Performance AI is where the rubber meets the revenue. But in order to benefit from it, we first need data. Not coffee grounds, not horoscopes, not the position of Mercury in retrograde. Data. The right kind, in the right place, at the right time.
And that’s where the hospitality industry hits a wall. Because for decades, we’ve been living in what I call the cocoon era – each hotel or brand wrapped tightly in its own isolated systems, its own dashboards, its own spreadsheets, trying to survive with only a partial view of the board.
The truth is, most of us have been trying to out-analyze our competition with incomplete information. We look at rate parity snapshots, Google Analytics dashboards, or request ad-hoc reports from our revenue managers – all in an attempt to piece together the big picture. But no matter how many charts or data points we collect, we’re still missing too many critical pieces to see the full view clearly.
Meanwhile, OTAs are thriving… not just because they have scale, but because they have data. Let’s admit it: OTAs know more about your guests than you do. They mine every search, every scroll, every booking path to optimize performance in real time. Hotels, by contrast, are often left flying blind. Each brand, chain, or independent property sits on a trove of data, but that data rarely sees the light beyond internal dashboards. And there lies the problem: data hoarding is killing hotel performance.
Rethinking hotel intelligence, from siloed to synergetic
What if we thought of hotel intelligence not as a proprietary asset, but as a collective one? What if, instead of hoarding information in digital vaults, we built an open, anonymized ecosystem where data could be shared safely, for everyone’s benefit?
This isn’t fantasy. This is the model other industries already use. Cybersecurity teams share threat data across vendors. Traffic apps improve with every user’s real-time input. The idea isn’t new – it’s just new to us.
In hospitality, every property collects different signals: pricing shifts, booking behavior, conversion trends. Alone, they’re interesting. Together, they’re transformative. Because collective hotel intelligence will redefine performance, with the help of AI. And it’s not just about data. It’s about human intelligence too. We all know that one revenue analyst with a magical Excel model or that one GM with an uncanny instinct for rate trends. What if their prompts, dashboards, and strategies could be anonymously shared, upvoted, and adapted across the industry?
And now, imagine you can ask your data questions, like, Which OTA is cannibalizing my most profitable guests?
or When should I drop rates to win demand, and when should I hold the line?
and get real answers, powered by shared patterns and AI.
That’s hive.
A platform-agnostic AI layer built to harness the power of collective hotel intelligence, without compromising individual privacy or strategic edge. All insights are anonymized, all contributions voluntary, and the value scales with every member who joins.
The roomangel Foundation is introducing a new solution designed around these principles. It’s called… (you guessed it) hive – an open, collaborative, chat-based AI that aggregates rate data, performance benchmarks, marketing insights and more across a growing network of hotel participants. It’s not just about benchmarking rates or tracking occupancy. hive connects the dots across channels: from pricing positioning to marketing demand, from search visibility to conversion. Think of it as the connective tissue between your data and everyone else’s, revealing patterns no single hotel could see alone – patterns and data that OTAs have been using against us all along that we are now finally able to tap into.
The next five years will belong to the hotels that embrace collaboration – not because it’s trendy, but because it’s the only way to beat platforms that profit from asymmetry. Intelligent collaboration is the only way to outsmart the powerful intermediaries. Period.
The blueprint is here. The technology exists. So let’s stop hoarding and let’s start sharing. Let’s build the future together, one insight at a time.
Your data is talking. The question is: who’s listening?