Hotels Are Spending AI Budget on Booking. Enterprise ROI Leaders Are Spending It on Dreaming and Sharing.

Hospitality digital-transformation coach Are Morch, writing in Hospitality Net, argues hotels are pouring AI investment into the wrong stage of the guest journey. He cites a Google Cloud study of more than 2,400 senior executives in which 86% now agree AI drives cost-efficient growth, and identifies three shared behaviors among the enterprises actually capturing that value: deciding faster, building AI fluency across the whole staff rather than a specialist team, and embedding AI into core value-creating processes instead of bolting it onto the edges. He points to Google Cloud, PayPal, and Tata Steel as examples of that pattern working.

Mapping the guest journey into five stages — Dreaming, Planning, Booking, Experiencing, Sharing — Morch’s central claim is that hotels concentrate AI spend on Booking, the most competitive and contested stage, while enterprise ROI leaders are capturing value in the less-contested Dreaming, Experiencing, and Sharing stages instead. His argument: the “booking leak” hotels are trying to plug with better booking-stage tools actually gets prevented upstream, through inspiration and post-stay advocacy, not by out-competing OTAs on booking-stage AI.

There’s real data suggesting hoteliers already sense this, even if budget hasn’t followed. Amadeus’s “Travel Dreams 2026” research — a survey of 6,000 travelers and 500 senior hoteliers covered in a separate Hospitality Net piece — found 38% of hoteliers already cite sharing guest testimonials and user-generated content as the single biggest social-media opportunity, and 37% see social platforms as real-time guest-service channels. That’s the “Sharing” stage Morch says is under-invested, and nearly four in ten hoteliers can already name it as an opportunity. The gap isn’t awareness. It’s that AI budget keeps landing where the vendors already built tools, not where hoteliers say the value is.