Discover the 2025 hotel industry trends: record-breaking construction pipelines, persistent staffing shortages, and the rise of Agentic AI. Learn how hoteliers are finally rethinking tech stacks to bridge the gap between digital and in-person hospitality.
With the 2025 conference season behind us, a few clear patterns have taken shape.
Hotel construction pipelines continue to break records in emerging markets. Yet, despite this growth, critical staffing shortages persist as a significant problem for hotel leaders. Discussions around technology focused heavily on "Agentic AI," which can act without needing a prompt. Hoteliers are also coming to the harsh reality that salary alone will not attract the right talent to help close the labour gap.
These trends, along with others, signal a larger industry shift towards finally realigning hotel tech stacks, rather than merely discussing the need to “rethink” them. In this article, we break down what we observed across a multitude of conferences in case you were able to visit as many as you wanted to.
Global hotel construction pipelines continue to break records, especially in the Middle East and China. Elie Maalouf effectively summed up this trend during his panel at the Skift Global Forum:
"Global GDP in these areas have a younger population, there’s higher middle-class growth, more infrastructure development, and not just tourism infrastructure, which is phenomenal, but any kind of infrastructure. The largest aircraft orders are where in the world? They're in the Middle East. They're in India. They're in Malaysia with Air Asia, they're in China.”
As global hotel growth continues, the labour gap is still not closing. To address the staffing problem, especially in expanding markets, there was significant discussion across all conferences about adopting technology in new ways. Hoteliers realise they can no longer throw “human capital” at their problems anymore.
This issue has been especially pronounced since the pandemic; the labour gap has yet to return to 2019 highs. Last month in Denver, AHLA and HTNG’s Hospitality Show highlighted their latest research, which confirms this truth.
65% of hotel leaders surveyed are still reporting critical staff shortages, and that’s despite almost half of them offering higher salaries to entice new workers into the fold. One of the areas that hoteliers are keen to learn more about is how Agentic AI tools can help mitigate the labour shortage.
Many thought leaders at conferences first called for a clear distinction between “generative AI” and “agentic AI”. Where generative AI responds to prompts mainly to build content, agentic AI acts more autonomously as an “agent” on the user's behalf, planning, analysing, and “doing” more than “creating”. Two areas around how “agentic AI” is being adopted stood out at Skift’s Global Forum this year over other conferences:
During AHLA's Hospitality Show, Glen Fogel shared the concept of a “connected trip” facilitated by agentic AI, using the example of inclement weather. Let’s say that a storm completely disrupts your travel plans to a destination. Given the impacts the storm will have on your trip, an AI “agent” could then reschedule every affected part of your itinerary for the trip without you ever having to lift a finger.
This innovative use of agentic AI is already here to stay, as Google Assistant, Siri, and Bixby are all adopting agentic AI functionality. This new use of AI can bring tremendous value to guests, allowing them to focus on enjoying their travels rather than being burdened by them.
Kelly Ungerman also highlighted during the Hospitality Show how agentic AI can be utilised at scale. She highlighted how her teams are utilising agentic AI to save significant time for tens of thousands of team members just to book travel.
“You know, I was talking to a colleague a few weeks ago and they said they were able to book 14 flights in six minutes across two months of travel, which is huge, and right now we've got about 20% of our bookings already going through this tool, we've got a plan to get to 80% on average each booking, we're saving about 15 to 30 minutes. So we scale that across 40,000 employees globally, you can easily spot that the potential is pretty significant.”
The most significant oversight across the industry conference zeitgeist when discussing Agentic AI was exactly what Kelly touched on. At scale we are failing to recognise how this new use of artificial intelligence will positively impact the staff experience, finally achieving the “work smarter and not harder” mentality. Both Agentic AI and Generative AI can already help staff focus on delivering memorable hospitality experiences rather than fighting systems or performing menial administrative work, but there's more to be adopted.
What’s important to understand about Agentic AI at present is that it can constantly analyse operational data streams and suggest, or even make, anticipatory changes on a user’s behalf. For instance, what if Agentic AI sifts through all your bookings 90 days in advance and it discovers that over half of your incoming guests have a strong pattern of booking spa experiences? Whatever AI tools you're using could then escalate such a discovery and further suggest, or even act on, sending out tailored spa experience offers or timely discounts to entice spa bookings.
2025 appears to have officially become the year when hotel executives have the capacity to realign what a “tech stack” means completely and act on making new investments. From HITEC to ITB, IHIF, and beyond, a multitude of sessions, presentations, and roundtables discussed treating hotel tech stacks as a more integrated body of technological organs within the hotel, rather than as technology groups that exist in isolation and are retrofitted together. One area of focus that was consistently brought to the spotlight across the conference season will significantly impact guest experiences in the near future:
At HFTP’s HITEC this year, our partners at dormakaba and Resorts World Las Vegas conducted a panel discussion with our very own Andrew Pirret about why Resorts World chose to revolutionise their digital arrival experience and how they’ve already found best practices that other hoteliers can follow. Their goal was to mirror their digital “first impression” of the hotel arrival experience with the in-person welcome they have become known for. Shannon McCallum perfectly expressed how they are already leading the way in educating guests to literally skip the front desk line and get right into the resort without impacting brand integrity.
“A lot of people don’t want to download an app to achieve a check-in. In addition, not many people usually read their pre-arrival emails either. So, it starts with the booking confirmation, and educating guests there, educating them on a seven-day out engagement, and even in the 24 hours prior to arrival. All of those touchpoints are critical for us to educate them on a different path than checking in at the front desk. Even more, we have QR code signage in the lobby that gets guests in, especially for the guests who don’t get pre-arrival emails from us, such as those who booked via a third party.
Their growth has also been exponential, moving from around a 15% digital check-in conversion to an average of 44% conversion within only a few months of adopting Alliants Contactless and Digital Key solutions. Jim Gist, the Principal Advisor at Integrated Resort Advisors, who helped Resorts World choose and implement these contactless technologies, highlighted an essential point about the difference between technologies that make claims and those that actually deliver tangible results.
“The challenge was familiar: hotels are pitched countless gadgets that rarely deliver on the promise. We approached the project skeptically. Resorts World needed tangible efficiencies such as faster, smoother check-in and guest flows while integrating the consumer technologies guests already use, like Apple Wallet. Success required multiple platforms to synchronise flawlessly, not just a single app or device. The team at Alliants really delivered on what they said, which is seldom found today.”
Later this year, at the Legic conference, Tim Sheard demystified an essential point of the contactless experience that helps create the best first impressions. He explained what is currently available to hoteliers when they look to improve the digital key provisioning experience they create.
“For us, it’s about removing the friction of getting that room key to a device. I would love to be able to walk into any hotel, and I just place my phone on an NFC encoder, and it provisions the key to my phone. And right now, that’s absolutely possible.
Alliants Co-Founder and CEO, Tristan Gadsby, further explained to the Modern Hotelier team during HITEC how to bridge the gap between hoteliers' and guests' perspectives. He specifically touched on leveraging technology like Digital Keys, particularly regarding whether a guest prefers a mobile app for this web-based type of check-in experience.
The “guest-app” is not the be-all and end-all of a guest experience. Hotels may think like that, but guests don’t. This is why the ability to send a room key to someone on their phone without having to download an app is a massive game-changer, which we call web provisioning. This new system is giving hoteliers the ability to send a key via a WhatsApp or SMS message to get a digital key onto a guest's phone or watch, which is amazing. It just works.
When thinking about the future of bridging the digital and in-person service gaps, a fear of obsolescence also drives a cautious approach to investing. Professor Ira Vouk noted during the Hospitality Show that many operators are waiting for technologies, like AI, to stabilise before investing. Or they want to see other hoteliers successfully adopt new technologies before adopting anything themselves. Most importantly, she highlights one of the most salient root problems in our industry: we are moving way too slowly to adapt to the future.
“Hotel executives are constantly worried that the technology they adopt today could quickly be obsolete tomorrow. While I can empathise with where they are coming from, their inaction has deepened two problems that now need to be solved simultaneously if we are to ever catch up to modernity. The first problem is a growing inability to quickly distinguish technological vaporware from reality. The second problem is investing in technology through single-year budget cycles rather than multi-year cycles that focus on mitigating the very obsolescence executives fear. Both of these problems slow down technology adoption to a point of inertia. Overall, the industry needs to start adopting technology exponentially faster, and we can only do that by thinking more critically about long-term technological needs than just reacting to short-term or shiny trends.”
Both of these problems slow technology adoption to the point that hoteliers are forced to remain in “catch-up” mode rather than getting ahead of trends. This is why Ira notes that we need to move faster in our adoption of technology. In order to break this inertia and get ahead, you simply need to map out your technology stack investments over multiple years, rather than just next year.
By doing so, you'll naturally start to find vendors who not only have an aligned developmental roadmap with your investment strategy but can also prove they know where your shared future is headed. For example, ask your vendors how much they invest into annual R&D year over year in your subscribed products. If a vendor isn’t deeply investing money every year to push their tech forward through future-forward R&D, you’ll quickly know who's selling vaporware that won't support your multi-year strategy. Overall, the industry needs to start adopting technology exponentially faster, and we can only do that by thinking more critically about long-term technological needs than just reacting to short-term trends.
Overall, the 2025 conference season made one thing clear: rapid global growth is now directly clashing with a persistent labour shortage that needs to be solved ASAP. The conversations have shifted towards technology that directly supports staff to solve this problem. The standout shining light is on Agentic AI to prove its potential to handle complex guest tasks and reduce administrative work for employees where Generative AI cannot.
This all points not just to a necessary realignment of hotel tech stacks, but to change the overall tech stack investment by treating staff and the hotel building as a single, integrated asset. Ultimately, the goal for us all should be to replicate the quality of in-person hospitality in every digital interaction, regardless of the time or place.
