From AI Visibility to Hotel Bookings - with Ira Vouk

Fran (00:01): Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Conversations on Experiential Hospitality.

My name is Fran. I'm the co-founder of Turneo, the world's leading experiences management system for hotels, and my guest today is Ira Vouk founder and CEO of AI Hospitality Alliance. Ira has spent more than 20 years where hospitality, tech, and strategy meet, started in revenue management, first startup built one of the industry's first RMSs using machine learning long before AI was a buzzword. Since then, Ira has held senior product and sales roles at companies like Duetto. She advises Cornell's Center for Hospitality Research and teaches at San Diego State University's Payne School of Hospitality. Also, Ira is the author of three books: Revenue Management Made Easy, Hospitality 2.0, and Hotel Tech 101. This year she launched the AI Hospitality Alliance to help hotels stop talking about AI and start putting it to work. Ira, great to have you. Welcome to the show.

Ira (01:12): Hello, hello. You make me sound really cool. And I really like you because of that already. Thank you for the intro.

Fran (01:19): Thank you.

No, it's I mean, that's your background. That's what I've read about you, and that's one of the reasons I invited you on our podcast. Sounds like a great mix of academic and practical experience.

Ira (01:33): Yeah, mostly practical, but I do like teaching. I only teach one class at SDSU and that's AI, surprise. A AI for the hospitality students. And I do lots of teaching and thought leadership in the industry. But I do come from operations. From the bottom, I've done almost every possible imaginable thing at the property level and management company level and then moved to the dark side, to the tech side of things. Consulting and all those things.

Fran (02:00): I mean you describe you describe falling into hospitality almost by accident, and then

Ira (02:05): Yeah.

Fran (02:05): Building the machine learning based RMS that that I've mentioned before, before AI was even fashionable. What did revenue management teach you, or even before that operations that still shapes how you look at AI today?

Ira (02:19): Yeah, well revenue management, what a concept, right? It's it's all about like we are in hospitality businesses, right? We're not here for entertainment of in volunteering, right? A business has to make money. A business is about profit. And for the longest time our industry has been and or was or has been still is looking at, you know, top line revenue metric as the universal metric for everything, RevPAR Right? Not even revenue, RevPAR, which is essentially the only metric that, you know, the metric that only measures how much revenue you made through your rooms department, which is like a very small portion for especially different, you know, higher end luxury, full service resort hotels or casinos. It's a very small part of the picture. Ironically, there's not a single RMS that I know of still that actually measures and helps, not just measures, but helps optimize. for the bottom line profits. Like literally not the one that we designed and launched 15 years ago did that. That's the only one that I know. And you know it's like it taught me a basic concept of a business needs to be profitable. Like what a concept, right? And you know, a lot of it is about including your you know operating expenses and distribution expens variable expenses.

But then also adding what you guys are, you know, really dedicated to all the additional revenue generating streams that are on top of the revenue of room revenue streams that play a very important role in the top and bottom line, you know, revenue profits for a hospitality business. Especially, you know, when it comes to casinos. Like they don't even care about room revenue. They give it away for free many times. So yeah, the concept of profit oriented. business models. That's something that I've been passionate about for the longest time and it's you know, what I've been trying to help hospitality businesses with for fifteen years now.

Fran (04:31): It's a huge paradox that you say that because you're mentioning that it taught you about profitability on the day, I think that we're recording when Anthropic came out with its IPO prospectus, where it said something like losing, I don't know, four billion dollars or something. So AI and profitability in the same sentence.

Ira (04:46): Yeah.

Fran (04:47): But I think in hospitality it is really different and we're not like an AI tech.

Ira (04:50): It is different. Yeah. Software companies have a very different business model where, you know, it's all about valuations and how much money you can make by selling the company or, you know, involving in bringing investors and then flipping it five years later and becoming rich with the stock. But you know the target business.

Fran (05:06): Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you do yeah, you call top line revenue a vanity metric in some of your writing and you push for the net total rev par. Now I'm

Gonna argue as someone running an experiences business that experiences, although they do carry lower revenue, they have huge margin and huge

Ira (05:23): Yeah.

Fran (05:24): Effect on satisfaction and reviews. So how do you think a hotel should value or approach those?

Ira (05:30): It's a pretty simple formula. I don't call it net total RevPAR I call it a cost-adjusted RevPAR which is not really the right name either, but I just couldn't find a better one. There is actually a Wikipedia article about it. If you look it up adjusted RevPAR there's a formula. So the formula is very simple, honestly. You just take variable expenses because you can't really like if you're using it, and the idea of the formula is to optimize for the bottom line profit, not just to measure GOPPAR. We all know how to measure GOPPAR.

Who cares? How do you actually influence it? You can't influence the fixed expenses. That's why you need to incorporate into the logic only the variable part that you actually can influence with your actions, right? Through whatever actions, you know, your revenue management pricing, dynamic pricing, through your marketing campaigns, through your upsell campaigns, through all those wonderful things you do on a daily basis in the e-commerce department. So you take the variable expenses, you consider them and you subtract them.

From the revenue, and you also make sure that you add all the revenue generating departments. And for the revenue generating departments that are in addition to room department, you also need to incorporate the expenses that are variable from those things. So for example, if like F&B is one of those, but F&B traditionally doesn't have a very high margin, right? But if you are talking about services that don't cost you much, but you can charge the hell out of them.

You need to incorporate that into the logic, then you'll have the full picture. Like again, what a concept. It's a very simple formula. You just need to take into account both sides. That's it.

Fran (07:07): Yeah, yeah. And it's it's changing and growing a lot faster, everything that's not a room today, which is why revenue management is changing as well so fast.

Ira (07:13): Right. There's all kinds of creative ways to charge the guests and they're happy. Great Wolf Lodge is an amazing example and I don't work for them, I don't make commission out of saying this. Really great. One of my customers, I've consulted them on multiple you know, occasions and the CTO is on the board of the alliance. They're doing amazing things. I've stayed at their properties, they suck money out of you like there is no tomorrow. And the guests are happy. Like that's the whole point. Like Customize your offers to what the guests like and you know, they come with kids who are you know, who want ice creams and stuff, and they sell you food packages, they sell you game packages, all kinds of different activities, and you just like keep paying and paying and paying and paying and you leave happy. And they are happy because you gave them, you know, all your money. Everybody wins.

Fran (08:05): They had a great holiday as well. But let's move it, let's move it more forward. Like we started already all almost on the at stay, but pre-stay or even pre-booking, you know.

Ira (08:15): Yeah.

Fran (08:16): The highest I've been to Arabian travel market last week, and one of the core topics everyone talks about is AI visibility. Now I've

Ira (08:25): Yeah.

Fran (08:26): Read somewhere you said AI visibility is engineered, not random. For a hotel starting from zero.

Ira (08:32): Yeah,

Fran (08:33): What are what are the

Ira (08:33): Absolutely.

Fran (08:34): Things to fix? What are the things to focus on?

Ira (08:37): Yeah, I don't remember half of what I say on like 'cause I say a lot, but I agree with that statement for that matter. So it sounds

Fran (08:43): Sounds pretty right.

Ira (08:45): Sounds correct. So the thing is, and we just published within the Alliance, and I'm sorry for you know all the shameless plugs, but we do a lot of work from in the within the Alliance to offer this education for free to the industry. Like not we don't charge for anything that we publish, and we just published a guide on AI visibility. It's a very, very thorough, so just go to the aihospitalityalliance.com click on standards and you'll find that guide along with other frameworks that we've just published recently. It's a very thorough guide on how to ensure that your company or your hotel, your hotel portfolio, appears most of the time. Like there's no guarantee. It's the different than the SEO. There's no like standard metric that you can always measure. I'm paying here, that's why I'm gonna be always at the top. It doesn't work like that.

But you can optimize, maximize your chances of appearing, of being visible. And there is a pretty straightforward logic to the things that you need to do to maximize your chances of appearing there. And it's somewhat complex, but you can do basic stuff without having to, you know, get a PhD in this. And there is a simple kind of version on our website where you can you know, just start from basic things.

Or know what questions to ask if you're outsourcing all of those things, which if you're a small company, you're probably outsourcing. A lot of it is revolves around having the right data in the right places and in the right format. Like that is right now the I would say much more critical than it used to be. It's always been important, but right now it is much more important because we are now optimizing not for humans, but for bots.

And bots have a very they have OCD. They like clean, structured stuff. Even though I mean they are pretty good at unstructured reading unstructured data. But if you make it easy for them to find you and read you and understand your values and build your propositions, then you know it's gonna be easier for you to appear because like otherwise they're just gonna get lost in your data and go to another property or an OTA, right? So that's kind of the gist of it.

Overall, I would say, especially now, you know, along these lines of the conversation of experiences and all additional things, more and more people are like we used to Google hotels in San Diego for tonight. Like this is all we would put in. Right now, you tell the whole life story, like your whole life story to that chatbot. You share, like, oh, I have two kids and we're going on vacation and we like to be near the beach and we would like a package, Legoland package.

And please, you know, tell me what F&B they have on site and how warm their pool is. And it's like, what the hell? And you know, there are hotel companies that are prepared for this and they do provide all that information in the right format, in the right places, so then that the bot can find all of those things that are matching this long hundred word prompt.

And appearing as a recommended property just because not because they're better value sometimes, but because it's a best match because the bot was able to find that information.

Fran (12:05): Yeah. I think what you said there best the right information in the right format and in the right place, right? 'Cause

Ira (12:12): Yes.

Fran (12:12): With my experience, we start working with a hotel and most of their experiences information sits in a PDF or on Instagram or

Ira (12:19): Yeah. Yeah.

Fran (12:21): Most frequently in the concierge's head. And like the concierge

Ira (12:24): Yeah. Right.

Fran (12:25): Knows that this tennis superstar is coming in a month and that they're

Ira (12:28): Yeah.

Fran (12:29): Gonna be doing tennis academies in the Maldives or something. But then Like that's not captured or published anywhere. So if anyone's Googling or searching, like where can I go on a holiday

Ira (12:38): They know.

Fran (12:38): Where I can do amazing tennis lessons or something, like so it's great that you're having it, but it needs to sit in the right format.

Ira (12:45): Yeah, right format, right place. Mm-hmm.

Fran (12:49): It's tricky one, right? How yeah, that that makes a lot of hotels invisible almost in AI answers. They have the right experiences, they have the right F&B offering, they have the right temperature of the pool, as you said. They just haven't put it in the right format. I've recently heard that at an AI summit in London on hospitality an Expedia exec was saying that they're building things two way almost. One is for the bots or for the agents.

And the other is for the humans, because humans will still come to your website ultimately and do like a pretty picture and a pretty video. Is that something you see as well, like the dual building in terms of how hotels should approach it?

Ira (13:29): Yeah, humans are emotional, you know, beings. So they do relate to, you know, better to like pretty pictures and atmospheric scenes in the videos and pictures or whatever is described, right? Because they want to emotionally relate to those things. But bots are the ones that are filtering out options and offering those, you know, whatever five, six recommendations in the chat window, right? So the first stage is always the bot in the, you know, I AI, what do you call it, augmented search? Or there's different ways. It's not really fully A2A yet. We're not there. Well, it's getting there, but we're not fully there yet. So it's AI assisted, I think that's the word. AI assisted search. So yes, it's not like your data needs to be the same, obviously, and consistent for both humans and like the factual data. But yes, they do go to different places to look for that information.

For example, bots, first they go to robots.txt to understand are they even allowed or not. And many hotel companies are not even allowing them to enter the right information on the right pages. So that will be step number one. Just check that your robots.txt. It's a public file. Just go to your domain forward slash robots.txt. You'll see what's out there.

And then, you know, the robots would go then and look at the code of the page to see if they can find schema formatted facts about the property that they're looking for. The address, the name, you know, the amenities, the room types, whatever it is. And then also the next step is okay, the price. How do you communicate the price information? So that's something that hotel companies have been struggling with as well. So that's also that needs to be coming from your booking engine, your CRS in the right format in the right place, so that these bots can see real time information, which you know, not a lot of, you know, not a lot of hotel companies are offering this right now. So that's step number one. And then the bots, you know, either choose you or not. So you need to first, for the AI assisted search, optimize for bots. But then if the bots do choose you, and if the transaction does not happen within the chat window, which right now it still does not for in most cases. It does not. Like we have not we're working within the alliance towards that with major frontier AI labs to build it the right way for them that benefits hotel companies and the guests. But it's we're not there yet. So when the guest clicks on the link and it clicks out onto the either OTA or the hotel website, whatever was offered in the chat window, then it's important for humans to see and still be convinced that this is the right choice. So yes, you do have to kind of do both right now, but that's has always kind of been the case because SEO technically, that's why you see sometimes SEO optimized articles with keyword soup that don't really make a lot of sense for humans, but they're there for bots.

Kinda same concept, just you know, different angle.

Fran (16:47): Here you've started with, you know, room and room rate, and you've started with the kind of then the bot discovering whether that room type at that room price. At the same time, I think I've read somewhere where you mentioned that the secret is actually in hospitality, understanding why guests choose a hotel. And sometimes that why could be the rooftop bar, could be the family feel, could be the dog policy.

Now, obviously a loaded question. I believe the why is usually an experience, rather than a room. Do you think that hotels should lead their AI content with experiences, or is it still the room, or is it a bit of both?

Ira (17:27): Room is boring. Like who goes to the hotel to a hotel to sleep in the room? Nobody. Like not a s I don't know a single person. I don't. I'm there for a reason. Everybody's there for a reason. So this is like it's the answer is very simple. This is basics of marketing. Like it's not something new. We have known that forever. You need to understand your audience, right? You need to understand who you are catering to.

If you are a hotel near Legoland, you probably cater to families who bring their kids to Legoland. Surprise. So you then most of the or you know, Great Wolf Lodge, they have an indoor aqua park. So most of their customers are obviously families with children. So then they will be offering, and which they do again a very good job at a bunch of experiences surrounding the stay. outside of the room where there's tons of opportunities again to squeeze money out of the guests who are again happy because they are there to have fun and entertain their kids who are annoying and you know always complain and a whole separate discussion. So yes, absolutely know your audience and based on understanding your target audience and please if you have not done that describe your Customer personas. Like this is the first thing you need to do in any business, hospitality or any other one. Describe who your customer are and customers are and that can be pulled from your exist or should be pulled from your existing data, from your PMS, you know, reports, what room packages, rate packages convert the most, who is your most profitable customer, or who pays you more most money, who is the most happy, your Google Analytics data, what converts.

You know, who they where they come from, geographically, females, males, whatever. Just I mean, shove it all in. I even have a GPT out there somewhere. I published an online learning course on this and offered a GPT that you can use for that. Just like copy paste screenshots of all of this data into your favorite chatbot and ask, please describe my target audience based on this information. Like the please describe my personas. And then after you understand who your personas are, you understand what they want. from you, why they stay there. And based on that you offer experiences related to that will be that they will relate to and then they would be willing to pay money for because nobody goes to a hotel to sleep in a room. Unless you're really desperate, like you have nowhere to stay and you're a homeless person. So that's kind of the thing.

Fran (20:09): Okay. Now you compare you compare MCP to USB-C in AI.

Ira (20:17): Yeah.

Fran (20:17): In that case, based on what you just said, should an MCP server for a hotel expose only availability booking for a room? Or is it also logical that other things, the experiences you mentioned, need to be bookable and exposed as well, whether it's, you know, spa slots, tables, sunbeds, transfers, Legoland or whatever else?

Ira (20:37): Of course. Yeah.

No, a hundred percent. I mean it's very logical, right? That's that's where AI bots get information. And of course they can get information from your website, assuming that you have it in the right format, in the right places, you know, schema, blah, all those things. But it's easier for them and for you if you have an MCP server where they can find all that information in a more organized manner in a more structured manner and they are gonna hallucinate much less. So you would need an MCP server if you have for example a ChatGPT connector like ChatGPT app or Anthropic connector Anthropic app or whatever plug-ins whatever they called so this is where you would use an MCP or if you have a chat bot AI bot on your website, you know you would want to if you connect an MCP to these AI surfaces, what we call them, you can you should provide a lot of information because that's much easier than trying to like rebuild your entire website and you know try to hook it up through tables and databases when a customer asks in the chat bot, hey, what temperature is your pool? You know, the old way you just had to have a field and then database that says the temperature of the pool of the pool of this and that.

With MCP is just much easier. It's MD files mostly. You know, it's just like it's English. It's like less structured but also more organized in terms of let's just like the AI knows where to find that information. And it's going to know that this information is reliable and actual and factual and accurate because this MCP belongs to this company. And it's, you know, certified or whatever the identity is clear.

So MCP is just a better way to present information to these bots in the organized way and more comprehensive way. And then yes, absolutely, you should put comprehensive information in there so that when the customer asks this hundred-word question that includes not just room, they mostly don't like they don't specify the room type. Like they never do. They just say, we have four people and we need this and that and then and that. So all of this, this and that, and then and that. needs to be ideally in your MCP, whatever you're storing your information, so that the bots can find the answer.

Fran (23:06): Makes sense. Now we've talked a lot about bots. We haven't touched on a very important element of hospitality. Kind of it's in the key in the word hospitality,

Ira (23:12): Humans.

Fran (23:14): Humans.

Ira (23:15): Yeah.

Fran (23:16): You've written before that that digital employees are already inside hotel workflows. Now the concierge role seems like also an obvious candidate. Let's talk about

A bit concierges and luxury hotels. What do you as a hotel automate and what must stay human?

Ira (23:34): Yeah. You mentioned luxury hotels. So that's an important distinction because different segments of our industry have a very different need and approach to automation. Has always been the case, not just with AI. If you are on in the luxury end of spectrum, you probably would want to keep a lot of the human element that you've had before. There's still absolutely many ways to automate and offer it as an option because there are guests, especially right now, the tech bros, they don't they're introverts like me, you know, I don't like talking to people in general. Like I would like to have an option of, you know, self check in with mobile access to my room. Like I do prefer that. I don't want to be in line for forty minutes to wait for a human to do things. And I would like to have access to a chat, to request my towels or whatever.

So there's I think that option needs to be offered, but you would expect more white glove service at a luxury property. If you are talking about, you know, like if we're looking at the mid-market segment or limited service segment rather, then you would expect more automation there and less expectations for you know human interactions. And it's already everywhere in Asian countries.

I travel a lot and you probably are do too. And we see a lot of that already implemented in many countries in Asia. Dubai also a very advanced, especially when it comes to robotics, much more advanced than the US. For example, and of course Europe as well. I'm saying of course because you know that's not news. Europe is a few years behind the US, US is a few years behind some Asian countries, especially

Fran (25:23): Yeah.

Ira (25:23): You know when it comes to robotics, right? In AI, you know.

World frontier labs are still ahead of the rest of the world here. So different again, different types of businesses have a different need for automation, but there is absolutely an opportunity for automation with or without AI in every single hospitality business. It only makes sense to do it if it improves either one of three things, or ideally all three: customer satisfaction, profits.

Operating efficiencies. And those three areas, and this is the framework that I use when I talk about applications of AI in our industry, those are the those three areas have three different stakeholders. Customer satisfaction improvements. The stakeholder is obviously the end consumer, the traveler. Profits, it's normally the owner. Operating efficiencies, it's normally the employees or the stakeholder, right? If you implement technology that does improve either one of these.

Or one without hurting the other, right? Or maybe all three. That's the right way to improve, to implement technology. Again, not just AI, but in general, technology and automation.

Fran (26:40): Yeah. And I like what you when you mentioned the tech bros, even from what I hear, even in luxury segment, there's something about a choice, right? So it's giving the customer as a stakeholder, the guest, a choice of, hey, if you want to do this yourself, you can do this yourself. But obviously we're here for you. And

Ira (26:56): Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Fran (26:58): Then the second dimension is empowering the employee to do better, to be better. There's nothing

Ira (27:04): Yeah, for sure.

Fran (27:05): Worse than, you know, walking into a luxury hotel and seeing Let's say a staff member struggling with whatever system they're given, working on an old laptop that's slow, and then they're like, Oh, you know, there's crickets in the background while something's loading or not even having a laptop or not being able to do things digitally, but having to call people

Ira (27:24): Stupid.

Fran (27:24): And confirm things. So yeah.

Ira (27:28): Hundred percent.

Fran (27:29): Okay, now maybe I've done my research wrong, but I have I heard somewhere that you've called hotel tech the United Nations of Hotel Tech?

Ira (27:38): Yeah, you're AI did a good job looking up that information. So yes, the context there it was an article that I published, I think last year, in the hotel Hospitality Net's magazine that was distributed during HITEC. It's their it was their tech edition. So what's happening in our tech space and still is, is we are very fragmented and we have m integration barriers for everything and it normally comes from the PMS, which is the main PMS is the core of our tech stack and most of non-PMS vendors have integration dependency on the PMS data. You would know because you probably also do. It sucks. I've been in that situation and then the problem is because it you know with my RMS that we I co founded in, you know, 15 years ago.

We were all excited. Oh, we have a great tool. And then we realized we spent a year building it. You know, two million dollars was spent. And then we realized we can't sell it because we don't have data to hook it up to and nobody's like jumping around us happily offering these integrations. Like we had to chase PMS companies and paying them a lot of money.

Ira (29:00): There's twelve hundred PMSs. Many of them are still on premise. They will die soon. It's there's no way they're gonna survive for too long in the twenty first century. But there was just the PMS paper that we published within the Alliance that went viral. We analyzed 343 PMS companies that are out there that publish that are the ties online, everybody that we could find. Guess how many actually have open APIs? Twenty freaking four.

7%

Fran (29:30): No.

Ira (29:31): Have open APIs. Then that's why that paper went viral because nobody put the number on it before. Everybody knew it was pretty bad. Everybody knows, you know, the usual suspects who openly say who started the trend. Oh, I'm not gonna mention any names, they're not paying me for that. But we didn't know how bad it was. It was it's only 24 PMSs out of 343, which is real reality, nearly a thousand PMS providers out there. So the United Nations concept was in relation to we don't know how to talk to each other. And we speak different languages. We don't have any standardization whatsoever. HTNG tried to establish standards and they did a great job, but nobody follows them. So it's very chaotic and fragmented. And the article was about the fact that AI might fix that with MCP, because MCP could be that. flexible standard that everybody that is kinda easy to follow because it's literally it's just English essentially. Like you don't really need to be a very bright engineer. I mean there's some complexities, but it's not even hard to stand up an MCP server. So the investment is much lower. So AI, these new AI technologies and the protocols that are now out there could be that translation layer between different countries. speaking different language, you know, equivalent in our space is the PMS, the CRS, the CRM, you know, whatever else you wanna hook up to your hotel text decks.

Fran (31:05): The EMS, the new category, the experience management system.

Ira (31:08): Experience management system. Interesting. Yeah, I have not heard. So you should add a you absolutely should add a use case to our use case map that we just also published that went viral. 260,000 views on LinkedIn. We published a map of AI use cases in our industry. Where you click on the map, like you have a CRS, you click and you see the use cases that are how AI is applied within that specific category.

Or CRM or RMS detailed description of for hoteliers to understand. So I should send you a link if you there is a place to suggest a new Yeah, you're one of, you know,

Fran (31:46): Yeah I'll have a look. I haven't seen that one. For sure.

Ira (31:50): Two people in the industry who haven't yet seen. 'Cause it's it literally just like

Fran (31:53): My bad.

Ira (31:54): I published it three days ago. It just went like internet went nuts about it. So yes. Thank you. We are doing great things.

Fran (31:59): Congratulations. Good. All right.

So we're coming to a close on time. I usually do a bit of a rapid fire at the end. So just

Ira (32:09): Sure.

Fran (32:09): Three short questions, short answers. One AI myth that you think hoteliers should stop believing.

Ira (32:19): That AI is gonna replace them.

Fran (32:23): Good. All right. One AI tool that you think a GM should try this week if they haven't already.

Ira (32:31): Easy. Install please everybody listening, install Claude desktop version. Not the limited thing in the browser using. Install it, hook up connectors. You're welcome. Your life is gonna change forever.

Fran (32:45): Okay, excellent. And then one prediction for our industry for 2027

Ira (32:52): 2027 if God can hear me now, ChatGPT, Anthropic, Muse, by Meta, and Instinct, that new viral thing, and X are going to have hotel booking capabilities within the chat window, a transaction, a button, a book now button that would be directly that would be redirecting guest directly to the hotel companies for maybe a small processing fee, which is gonna be much more modest than the current situation. And the hotels will be receiving all the guest's data and more so that they can actually have real conversations with the with their own customer.

Fran (33:43): Wow, that's that would be a hit for the OTAs. I mean, I know a couple of weeks

Ira (33:46): That is

Fran (33:47): Ago when Muse by Meta was released, I think stocks of Expedia, Booking, Airbnb all dropped about twenty percent. I think, I don't know, fifty billion was erased from the market cap. And

Ira (33:56): For them. Yeah.

Fran (34:00): Then obviously phase Meta's market cap went up by about three hundred and fifty million billion. Sorry, all in

Ira (34:05): Yeah.

Fran (34:06): Billion. So you're on you're on the train of thought of thinking down that line.

Ira (34:11): I would say that is the reason why the alliance was born. That is the main reason why the alliance was born, because we want - the window of opportunity is pretty short. And if we sit around like we did thirty years ago when OTAs were born, we're gonna miss it again and it's gonna be screwed up even more. We're doing all we can within the alliance and with all the executives on our board that represent all major hotel companies and more and partners and infrastructure companies. to push the conversation in the direction that's going to benefit the end consumer, first of all, which is direct is always best for the end consumer in hotel companies. To build a healthy,

Fran (34:50): All right.

Ira (34:51): Agentic hotel booking ecosystem. I'm very passionate about that as you can tell. I'll die trying.

Fran (34:57): All right. Ira, thank you so much. Final question where can listeners find out more about your standards, the free academy workshops? Is it the website, social media?

Ira (35:08): Yeah. you can just find me on LinkedIn, Ira Vouk It's easy and all the links are there, or you can go to aihospitalityalliance.com

Fran (35:20): Thank you so much for chatting to me today. I've learned a lot as well and I've

Ira (35:25): Thank you.

Fran (35:25): Really enjoyed the conversation. I wish you and the Alliance all the best and hope to see you again soon.

Ira (35:33): Sounds good. Thanks for having me.

Fran (35:35): Thanks everyone for listening. This was another episode of Conversations on Experiential Hospitality. Take care and have a great day.