[00:00:00] Karen Stephens: The whole point of technology, and the whole point of, you know, not only technology, but as AI becomes more and more prevalent, is to make that as seamless as possible. It’s running behind the scenes so that the person having that interaction can easily understand — this person has been here four times, they stay in the spa, they really enjoy vanilla lattes — like all of that information at their fingertips.

[00:00:26] Intro: Welcome to the Hotel Moment Podcast, presented by Revinate, the podcast where we discuss how hotel technology shapes every moment of the hotelier’s experience. Tune in as we explore the cutting-edge technology transforming the hospitality industry and hear from experts and visionaries shaping the future of guest experiences. Whether you’re a hotelier or a tech enthusiast, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in and discover how we can elevate the art of hospitality together.

[00:00:57] Karen Stephens: Hello and welcome to the Hotel Moment Podcast. I am your host, Karen Stephens, the Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate. And today we’re doing something a little different. I actually have another Revinator here with me. Please welcome Bailey Yeats.

[00:01:09] Bailey Yeats: Hello, everyone. Thanks for having me join you here, Karen.

[00:01:13] Karen Stephens: You know what? I’m excited to see you, Bailey. So the topic of today’s podcast is we’re going to do a little recap on NAVIGATE. And for those of you who aren’t aware, NAVIGATE is our customer conference that we just wrapped up in Phoenix. So Bailey, I’m excited to get into it.

[00:01:27] Bailey Yeats: Me too. What a time we had. That was one of my favorites to date, I must say, Karen. It was a blast.

[00:01:33] Karen Stephens: Yeah, so let’s start there, Bailey. So tell us a little bit — how many NAVIGATEs have you been to and how long have you been at Revinate? So give everybody the lowdown.

[00:01:43] Bailey Yeats: So equal times — years as NAVIGATEs. So I’ve been here for almost four years and I’ve done four NAVIGATEs so far, and hopefully many to come, because they are the best event of the year, I think. And it’s a time where I get excited because I get to connect with our customers. Right? We get to see how far they’ve come. So every year that we do our pre-conference training — for those of you that were in it, you know that I lead the pre-conference training room for the marketing side. And I get really excited to see you guys come back every year and see how you’ve progressed and what takeaways you took from last year and then moved forward. And we’re seeing them in action this year. And we get to actually look at the analytics and the performance from how those tasks have performed. So it’s really, really exciting.

[00:02:24] Karen Stephens: It’s very cool. So Bailey has been on our education team and then just this year moved over to the dark side, which is the marketing team. So now Bailey is in marketing with the rest of us marketers, but her background’s in digital marketing, so it works out perfect. Okay, so let’s dive in. So first of all, let’s talk about the venue because I think one of the things that makes the conference so cool is the venue. So tell us a little bit about the Wigwam.

[00:02:48] Bailey Yeats: Yeah, what a beautiful property. I got the opportunity to come in a day early and help the team set up for the conference, and — we say help the team set up for the conference, but I also got to explore the property, which was really brilliant for me because I do like to be able to see what they have for restaurants, see what they have for different outlets. And I must say, walking around their golf course — stunning. I’m Canadian, and so if when I get to go outside and see, you know, oranges growing, it’s remarkable. It’s really exciting. So it was so beautiful, and the cacti everywhere, and the grounds lovely. The staff — I mean, that woman that was serving me in the restaurant every morning for my coffee — she knew my order right away. She was on it. And I really respect people in the hospitality industry when they are so very willing to have excellent customer service like that and make sure that she’s personalizing my needs. And she knew every morning, you know, it was a vanilla latte or whatever I was ordering — I can’t even remember — with oat milk. And I love when hoteliers are able to come through on experiences like that for their guests, even though I was just there for the conference, but I was still a guest.

[00:03:55] Karen Stephens: Yeah, so it’s a beautiful property. It’s almost a hundred years old — fun fact. It’s part of the Historic Hotels of America. So it’s part of the Preferred Hotel Group, and then specifically Historic Hotels of America. And it’s part of the Benchmark collection with Pyramid Hotels. So they’ve got all bases covered and, like you said, fantastic staff, absolutely beautiful property. So if you’re listening and you’ve got a vacation coming up, man, I mean, this is the place to be. So the hotel was beautiful. It was a very nice setting. And then we had about 300 people on property — so about 200 customers. And then we had all of our vendor partners. So we have a number… our ecosystem is growing every year. And then we had about 50 Revinators. So it was really, really cool. So let’s get into the meat of the conference. So I want to start with — first of all, I think everybody and their dog, and I have a dog, and he’s also talking about artificial intelligence — all over hospitality. So that was definitely the buzz. I’m sure you were hearing it in training day and throughout.

[00:04:53] Bailey Yeats: Absolutely. Yeah. Everybody was wondering what’s coming next. I think there’s a little bit of maybe some anxieties around it because there’s so much to know. And we got a lot of feedback from our customers at training day that they’re really excited about what’s yet to come. And I think them being there and being able to lean on each other and lean on our team really helped calm some of that anxiety around what to do next.

[00:05:19] Karen Stephens: Sure. Well, and, you know, I think it’s fair. I think a lot of people — there are reasons to be anxious. You know, what you hear out there so much just industry-wide is this is gonna replace all the people, and your job is gonna get taken over, et cetera, et cetera. But from our perspective, we really see AI as the way to enable our customers to do what they do best — which you hit on at the top of this, right? It’s about guest experience. You don’t get into hotels because you love technology. You get into hotels because you love beautiful properties, guest experience, making people feel wonderful on, you know, whatever they’re there for. So I think that that was a really good lens to take. And we’re gonna — later on in the podcast, we’re gonna have some of the clips from our CEO Bryson Koehler’s keynote. But before that, I want to talk about our McKinsey presentation. So we always have mainstage — we always bring in experts. We brought in CoStar, McKinsey, we had Amazon on stage. We had a company called UST on stage. So in addition to having the training and having everybody understand how to use the products, we also like to take a step back — what’s going on in the wider ecosystem. So let’s talk a little bit about the McKinsey presentation. And, you know, we talked really about three kind of categories. So do you want to talk about what those three points were, Bailey, and then we can talk about each one?

[00:06:35] Bailey Yeats: Yeah. So the first one, it really comes into functions like HR, finance, recruiting. Things that Karen, you and I — not that we don’t care about them, but not so much our wheelhouse.

[00:06:47] Karen Stephens: Not our wheelhouse, but probably the things that could be most easily optimized with AI, right? Yeah.

[00:06:55] Bailey Yeats: Exactly. But really what caught my attention was the second and third point. So the second point was hoteliers asking, what do I do on property? How do I actually improve the guest experience and make sure, you know, things are working efficiently to be able to spend more time with guests using AI. And the other one was — we look at there’s this search functionality. And what happens when we start to look at what OTAs are going to do versus being able to cut those middlemen out? And how are we as hoteliers — I say “we” as in on their team, but, you know, we’re partners. We want to work together and cohesively make sure that they’re being successful. So how do you prepare for a world like that where search and booking are fundamentally getting disrupted? And that is definitely a world that we can help our customers and a world that we can live in with them.

[00:07:48] Karen Stephens: Yeah, I think right from the jump. So Courtney Witherspoon, who is our MC — she actually just got promoted. She’s working on our product team. She’s PMing for the reservation sales product. But she asked everybody in the room, how many people here have used ChatGPT or a similar, you know, chat bot whatever  to book travel in the last six months? And, you know, 75% of the hands went up. So it’s not only happening — you know, if the hoteliers are doing it, everybody is starting to use these capabilities. And the question is, how do you prepare for a world where that becomes the main distribution channel, right? Right now it’s probably sitting at about 14%, but last year was like 2%. So — don’t quote me on that — but actually somewhere in there, it’s growing. It’s growing exponentially, and that’s what we need to know. So let’s focus on that second thing though because I think this is where Bailey gets out — she gets in with the people. She goes and talks to all the people. So when you think about how you can leverage AI on property, and this is something we’re very proud of at Revinate — really bringing in that AI intelligence layer — so let’s talk about how that’s going to start to manifest. So we are calling our AI entity, ‘Ivy’. So Ivy — think about her as the intelligence layer that runs through all of our platforms. And you’re gonna start to see her manifest in some of our products, the first one being Reservation Sales. So let’s talk about that, Bailey. What’s on the horizon for Ivy and Reservation Sales?

[00:09:11] Bailey Yeats: Yeah. Before we get into Ivy with Reservation Sales specifically, I just want to call something out because I think it’s very relevant, Karen. On pre-conference training day, one of the icebreakers that we had was, if you could have a superpower, what would it be? And I would say at least 60 to 70% of the room gave some sort of answer that was time-saving. They wanted something to do with saving time. Whether it be — I don’t want to have to fly, I just wanna be able to say, I’d like to go to the Wigwam in Phoenix and I’m there — or some other way. And so the reason why I bring that in is because I think that these products that are coming down the line for our customers — or that are here for our customers — are very relevant for that time saving. And when we look at automated call scoring, this is going to be saving reservation sales managers multiple hours of time. And whether that be — it could be up to 30 hours. And so someone that I really enjoyed hearing from was Colton Bean at Suncadia Resort. He was one of our Revy winners. So that was very exciting. But I’d really love to play this clip, if we can, Karen, to let him talk a little bit about what he’s looking forward to when it comes to saving some time and staff efficiencies.

[00:10:27] Colton Bean: Hearing about Revinate’s roadmap today, the thing that I think I’m most excited for in 2026 is definitely the upgraded lead form. I think it’s really gonna help streamline our agents’ call flow and have notes kind of right at the forefront. Also it will have a ton of information that we have to kind of manually sift for, just right at their fingertips. The other thing I’m also very excited for is the AI call scoring. People talk a lot about us getting time back in our days. And thirty hours a month is crazy. And I just am so excited that once this is online, we will have that time back to be able to focus on strategic things — helping streamline our processes and focus on culture. So I’m super, super excited for what’s to come.

[00:11:11] Karen Stephens: Oh, I love that quote from Colton. You know what? I love Colton. That guy is great. So, as you mentioned, he is — we always do awards at our conference and we had four awards this year. Colton was one. We’ll make sure that we put his video in the show notes. But the other thing I love to talk about when we talk about AI is how do we improve? So that’s the res sales side of the house. The other distribution channel that we work through is the marketing side of the house. So right now we’re really heavy on email, but — spoiler alert — we’ve got a lot to come around digital marketing and some other pieces. But let’s hear another quote. So who’s this one from, Bailey?

[00:11:44] Bailey Yeats: So this is from Abby Waski from Pyramid Global Hospitality, really talking about — well, I’m gonna let her speak the words, and then let’s have a listen first and we’ll talk about it after.

[00:11:53] Abby Waski: An aha moment that I definitely had was getting to know our guests, you know, enhancing their profile, getting to know their needs and what they really love when they come to the hotel, so that we can implement those guest preferences into Revinate and going forward put those in our emails and see how we can better cater to them.

[00:12:11] Bailey Yeats: So personalization and creating those exceptional guest experiences — you know, that’s really the goal for most of our hoteliers. I would say, if not everybody, is they want to create exceptional guest experiences. And personalization goes so far beyond a first name in a merge tag. And Abby said it right here, you know, making your guests feel welcome and making them understand that we know that you’ve stayed here a million times — and having that conversation with them at the front desk. There’s nothing worse, Karen, than walking into a hotel you’ve stayed at ten times and being asked if this is your first time. Right? It doesn’t feel good. And so what Abby said here, I think it really, really hits the nail on the head — that being able to create those experiences where it’s the human connection, the personal touch.

[00:12:56] Karen Stephens: Right. Well, and the whole point of technology and the whole point of, you know, not only technology, but as AI becomes more and more prevalent, is to make that as seamless as possible. It’s running behind the scenes so that the person having that interaction can easily understand — this person has been here four times, they stay in the spa, they really enjoy vanilla lattes — like all of that information at their fingertips, so that we can really do that at scale. And that’s what makes it a wonderful experience, right? So it’s not about AI replacing humans. It’s about making sure that they get the time savings so that humans can do what they do best. And it’s actually — it sounds really simple, but it’s not, right? To do it elegantly is really a complicated thing.

[00:13:40] Bailey Yeats: Yeah, for sure.

[00:13:41] Karen Stephens: That’s what we seek to do. So I mentioned earlier that we wanted to get on to Bryson’s clip. So if we come back to kind of that third point that you talked about — what is the future of this going to do in terms of how people book travel, how they search for travel? How do you get ahead of that as a customer? And for us, it all comes down to making sure that number one, your data is clean and the foundation of everything that you do. So let’s listen to this clip from Bryson.

[00:14:07] Bryson Koehler: And so here’s the truth — we still know that’s true today. AI without data, like a child without schooling, are certainly not going to grow up to be like Ollie’s siblings — or, you know, her brothers and sisters — which I’m sitting there thinking about my five kids going, “Okay, wow, I got a lot to figure out.” But, you know, AI without data is like a world-class chef trying to bake a cake, but somebody’s gone into the pantry and taken all of the labels, right? Where the sugar was in the blue jar and the salt was in the red jar and switched all around. And maybe because the data was messy, somebody started putting salt into the blue jar, putting sand into the red jar. An AI hallucination is caused by that messy data. It’s caused by, you know, the AI bot not really understanding what that next probabilistic action is supposed to be. And that’s why so many AI projects don’t return the great results that we’re all hoping for. And we continue to see it happen. We see vendors walking into hotels with all of the shiny fanfare, promising the world. But the data underneath is messy, the data is inconsistent, the AI hallucinates, it sends the wrong offers, the wrong messages, the wrong answers to the wrong people, and it creates more problems than it solves. And that’s not the hotel’s fault — it’s not your fault. That’s the vendor who sold a bill of goods.

[00:15:30] Bailey Yeats: It’s almost like Revinate knew the future was coming and we’ve been helping our customers collect that data all along, right? We have the spa data in, we have restaurant and golf and all of these integrations where we’ve been helping them create these brilliant databases. And now here comes AI, and we actually have this great purpose — additional to, you know, being able to segment based on their travel trends — but now it’s even more than that, Karen.

[00:15:58] Karen Stephens: It really is. I mean, and when you talk about the history — I mean, Revinate’s been around… you know, we started in 2009, so seventeen years. You know, the core of our company back in the day was collecting all of the reputation and survey data and putting that into one place. So if you think about it, we not only have all of the data on all of these beautiful hotels that goes back years and years and years, but also all of the guest data for the folks staying in those hotels because we’re connected to over a hundred PMS systems. We’ve got all the, as you mentioned, data in systems. And now I think we have over 160 integrations in total. And all of that is getting synthesized — right? We call it identity resolution — into guest profiles that can then be activated. So what Bryson is really saying there — like, buyer beware, right? You’re gonna hear a lot of companies that come out and say, hey, we’ve got AI that you can drop into your tech stack and that’s gonna do X, Y, and Z for you. But we all know that the data within a property management system — it is not clean. There are multiple profiles. That’s why a hotelier can’t know just looking at the property management system if you’ve been there one time or fifteen times. So your data foundation has to be clean. And once it’s clean, you can then activate that data — either for Revinate, within our ecosystem, so across all of our products and services. And you can also take that data and activate it outside of the Revinate system. So if we talk a little bit about our data outbound capabilities, those have all come online in the last month. So, as you said, we saw the future, we are now in the future, we are here, and now we’re all about activating.

[00:17:34] Bailey Yeats: Yeah. Talk about superpowers — I think that we’ve nailed it. I had the chance to sit with Angelo Fernandes from Cote Hospitality for a little bit. Such a great conversation with him, and he had a lot to say about the value in being able to have that data. And so if it’s okay, I’d love to play a clip from our conversation.

[00:17:53] Karen Stephens: You know what? I always want to hear from Angelo. Let’s do it.

[00:17:56] Angelo Fernandes: Well, I’m really excited about connecting with industry friends and the team at Revinate. I think the learning and the sharing and the networking that takes place here is second to none. So I’m really excited for Revinate 2026. Well, it’s the ability to make bold decisions based on the data that we’re able to collect. And that was something that was a big void in our industry for many years, and especially the companies that I’ve been part of. But today when we look at Revinate and the data it provides, it enables us to make bold decisions faster and more efficiently.

[00:18:27] Bailey Yeats: Yeah, and you know, we’re so proud of what we’ve built, Karen. You know, Angelo talked about that big void in our industry and we’ve really built something quite beautiful to be able to fulfill that.

[00:18:38] Karen Stephens: That’s right. We’re very excited. So if you weren’t at our conference and you are a customer, you will have received an email from our Chief Customer Officer, Rani Croshal. So we did send out the keynote and some other key pieces of content so that you can relive the experience if you want to hear a little bit more direction about where we’re going, which is very exciting. The future is bright. So I think we’re gonna end on one last quote. Tell us about this last one, Bailey.

[00:19:03] Bailey Yeats: Yeah, you know, this last quote from Jennifer Barnhart from Noble House Resorts — it was probably one of my favorite conversations that I had. Just because out of all of what we talked about at the beginning and the anxieties that people brought on the first day, to kind of how they felt when they left the conference — this kind of sums it up in one quote. So let’s hear what Jennifer had to say.

[00:19:25] Jennifer Barnhart: So far today, the biggest takeaway I’ve had from NAVIGATE is the future of AI and how it’s going to impact the hotel industry and basically, you know, what — the future is gonna be brighter than we can ever imagine in our industry. I’m excited to see how it’s gonna happen.

[00:19:39] Karen Stephens: All right, Bailey, this has been so fun. Thank you for joining me.

[00:19:42] Bailey Yeats: Yes, thank you so much for having me. And, you know, I agree with what Jen said there. The future is bright. I’m really looking forward to seeing what is in store for all of us.

[00:19:51] Karen Stephens: That’s right. And if you’d like to learn more about Revinate, Bailey will be on the road. She’s going to be at HITEC, which I believe is in San Antonio. Is that right?

[00:20:00] Bailey Yeats: Yeah, San Antonio in June.

[00:20:03] Karen Stephens: Yep, so look for Bailey and we’ll have the full team. Our new CRO, Frank Trampert, is going to be there, who you might know from his days at Sabre. He’s our industry heavy hitter, so he’ll be making his debut as Revinate CRO at that conference, and we’ll put all that in the show notes. So thank you so much, Bailey.

[00:20:19] Bailey Yeats: It was great to see you today. Thanks again.

[00:20:25] Outro: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hotel Moment by Revinate. Our community of hoteliers is growing every week, and each guest we speak to is tackling industry challenges with the innovation and flexibility that our industry demands. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re listening on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more content. For more information, head to revinate.com/hotelmomentpodcast. Until next time, keep innovating.