Introduction
In this episode, Tiago Araújo is joined by Guilain Denisselle, founder and editor-in-chief of Tendance Hôtellerie and a hospitality consultant with over 30 years of industry experience, to unpack the trends shaping 2026. They cut through the AI hype to talk about where it actually earns its keep, why next year is about execution rather than buzzwords, and how sustainability becomes a real priority once it’s framed as a money question. Guilain’s closing tip: before chasing tools, consolidate your data into a single view you can actually act on.
Transcript
Tiago Araújo (00:00): Hi, Guilain! We’re here for another Virtual Coffee from HiJiffy, and today I invited Guilain to join us from Tendance Hôtellerie. Let’s start with you introducing yourself.
Guilain Denisselle (00:16): Thanks, Tiago, for inviting me to this Virtual Coffee. My name is Guilain Denisselle, I’m a French guy. I’ve been in hospitality operations and technology for a very long time. I’ve worked with many companies at the beginning of many things that happened in hospitality technology over the past 30 years.
I have a web magazine called Tendance Hôtellerie, all in French. And I also do consulting: I help technology companies, investment firms, and hotel groups. At the moment, I’m working with a hotel group in Europe who want to increase their number of hotels, so I’m working on their technology stack.
Tiago Araújo (01:07): Exciting!
Guilain Denisselle (01:08): Yes, it’s exciting, and we see lots of new things and lots of problems to solve.
Tiago Araújo (01:16): For sure. It’s amazing that you’re going back into operations and putting your hands into that again. Talking about seeing a lot of new things, one of the things I’d like to discuss with you today: we’re recording this at the end of October, we’re reaching the end of the year, and it’s something quite natural and normal now, but at this time of year, or in the next few weeks, we’re going to be bombarded by content around the trends for 2026. That happens a lot. It seems that every new year we’re going to have something that completely changes the industry. But the truth is that each year does bring trends. We were discussing off-camera that sometimes there are a lot of new things, but then implementation is a whole new level. So I’d like to talk about the hospitality trends for 2026, and your insights as an expert on what hoteliers should focus on for next year. I think we can start with the big picture. From your perspective, what are the most important trends shaping the year ahead, 2026?
Guilain Denisselle (02:47): Well, there isn’t really one big trend except AI, which is everything. Well, it’s not everywhere. It’s behind everything. You’ve got lots of vendors talking about AI, but some are really using it just to improve one small thing, plus a small thing, plus a small thing. And then you get a real rice packet at the end, because this is what we’re looking for. It’s exactly that: it’s one customer plus one customer that makes thousands of customers at the end of the year. It’s the same idea. So AI is behind everything, and it’s a matter of using it in the right way to analyse, with a proper prompt.
I see many hotels using ChatGPT or other stuff like that, even giving personal data to ChatGPT. And, wow, do they know what they’re doing? Imagine Mr Smith is looking for something about himself and finds information about his stay at Hotel X in Lisbon. Wow, it’s crazy. So AI is a big trend, and it helps everything. It goes from operations to sales to reservation systems, to everything.
Tiago Araújo (04:04): On the aspect of AI, I do feel this year was already a year where we heard a lot about it. You’re a speaker at a lot of events, and, obviously, with HiJiffy being an AI provider, let’s try to forget that. But at most of the events we attended, AI was a very, very big topic. What do you feel will change next year? Was this year more of a buzzword, and next year more of an execution? Do you see it that way, or do you see it continuing to be a lot of buzz and not a lot of execution within hotel operations?
Guilain Denisselle (04:52): I think last year was mainly buzz and not much real operation. And I think it’s moving. Operations will increase, but buzz will continue too. That’s obvious, because every time we create something new using AI, or we improve something, it’s good to explain what’s going on. But the thing with AI is that it’s improving every day. The engine is improving every day, so the way you use the engine has to improve every day as well.
Tiago Araújo (05:21): Sure. And do you think the AI part of it will make a true difference, not be flashy anymore, and have a real impact? And if it does have a real impact, what parts of the hotel do you think it will affect?
Guilain Denisselle (05:43): Well, in many parts of operations. I can see it with the hotel group I’m working with. For example, when you need to analyse something, when you need to look at a dashboard, sometimes you want to compare things. And even if you try to compare apples with apples, it doesn’t fit. So that’s one example of AI: it does help to compare the apples in Paris to the apples in London, or the apples in Berlin. It helps a lot. It makes things easy to understand for humans.
And it understands humans too, because we are terrible. We don’t even know what we want. We say we want that, but we don’t let the machine know how to make it. So now it’s improving a lot.
Tiago Araújo (06:32): Sure. And do you think that, in 2026, sustainability will still be an important topic? Do you think hotels have already done everything needed to reach, in terms of the European Union and the goals of the world, everything we need around sustainability? Or is it still going to be a hot topic for 2026?
Guilain Denisselle (07:00): Well, it’s going to be a hot topic for 2026 and the years after, I guess, because hospitality is a brick-and-mortar business. And with brick and mortar, it takes time to refurbish. It takes time to make the appropriate transformation. So, yes, it’s a topic that will remain for at least two, three, four years, to be able to comply with the basic rules. And we see the law when it comes to energy and things like that. The law has changed in Europe, and we have to follow a direction. Within the law, it’s written: this year you have to do that, next year it’s going to be that, and in three years it’s going to be that. So it’s all improving. It’s a good point.
Even so, I still see a few brands doing what we can call greenwashing. They talk a lot. They say a lot. I remember last year I stayed at a hotel that had just had a Green Key audit, and just after the audit they took away the glasses and put plastic back, and things like that. So this is greenwashing: once you get the stamp from Green Key, you take it away and continue with plastic. No. It’s not honest.
Tiago Araújo (08:29): Completely. And is there any innovation you’ve been seeing in this area of sustainability right now?
Guilain Denisselle (08:37): Well, again, it’s all around technology. Many things have changed in technology. You’ve got systems talking to each other, so interoperability is key. And you’ve got systems able to pilot energy. I’ve seen that. I’ve seen systems where there isn’t much technology, it’s just the AI engine that says we should do something there, lower the heating or lower the air conditioning, without much interoperability. So as soon as we bring more interoperability between systems, yes, it will save a lot of money, a lot of energy, and a lot of CO2.
Tiago Araújo (09:21): Yeah, yeah.
Guilain Denisselle (09:23): I think people have to think of it as money, because when they feel obliged to do something, they don’t really like it. When they realise they’ll save money, then they start thinking differently.
Tiago Araújo (09:34): That’s exactly what I always think. In my day-to-day, I really think that with sustainability, business-wise, we need to move with numbers. It needs to be numbers. It needs to be about cost saving or an increase in revenue. That’s the way you move the needle in an industry, whatever industry. It’s not specifically the hotel industry, it’s any industry. You really need to move people with money. And I think in this area there’s a lot to be done, to be honest.
Guilain Denisselle (10:05): Exactly. And what’s better than AI to do a nice dashboard? AI is the tool to make that, and to see the value of what we did and the savings.
Tiago Araújo (10:15): Definitely. I think that us having more data and more reporting in the industry is the way AI can help. I do think helping with insights, so we can deliver a better guest experience, and by delivering a better guest experience I mean treating each guest as unique, I think AI can help with that. What would be your number one tip for fellow hoteliers for 2026: what should they be looking into, what should they be careful with, what should they really be investing time in? What would be one tip you’d like to give as a wrap-up?
Guilain Denisselle (11:03): Well, I see so many hotels that don’t really know what’s going on in the hotel when you ask them about figures. They’ve got one Excel sheet for something and another one for something else. Nothing is consolidated. So I think what they should do this year is try to consolidate everything: to make sure interoperability works between systems, to get just one dashboard to see what’s going on. And then you can click and go into detail. Because today it’s one page there, one page there, one page there. It’s crazy. How can you have a global view of your company and push your team to work in the right direction if you don’t have that vision of the company? And you can’t wait for the next month or a quarterly report, it’s got to be daily. So concentrate on that. I think it’s the most important thing to do in 2026.
Tiago Araújo (11:58): Sure. And for that, you nearly need to set it as mandatory for hotel tech partners to have an open API to plug into a reporting system, whatever reporting system you’re using, whether it’s Google Data Studio or something more complex like Tableau, and then make sure all the data goes into one bucket, so you can work on that bucket. I think that’s a very, very good tip for us all in the hospitality industry: being more data-driven and more metric-driven.
Guilain Denisselle (12:34): Especially if you have investors, because investors are looking for that.
Tiago Araújo (12:37): Sure, definitely. Thank you so much for these tips and these trends, Guilain. It was very, very insightful.
Guilain Denisselle (12:48): Merci beaucoup. Thank you, Tiago.