1.  What are the key learnings for the industry from covid in your view?  

• For all the people that were afraid algorithms are taking their jobs, they can relax now – it became very difficult to forecast based on historical data, since the patterns are disturbed in the past 2 and a half years; experts are needed to interpret data more than before
• Occupancy is not everything – I have heard multiple hotels talking about having much higher rates than pre-covid and being more profitable… at least as long as the tourists were able to come 
• Everything is connected – hotels can’t be filled when people can’t reach the place, geographically; there has to be more cooperation between hospitality and transportation, especially air transport  

2.  What do you see as the biggest need in the industry to tackle in 2023? 

• Digitalization – it’s already an old buzzword, however old is also the style we are doing business in Travel; travel tech solution providers need to collaborate and integrate more than before, making it easier for hotels to shift to a new tool, adopt a new tool and integrate it with their existing stack  
• Standardization – there’s no proper hotel standard for visuals and facts; Big OTAs capitalized on that by offering the best curated and standardized content in the industry; for the hotels, this meant, initially, less trouble, saved time and easy sales; today, many hotels are ”addicted” on these big OTAs for a big chunk on their sales, which is risky for them

  
3.  How do you see hospitality technology is used in 10-20 years?  

• More into the direction of attribute-based sales, where your personal virtual assistant will search properties on your behalf, make the packages/arrangements for you, recommend experiences and so on; exponentially more data will be available and probably easier to crunch; health data and psychological data can merge and we will receive truly customized experiences  
• Example: when your smartwatch/smart device identifies raised stress levels for a longer time, worse sleep quality, longer work times - it can look for relaxing weekend escapes within your budget, bring itineraries for approval and then take care of all arrangements for you  

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