Notes from strait.
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A signal from inside the industry
Florian Montag, SVP of Revenue at Apaleo, published a piece on the ten agentic AI trends he expects to redefine hotel operations in 2026. Three of them are worth reading carefully, with the operational implication for a hotel commercial team spelled out.
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The OTA tax is coming for your AI bookings.
Booking.com is already inside ChatGPT. The other major OTAs have every reason to follow. If hotels wait for the OTAs to finish building the AI layer, the next thirty years of commission look like the last ten.
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What AI native infrastructure means at strait
Four pillars: natural language integrated vertically through the stack, a lossless bidirectional protocol between personal AI and hotel AI, data shaped for LLM trust and rigor, and infrastructure that survives AI-agent look-to-book economics. Strait is being built to solve this.
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AI trip planners are the future: let's build them a moat
AI trip planners are squeezed between Google and the OTAs. The only way out is reducing OTA reliance and building direct relationships with hotels. Strait is being built to solve this.