SCALE With AI 2026

This talk will explore how Forge Holiday Group leverages AI to gain a 30% competitive advantage, saving significant time and enhancing efficiency. I will discuss our plans to develop an agentic value-add platform, highlight how AI adoption has reached 70% among our 1000+ employees, and share my vision for the future of Search and the ways people will research and book travel. I will also provide practical tips and demonstrate the tools we use to drive these impressive results.

AI tools are everywhere—but most businesses are trying to build on sand. In this beginner-friendly, highly practical session, you’ll learn the #1 foundation of successful AI adoption: creating a clear, centralised company knowledge base that turns AI from a fun experiment into a reliable teammate. We’ll unpack why scattered docs (vision, values, brand voice, reviews, SOPs, guest and owner avatars, FAQs and more) lead to generic, inconsistent outputs, then walk through a simple blueprint for pulling everything into a “single source of truth” you can reuse again and again. You’ll see how this foundation unlocks faster content creation, smoother onboarding, better decision-making and less repetitive work—regardless of which AI platform you use now or six months from now.

The era of generic guest experience is ending. AI gives operators memory and prediction at scale, turning every stay into insight that improves the next one. Luca Zambello breaks down how hyper-personalization works, how it drives higher satisfaction and revenue, and why smaller operators can now deliver ultra high-end boutique experiences with big chain-level consistency.

While we celebrate AI’s transformative potential in life and in hospitality, we’ve failed to recognize that the same powerful tools are being weaponized by fraudsters, posing as “guests”, at an unprecedented scale. Ignorance is our biggest security loophole as most hospitality operators fight today’s threats with yesterday’s defenses.

This session will present the shocking reality of the “New Fraud Toolkit” – synthetic identities, voice cloning, and deepfake IDs – that can fool even the most experienced of staff. We’ll tackle hospitality’s unique “behind closed doors” vulnerabilities leading to not just financial fraud, but sex trafficking, drug smuggling, and organized criminal activity. It is imperative to understand that combating these threats requires both smart, AI-driven, defenses and empowered human vigilance.

Why marketing (especially Social Media Marketing) feels off right now and how AI is amplifying existing weaknesses in marketing strategies. It shows how operators should intervene, override, or redirect AI outputs to prevent those weaknesses from compounding at the points that most directly impact marketing ROI.

AI is introducing an entirely new distribution layer in travel – one that lives inside LLMs, AI assistants, emerging interfaces, and soon, new AI-native devices. As guests move from searching and browsing to asking and delegating, inspiration, discovery, and booking collapse into a single moment. This keynote maps how demand flows in this new layer and how supply connects with guests when machines take the lead in decisions. The goal? Property managers taking practical steps to achieving OTA independence in an AI-driven world.

Everybody and their dog is talking about getting their STR brand recommended by AI search tools like ChatGPT and Claude – but how do you do this without your content taking a nose dive into a sea of sameness, where all things go to die? Seasoned STR copywriter, storyteller, and LLM expert, Neely Khan teaches you how to show up in AI-enabled search results, without sacrificing your soul, self respect, and story. This will be a lively, hands-on session, proving that AI favours human creativity.

The best hospitality makes people feel seen. But feeling seen doesn’t come from effort alone.

It comes from memory. Timing. Coordination. Follow-through. And that doesn’t happen by accident. This session explores how agentic AI doesn’t replace hospitality — it creates the structural support that makes great hospitality possible at scale.

There’s a better way — and it’s already here.

Steve Taggert built My Getaways into an award-winning rental management company by understanding one thing early: the operators who scale are the ones who stop doing jobs that technology can do better. In this session, he pulls back the curtain on exactly how agentic AI runs guest communication around the clock — WhatsApp agents, voice agents, automated problem-solving — and where else in your business AI is quietly doing the work you shouldn’t be doing yourself.
No theory. No demos of tools that don’t exist yet. Just what’s working, right now, in a real short-term rental business.
Stop being the bottleneck. Start building a business that runs without you in the loop.

The short-term rental industry is experiencing its biggest shift in customer discovery in decades, as Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini redefine the buyer journey. AI-powered search is now shaping how property owners choose managers and how guests book, handling early-stage research, education, and comparison long before a buyer visits a website or asks for a recommendation.

We are walking into a complete structural shift, and this talk explores how AI is fundamentally reshaping the market by not just retrieving information but actively interpreting it. When categories are vague, AI flattens differentiation and groups competitors inaccurately. When positioning is precise, authority compounds.

Drawing on her extensive experience in hospitality, technology, and communications, Jessica will unpack this structural shift and demonstrate why category clarity has become a strategic competitive advantage. Operators must ensure their brand is clearly defined to avoid misinterpretation by systems increasingly influencing owner and guest (human) decisions. Discover what this fundamental change means for vacation rental managers who want to shape, rather than be shaped by, the next era of industry growth.

Join Laurenz Schwarzhappel of Global Living Apartments in Germany as he shares his actionable experience of integrating AI into his rental business and maximising guest satisfaction.

How the industry is splitting between AI-first / autopilot tools and UI-first / human-in-control platforms.
Why full automation can work for small portfolios, but tends to break down at scale.
The operational risks of AI-first systems (loss of control, accountability, and consistency).
Reframing AI as an enabler of teams, not a replacement.
Why the future of hospitality is assisted, not autonomous.