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20/08/2026

Last week I said I would give the attribution recipe away for AI Search.

Step one is going to disappoint you, because it is boring, mind-numbing work.

You cannot attribute anything without the data. Not some of it. All of it.

Every missing dataset is a hole someone will drive an objection through.

There are seven steps to gathering it, and the seventh has three parts of its own.

The most important one is not in any platform you have a login for. It sits with your revenue manager. Occupancy, ADR, ALOS, MICE and C&E revenue, total direct against total indirect.

That is the record of what guests actually booked. Almost nobody in marketing ever asks for it.

And you will have to ask. Repeatedly. From people who do not report to you and do not see why it matters.

Ask lots of questions and dig. The more you can get, the more complete the picture will be.

It is hard. It is unglamorous. And that is exactly why nobody has done it.

Once you have all of it, you can start to attribute. That is next week.

Full recipe, every step, is in the blog. Link in the comments.

17/08/2026

Saturday night was all about reconnecting with Mike, Graham and Jane at Soul Bar & Bistro in Auckland and living up to our reputation as the table nobody can ignore. soulbarandbistro

Mike and Graham and I go back to 2006, when I started at Universal Homes. I was lucky enough to work alongside them right up until their retirements in 2021. We built a partnership that weathered its fair share of peaks and troughs — and like any good one, it turned into a real friendship that’s stuck long after the work stopped.

So good to catch up, laugh way too loud, and pick up exactly where we left off.

PS — the pear bombe alaska with anzac crumbs, swiss meringue and tonka bean ice cream is a 50/10. Non-negotiable order if you’re at Soul Bar.

14/08/2026

Dinner at MASU last night. Sat at the counter, watched the chefs work the pass for two hours.

And it got me thinking about something we talk about a lot in hospitality tech but rarely say out loud: the best guest experiences are almost never about the technology. They’re about proximity and transparency.

Counter seating does something a table in a dining room can’t. You watch the work happen. You see the care, the precision, the repetition that turns into mastery. There’s no mystery box between you and the outcome. That transparency builds trust before the first course even lands.

We spend so much time in this industry optimising for speed, personalisation, automation. All necessary. All valuable. But last night was a good reminder that the highest form of hospitality is often the simplest: let the guest see the craft.

A few things worth carrying into how we think about guest experience design:

→ Visibility builds trust faster than any review score can
→ Process is part of the product, not just the output
→ The best experiences don’t need to be explained, they’re felt

Technology should be removing friction so more of this kind of experience is possible, not replacing it.

Good night. Good food. Good reminder of why we do this.

12/08/2026

Sat in a room at AHICE Aotearoa the last couple of days and heard some version of that question about four different ways. AHICE Global Hotel Industry Conferences

The mood in the room has genuinely shifted. Not hype, not spin, just a room full of people who’ve spent two or three years white-knuckling it finally allowed to talk about demand, occupancy and rates like they’re moving the right direction again.

But nobody’s talking about “getting back to normal.” That conversation’s already over. The room’s moved on to what’s next.

More focus on the numbers that actually matter, not just the ones that look good. AI and digital discovery reshaping how guests even find you in the first place. Sharper experiences. Smarter investment.

We’re not in recovery mode anymore. We’re in growth mode. That’s a different game, and it needs a different playbook.

Good few days. More to come.

11/08/2026

Crowne Plaza Christchurch, fireplace, coffee, sat down with the DOSM Simon Rees to talk where hotel & F&B marketing is headed. Then dinner with a couple of AHICE speakers from Cendyn.

Now: portfolio meeting, then Day One of AHICE. Let’s go. 👇

Nick ~ OmniHyper

10/08/2026

Attribution is the word of the year in hotel marketing.

Especially when it comes to AI Search.

But everyone is trying to measure it using systems that were never designed to see it.

Here is what that looks like.

For one hotel, its traditional reporting attributed just $103,490 in revenue to its website.

The hotel’s own booking systems recorded $1,445,743 in direct revenue over exactly the same period.

Same hotel. Same dates. More than $1.3 million of actual direct revenue that the traditional reporting could not see.

To be clear, that does not mean AI Search generated the $1.3 million difference.

It means the system being used to judge performance could not see it.

And that is the attribution problem.

Google Analytics can see some AI referral traffic. It cannot see every AI answer that influenced a guest, or always connect discovery on a hotel microsite with a booking later completed through the brand website, by phone or in another session.

The hotel’s own reporting is not set up for it either. There is no neat line item called “AI Search.”

So, AI Search attribution cannot be one tracking link or one number in Google Analytics.

It has to be a chain of evidence connecting visibility, guest behaviour, intent and actual commercial outcomes.

I have spent a long time developing that method.

Over the coming weeks, I am giving the whole recipe away: how to gather the data, how to connect the evidence, and how we applied it to three actual hotels.

05/08/2026

Another photo of me and food …shocking, I know, given I’m in hospitality. Haha.

Today’s excuse…catching up with Melinda Maillard from Mallard Marketing while she’s in Sydney. Mel and I go back to our Accor days working together, before she went off and started her own business.

Good to see you, Mel and let’s not leave it so long next time!

04/08/2026

Great dinner with Rodger Powell (Managing Director, THSA Hotel Advisors) always a pleasure catching up outside the conference rooms.

We appreciate the partnership, Rodger, but I have to say the stories about your various “lives” outside of hotels were the highlight of the night. Let’s just say there’s a lot more to Rodger Powell than the LinkedIn profile lets on 👀

Good food, good company, and a healthy dose of client talk mixed in for good measure. This industry is better because of relationships like this one.

02/08/2026

Another great session at the Sydney Hotel Summit by AHICE “New Developments & Hot Projects.”

What struck me most wasn’t the headline projects — it was how much industry insight never makes it past the room it’s discussed in.

A few takeaways for anyone building in hospitality right now:

→ The biggest shifts in a market rarely start as announcements they start as conversations between operators, owners and advisors long before anything’s public.

→ Trust is the real currency in rooms like this. The more openly people share what’s actually happening, the sharper everyone’s thinking gets.

→ If you want to understand where an industry is heading, watch who’s in the room not just what’s on the agenda.

Grateful to be in rooms like this. The best insight isn’t always the one that makes headlines, it’s the one shared before it does.

01/08/2026

Great to be back at the Sydney Hotel Summit by AHICE this week.

The “Hoteliers’ Outlook” panel was a standout with Scott Boyes (CEO, Trilogy Hotels) in particular brought a level of knowledge and conviction that made the next 5 years for Sydney’s hotel market feel very tangible.

His read on construction costs, ADR movement and where EBITDA is heading gave a much clearer picture than the usual conference soundbites.

One thing that stuck with me: Western Sydney Airport is arguably the biggest thing to happen to this city in decades, and the hotel sector out west is still very much a “watch this space.” Construction costs, achievable rate and yield are all being weighed up right now and time will tell how it plays out, but the opportunity is real.

Always good to be in a room with people actually shaping where this industry goes next. Conversations like these are exactly why we keep building tools that help hoteliers make sense of what’s coming, not just react to it.

~ Michael McDonald, OmniHyper.

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