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Charlie Osmond, Co-founder & Chief Growth Officer, Triptease
Charlie OsmondCo-founder & Chief Growth Officer, Triptease
Sanjay Vakil, CEO and Co-founder, DirectBooker
Sanjay VakilCEO and Co-founder, DirectBooker
Ira Vouk, Hospitality consultant and author
Ira VoukHospitality consultant and author
On-demand webinar

The AI hospitality tech map What's real, what's hype

One hour to work out which AI tools deserve a line in your 2027 budget, and which can wait.

21 October 2026
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About this webinar

What this session covers

Free consumer agents went mainstream in the month before this session aired, and nobody on this panel claims to know where hotel distribution lands next. What they can do is map it. Triptease co-founder Charlie Osmond, DirectBooker co-founder Sanjay Vakil and hospitality consultant Ira Vouk work through what actually changed, how agents find and book hotels today, and what hotels can do about it now.

Ira makes the case that the technology is not new, the audience is. Sanjay asks who each agent works for once advertising and commissions pay the bill, and why the lodging protocols being written right now need hoteliers in the room. Charlie covers the guest behaviors that go from rare to normal when every guest has an agent, and Google, still the elephant, gets its own section.

Speakers

Meet the speakers

Charlie Osmond, Co-founder & Chief Growth Officer, Triptease

Charlie Osmond

Co-founder & Chief Growth Officer, Triptease
Sanjay Vakil, CEO and Co-founder, DirectBooker

Sanjay Vakil

CEO and Co-founder, DirectBooker
Ira Vouk, Hospitality consultant and author

Ira Vouk

Hospitality consultant and author
What you'll learn

What you'll take away from this session

1

Ask who the agent works for. Agents paid for by the consumer work only for them; agents that run on advertising or commission steer the shortlist, like a travel agent with a kickback.

2

What changed is who has an agent. The functionality has existed for paying users for about a year; what is new is free agents on your phone, inside the chat apps people already use, in front of an audience of billions.

3

Agents still book like a human browsing the web. So the AI visibility basics apply: organized data, a clean, structured website, content that is recommendable as well as discoverable, and a booking engine where the transaction can complete.

4

Rare guest behaviors become the norm. Only a small minority of guests cancel and rebook when a rate drops today; if every guest has an agent watching their inbox, rate policies, OTA contracts and wholesaler terms need revisiting.

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Want to apply this to your hotel?

Talk to our team about where your hotel sits on the map and what to prioritize for 2027, with your own data on the table.

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