Monday, 22 June 2026

Vendor-sponsored research (Aven Hospitality with Skift Studio) finds only 11% of hotel organizations run AI agents that can actually complete bookings or price inventory in real time, while roughly 80% confine AI to chatbots and marketing — the gap, it argues, decides whether a property surfaces in conversational recommendations at all.

A premium intercity coach operator reports women now make up roughly 40% of riders on its Maxx tier, well above its ~29% network-wide female share (up from 9% in 2019), crediting women-only seating, female staff support, and live tracking rather than price as the conversion levers.

Distilling Soleio Cuervo's hiring lens, the argument is that the gap between competent and exceptional designers is posture rather than craft — communicating intent over showing work, confronting users while ideas are still cheap to change, asking whether a feature should exist at all, and refusing to delegate strategy and impact to PMs.