Q4 is gifting longer holiday weekends

Hotel revenue is getting more creative about where it comes from—and your next found dollars have nothing to do with adding more rooms. The guestroom TV screen can become a sales channel, PMS APIs can determine how easily new tech plugs in and savvier marketing can give guests a reason to book when rooms need filling. Across all three, the opportunity is the same: Make the systems around the stay work harder for your business.

📥 In your inbox tomorrow: A Mint Pillow Q&A with Francis Pierrel, former president of Ralph Lauren and now CEO of LR Paris, who dishes on how hotels are using gifts to build guest loyalty beyond the stay.

The hotel management rethink. “Everyone except the owner is paid on revenue or on a fixed subscription, and that’s just not sustainable,” Sloan Dean says. He has a new answer to a very old hotel problem: his new AI-native management company, AI Hospitality Group, is betting that AI can take a serious chunk of back-office work off the table while the humans take care of the hospitality.

Holiday demand is coming in hot. Q4 is handing hoteliers a few useful calendar quirks, with major December holidays landing on Fridays and New Year’s Eve falling on a Thursday. Translation: there’s more room for the long-weekend crowd to make a getaway of it.

Your room key just got a software update. What happens at the guest room door is becoming part of the broader digital experience, and dormakaba clearly wants in on that conversation. Its deal to acquire UK guest-experience software firm Alliants brings mobile keys, contactless check-in, messaging and other guest-facing tools into the same orbit as dormakaba access technology.

Small volume, same receipts. Only working with a handful of creators? That’s no reason to loosen your vetting standards. When every stay, fee or hour of staff time carries more weight, knowing who’s actually behind the audience matters even more.

✨Learn more about working with influencers in our Q&A with Evolusen co-founder and CEO Wendy Song Dowling.

The assumptions hotels make about what guests will tolerate. Guests don’t always tell you what they want—they tell each other what drove them nuts. The bedside switch that’s somehow across the room, the shower knob nobody can decode, the outlet hidden behind the nightstand... Conversations like these are guest experience gold, if you’re paying attention.

When laundry room staff are stretched thin, you need equipment that doesn't add to the workload. UniMac® commercial washers and dryers are built to keep operations running with a lean team:

POSH on Kirkwood in Bloomington, Ind., takes its gemstone inspiration beyond a pretty color palette. An emerald granite reception desk brings the drama downstairs, while the guest rooms shift into warmer territory with wood and brushed-gold details. Then there’s the vault, which gets a second life as a guest sitting room.

Why it matters: A design concept gets more useful—and infinitely more interesting—when it can flex from space to space. Here, the gemstone story sets a direction without forcing every room to make the same visual argument. And in the old vault, letting guests interact with an original architectural feature makes what’s already there feel newly relevant. (The Gettys Group Instagram)

HotelLogic and the AI Hospitality Alliance examined the entire discoverable hotel PMS market to find out how many PMS exposes a public, documented API. The resulting 2026 PMS API study found major differences in API access and capability across 343 PMS vendors, with only 7% offering fully public documentation that anyone can use.

Why it matters: “Has an API” is a pretty low bar when you’re evaluating hotel software. What matters is what that API lets you access, how well it’s documented and whether it can support the integrations you actually need. Before you add another piece of tech, find out what your PMS actually exposes, as API access can determine how quickly—or how painfully—you can get a new system up and running. (AI Hospitality Alliance)

Enseo says more than 70% of guests turn on the hotel TV, which means that the screen in the guestroom is doing a lot more than filling space between Netflix episodes. Used well, it can put a timely offer in front of a guest who’s already on property and make it easy to spend a little more. The trick is matching the offer to what the guest can actually buy right then.

Why it matters: The revenue opportunity gets interesting when the screen becomes a buying channel instead of a billboard. Late checkout, room upgrades and in-room dining all make sense when the guest can tap, order and get the service without calling the front desk. (Hotel Management)

When bookings slow, the answer isn’t always another discount. These six marketing shifts look at how to give guests a more compelling reason to travel when your hotel has rooms to fill.

Low season is a good example: It gets a lot easier to market when you stop treating it like the lesser version of peak season. Stop selling it as the “off-season” and start selling what guests can actually do then. Build the story around the trip, show where your hotel fits into it, and aim the message at the people who are most likely to make that trip in the first place.

Why it matters: There's no sense in spending every slow period pushing the same promotion. Sharper positioning gives your marketing a clearer message, while better audience targeting helps it reach the right people. The result? A more useful reason to market now and a better shot at converting demand. (Stay the Night)

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Mint Pillow is curated and written by Jennifer Glatt and edited by Bianca Prieto.