Corporate Travel Is Changing Fast — Here’s What Hotels Must Do to Win in 2026

Glenn: Everybody. It’s your hospitality. Franklin, thank you so much for tuning in today as we try to figure out what’s going on with company bookings and how hotels are going to do in 2026. But listen, I want to thank our friends over at akimbo. Remember, approval. They give you the power to profit. Please check them out at bol.com. So I’m not much of an expert in what’s going on in that travel management kind of a world. So I found an expert and I got our sales. Mr. Lukasz Dabrowski, SVP of Global Supplier Relations at HR Group. Lucas, man, great to see you. How’s it going?

Lukasz: My pleasure. Great seeing you too, Glenn. I feel my seat is still warm from our last episode. You know, I’m becoming a resident on the show

Glenn: I know, right, I love it. I love your insights. So let’s get right to it. I’m feeling a lot of anxiety out there in the market throughout 2025. I started to become a little bit more anxious. What are you seeing in terms of travel management and the state of all things As we wind down 2025 into 2026 here in the States and globally. And answer that 10s or less. Go.

Lukasz: I honestly believe, you know, 2025 has been a pivotal year. Yeah. And I called the game is changing altogether. And that may play into some of your impressions.

Glenn: Yeah.

Lukasz: I honestly do believe that you know, the thing of the annual cycles of negotiations and requests for pricing and and spending basically 9 to 10 months on it to to only redo it again in you know, a few weeks later, that’s, that’s just going away. You know, everybody likes when you’re a multinational company. Everybody likes predictability of spend. So they like to make their rates to the bank. They like to make them predictable. But the one thing that is coming in as a major enhancer is driven by the, the depth of data that we can now play with. And that goes for transient segment, that goes for meetings and groups. That also goes for long stay projects out of which we can derive patterns in real time. And trust me, 2026 and beyond, nobody gonna wait to negotiate or renegotiate the rate. In 12 months, if they see that there is major changes happening to their travel patterns and to the demand.

Glenn: Okay. So let’s let’s break that down for a second. Obviously, if I’m running a business, it’s important for me to know how much I’m going to be spending on travel to meet my budget requirements for the next year. But the combination of fluctuations in the economy, depending on what region or country you’re in, combined with the changes of technology, are kind of uprooting the way we have to think about everything. Lucas.

Lukasz: Perhaps there’s there is one common denominator to it, though you know that in favor of both the large corporations and the hoteliers, which is looking at total account contribution, it’s looking at the converged demand between the various business segments. And then for the corporates, it is, you know, very useful to be able to negotiate more and go beyond the traditional transient dialogue. So individual traffic dialogue and for the hotels, it’s a it’s an opportunity to basically open up for more business from the same large corporation that they used to know for their transient or meetings in groups, business, anything like that.

Glenn: So now let’s go on both sides. First. If I am the travel booker, how am I going to be in a better negotiating position going forward if I’m utilizing the tools out there correctly?

Lukasz: If if you’re the the travel CEO, this is how I like to call it, because of the wide responsibility that rests on those people’s shoulders.

Glenn: Here at vacancy, I am the travel CEO.

Lukasz: Absolutely. So and it’s all the data. It’s all on the data. And you have to there is no way around it. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to roll up your sleeves and dig through the data that is available that some partners in the travel space are making available to you. And when I talk about data, I mean data that goes deep all the way down to level three, level three, which is basically itemized, spent on a hotel invoice coming from a payment provider, coming from a credit card company. So it reflects the reality of what people do and where they go with a very high degree of, well, that’s real. Not what I think, not what I negotiated. But that’s actually what’s happening in this parameter in this point of interest, and because of AI and because of technology, you know, getting on a whole new level. Those data insights that are insanely complex and fragmented are now available to be sliced and diced into a decision making process that can happen almost in real time. So in other words, I get prompted as a travel CEO about that. You know, my volumes in New York, Manhattan are going somewhere else versus what I intended and versus what I negotiated. And then I can see the reason for it as well. And I can act in real time without making or without waiting for the next cycle of hotel negotiations to fix it.

Glenn: Right. And that’s going to be important going forward, I guess, for both sides. So how are hoteliers thinking about you know, utilizing the modern way of thinking things, particularly through what you’re doing as a travel management technology platform?

Lukasz: Yeah, I do believe, you know, there is a there is a very precious trend in finally hoteliers embracing the overall philosophy. And reality of converged business segment demand. Right. So the realization is behind us. Yes. Everybody knows that there are even some huge multinational companies that lead with meetings and events, business and transient follows. Right. So the traditional thinking of how we would structure and deploy our salespeople against those segments is completely gone. It’s it’s now way more open minded, way more focused on what is the real time opportunity. The question then is, you know, with all this knowledge, are the hotels able to organize themselves and their team to be able to deal with this business, with this centralized demand across multiple markets for chains or or across. Yeah. Destination level. Is there a central contact person who is actually capable of conducting that dialogue with the customer for multiple business segments? And can we really pull it off as an industry?

Glenn: Well, what do you think? And how can we help hoteliers get closer to making this a reality? So they could win business in 2026.

Lukasz: I think the you know, the philosophy, the principle of convergence. So, you know, looking at an account potential from multiple angles, business segments, right, is something that traditionally, you know, resonates better with the hotel chains, obviously, since convergence means more when you have multiple properties involved, when there is potential to be shared across multiple destinations and so on and so on. But that doesn’t take the you know, individual independent hotels out of the mix if they’re well placed, well positioned and so on. So I really see a lot of hoteliers being open to that approach. I see very few organizations doing it. Right. So putting themselves in the shoes of the travel CEO of the basically the corporate account trying to you know, figure out.

Glenn: Lucas, I love I love that you said that because one of the things that I find is this weird disconnect in all levels of our business is the executives don’t think about how they experience booking travel or how they actually stay and experience a room and all sorts of other things, like, why can’t we get a desk chair to be the right height for the desk, like these kinds of these kinds of things. That’s what you’re talking about, really. Take the other side, really take the other the other thought process. So how do how do we make that be more successful for us.

Lukasz: Honestly, there is only one answer, right? You have to get yourself out of your sort of niche, thinking through the prism of your hotel or your hotel chain, and really put yourself in the shoes of the corporate customer, their expectations, their entire experience, end to end. You know, emphasize on whatever’s most important to them. You know, any friction points that are well known for the industry, like virtual payments, for instance. Study those. Make sure that your hotel excels at keeping the customer satisfied when it comes to this particular dimension. It’s a it’s a massive win win corporation in terms of adoption and compliance and the hotel in terms of the volumes that they receive. And there’s more.

Glenn: Yeah. So how if you’re a smaller brand, how do you really stand out against the larger competition in this techno fueled environment? Because it could really level the playing field, or you could be buried into oblivion.

Lukasz: Yeah. I think, you know, what I’m going to say goes, you know, equally for smaller brands or independent hotels as well as some of the chain properties, you know, since since 2020, we have this major problem inside the industry, which is the highest operational costs since, you know, 16, 17 years running at well over 52, 53% right now. And we know the churn, the employee churn, that is that is one of the the biggest challenges and and problems inside the industry today. So I honestly, I’m going to compare it to you know, when you aspire to be a, a Ferrari, but you you run badly as a car, right? So it’s a Ferrari that is pretty bumped up and maybe you know, running at 100%.

Glenn: So that’s my life there, Lucas.

Lukasz: Thank you. Yeah, I get a little too close.

Glenn: To home with.

Lukasz: That. Well, my advice would be, you know back to basics, right? Do do what you can do and do it right. Be be a very good Volkswagen VW or a Toyota and make an impact to the customers. That is genuine. That is sustainable. You know, don’t overshoot in terms of your ambition. If you know that you can hold your strength with your current operational challenges, with your staffing issues on a certain level. Nothing wrong with that. A lot of the hoteliers adopt a strategy that I started calling the Golden Middle, which is actually a healthy balance between the hotel occupancy and the average rate kept at a level where you can deliver the service that is expected from the quality of your brand in a sustainable fashion, so that you don’t upset customers, but you make them stick.

Glenn: Yeah, man. So making them stick is so important. I think what Lucas is really talking about when you get back to basics is give people great value. You don’t have to be cheap. You just have to make sure people feel great for the price they are paying. Hey, Lucas, I feel like I’m heading over to this website. Com what am I going to find over there?

Lukasz: Well, you’ll find a lot about our end to end value proposition that starts from global procurement. Runs through search and book payment expense management and data warehousing data, data, data all the way down to VAT reclaim for the largest corporations of the world. So enjoy.

Glenn: Excellent, man. Thanks, Lucas. I really appreciate you being here. And I appreciate all of you guys for watching. Please, like, share this video. You know I’m a sensitive guy. I need you to, like, help me out of here. Thanks so much. We’ll see you next time. Really appreciate you. And we’ll see you back here. Bye.