How Charlestowne Hotels Is Cutting Through AI Hype at HITEC 2025

Glenn: Hey, everybody. It’s your hospitality. Friend Glenn, here at Hi-Tech, I want to thank my good friends over at Unifocus, Technology that drives value. Check them out at unifocus.com, I got Matt Spangler, VP of technology for Charlestown Hotels. Really cool management company. How are you today?

Max: Great, Glenn, great to be here. Another high tech really exciting stuff happening.

Glenn: Oh, really exciting stuff happening. But there’s certain things that are happening here that’s, I think, starting to get confusing to people. We love AI, we think there’s going to be very successful. But I’m starting to feel like everybody is saying AI for the sake of AI, and it’s making it both important and meaningless at the same time. And I don’t understand how guys like you figure out what’s right and what’s not right, and how it all works.

Max: That’s right Glenn, everything’s been AI wash this year. Every company. Now, I love that phrase I want I can’t take credit for it, but it’s great.

Glenn: The whole idea is like, no matter what you’re selling or doing, you have to throw the buzzwords in.

Max: That’s right. You have to throw the buzzword buzzwords in. And for a company like Charlestown, how do we separate the noise, the fact from the fiction? And that really starts with a strong AI strategy. So knowing where your team stand, their comfortability level, what tools you want to use, how that informs your strategic direction, nobody’s got it all figured out. But the sooner that you can put forward a plan, a path, and recognize the strengths and the opportunities and the weaknesses and the threats, you can actually make some meaningful progress and understand who to work with, who not, and who to keep an eye on.

Glenn: So what kind of meaningful progress are you looking for, and have you been able to figure out solutions behind that yet?

Max: Yeah, absolutely. You know, for us internally we’ve got steering groups for every discipline. So marketing, revenue ops, you name it. Those groups put together plans. They test, they experiment, they have fun. You know, they just actually use the tools. That’s a good starting point from there. You know, our biggest thing right now is looking at how can we continue to generate internal proprietary tech using some of these tools. So, you know, we come here, we see a lot of cool things happening. But ultimately for us as a management company, we focus a ton on boutique hotels. So for us it’s what’s the right fit for the right property. A lot of the tools here are great, but you know, they’re trying to operate at a scale that Charlestown, you know, we’re really looking to focus on individuals, specifically tailored tools to work for our hotels and AI tools like a cursor or windsurf, give our very small teams an opportunity to actually build something pretty compelling.

Glenn: That’s pretty awesome. And just so you guys know, I mean, they regularly have hotels that are at the top of the list for like Travel and Leisure magazine, Condé Nast Traveler. So I’m talking really high end stuff. And you want to utilize this technology really to be able to. My guess is simplify the lives of the people of the property level in one way, and help them connect better with the people that you’re serving, right?

Max: That’s absolutely true. I mean, there’s always going to be a great AI tool or another incredibly compelling chatbot out there. But for us, our our core priority right now is how do we do this at the management company level to actually drive additional sort of automation for all of our teams? And there’s no better example for us right now than in the marketing department where AI image generation, video generation, being able to create slot compelling slide decks and what would take a team of people maybe days, weeks, months to actually put together. Now we’re doing it literally on the plane before we go to a pitch, and it’s like, it’s incredible. And the results are really compelling.

Glenn: That is insane. And the lazy part of me freaking loves it, no doubt. You know, it’s it’s not really lazy. It’s about being more efficient with your time and then being able to dedicate it to the stuff that you really need to use your brainpower.

Max: Well that’s right. I mean, and it can absolutely become a crutch for people who are just like, okay, I’m copying and pasting literally a response from every model out there into an email, into a PowerPoint. It’s looking at my PNL. I’m not actually taking what it’s saying or actually being an auditor. Who’s the critic? Who’s the auditor on some of the results coming out of these tools? So absolutely. Humans are still in the driver’s seat, but these tools are running neck and neck now.

Glenn: Yeah, they sure are. All right. So go back to the beginning of the conversation. I was saying, what recommendation would you have for folks that are marketing products in the hospitality industry, in the tech sphere, to just clean that up and be able to deliver their messaging without this AI confusion?

Max: Yeah. I mean, I think for me, for someone who evaluates tech all the time, 24 over seven, the biggest thing is being being able to actually quickly and confidently show what it’s doing and how you’re differentiating, and why you chose AI versus not choosing AI. That’s the biggest thing. I mean, there’s plenty of things out there that absolutely don’t need AI layered in right now. And so if you’re actually selling AI, how are you explaining it to me, a potential customer, why AI is the right choice.

Glenn: Right. And don’t just slap the the letters AI on the product that you already have, because it doesn’t make any sense. At least not to not to me. Right? Well said. All right. I think we nailed it. We got Max over here. I’m Glenn over here. Thanks to my friends over at InFocus. Check em out, Union folks. Com. See you all later. Bye bye.