Posts by Josiah Mackenzie
The Year of Operational AI: What Marriott and Hilton Figured Out First
Skift founder Rafat Ali opened the company’s Data + AI Summit in New York by calling 2026 “the year of operational AI.” For the early adopters, AI is out of the sandbox and inside the daily work of running a hotel. Consumer-facing features get copied fast, Ali noted. The real work is happening in the…
Read MoreHotel Leaders Turn to AI to Drive Financial Performance in 2026
Hotel industry performance is turning positive in 2026, until you adjust for inflation. In real terms, U.S. hotels overall are earning roughly 20 percent less than they did in 2019, and CoStar projects that gap to keep widening through 2027. Revenue is growing, but costs are growing faster. CoStar’s Jan Freitag shared this in front…
Read MoreHow to Drive Hotel NOI in 2026: Follow the Money
By Josiah Mackenzie, Vice President of Marketing at Actabl How do you drive NOI? That was the billion-dollar question on the main stage and in the hallways at the NYU International Hospitality Investment Forum (IHIF) this year. It was also the question I came to answer on a panel there: Unlocking NOI: The Plays Driving…
Read MoreHow Commonwealth Hotels Connected Labor and Finance to Drive Profitability Across Its Portfolio
Labor is the largest controllable expense in hospitality. But when labor data and financial forecasting live in separate systems, insights lag, and so does decision-making. At Commonwealth Hotels, integrating Hotel Effectiveness and ProfitSword from Actabl has created a real-time bridge between operations and finance. Read on to learn how this works and how shared insights…
Read MoreHow ProfitSword is Powering Profitability at Commonwealth Hotels
For many hotel operators, the biggest challenge isn’t buying new technology. It’s putting it to work. As we explored in our last article, ProfitSword by Actabl is now active across the entire portfolio at Commonwealth Hotels, providing visibility into performance and supporting better decision-making. In this article, we explore what this has looked like and…
Read MoreFast Track to Financial Visibility: How Commonwealth Hotels Quickly Activated ProfitSword Across More Than 40 Hotels
When you’re managing hotels, data should work for you, not slow you down. And that’s even more true the more hotels you’re managing. For Commonwealth Hotels, the challenge was finding the best way to do that – and ensuring they could implement a solution quickly and accurately across their entire portfolio of more than 40…
Read More