Hospitality’s Digital Reset with Ulrich Pillau (Apaleo)

Jessica
Uli, welcome to Pillow Talk Sessions. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I always get so much when I speak to you. You're just a sort of fountain of insight and information and knowledge and years of experience in the hotel tech space. So very excited to talk to you. But before we crack into our conversation, Uli, can you give our audience who may not already know you a brief overview of yourself but also about Apaleo as well.

Uli
Sure, absolutely. So I'm Uli Pillau. I'm one of the co-founders of Apaleo, a tech-based company in Munich. We are doing a technology platform for the hospitality industry, a PMS platform where actually modern hotel groups can run their digital tech stack on. So it's a company we founded. It is seven years old and it's growing very quickly around the world. Personally, I'm actually originally from the hospitality industry, so I've been working for some of the big hotel brands around the world and then very early on switched to technology so started to do a couple of software companies in our business different segments different types of software and that's what we have been doing for the past 20-25 years do startups in hospitality that focus on tech on modern tech and new ways of running hospitality businesses

Jessica
Brilliant, Uli, can we go back to your beginnings in hospitality actually? So what did you do originally in hospitality when you worked for the hotel brands? What was that part of your career before you moved to tech and before you moved to startups?

Uli
So very originally actually I was doing a hotel school and a hotel apprenticeship as so many people start in our industry. That's the usual or has been the usual starting point during my times. I was part of ⁓ Intercontinental when they first were running their first property in Germany, which still exists today, ⁓ 600 plus rooms hotel in the center of Berlin, which was the first property they had in Germany. It's still being run by Intercontinental.

one of the famous intercontinentals in Germany called the Berlin Intercontinental. So I did an apprenticeship there and then started to work for them in different locations, also for Hilton later on where I spent a couple of years. First on a hotel level, mostly in operations, rooms, division, reservation, front desk, but then also went into technology. So at the time only the big brands were using some kind of property management system and other software.

And then it got more popular so we introduced PMS and other technology into many hotels of those brands including revenue management at some point. So very exciting times. Very different to today. Today pretty much every hotel has a property management system and some other apps and modules around it. But at that point it was really the starting point of IT and technology in hotel business.

Jessica
I mean, if we think about how far we've come in that period of time for going when it really was very, very analog to where we are today, you've seen and been part of such a shift in tech adoption across hospitality and sort of seeing the impact it's had as well.

Uli
Yeah, absolutely. And I think when I look back at the past half year, year, it has been going even faster than ever before, obviously, due to AI coming into the industry, travel and hospitality and lots of shifts there. At the same time, the digitalization, which was also partially driven by the pandemic over the past five years, also was undergoing a lot of changes in hospitality ways on how hotel groups and operators

are running, were running their hotels, it all became more mobile, more digital. The guests did expect a different guest journey compared to what existed before. At the same time it's still very much a legacy technology in the entire industry. mean some of the big brands like Marriott are running their core systems which are partially 30-40 years old. It's still the old, very old technology infrastructures that exist in those brands. So it's two-sided.

of new operators, owners, ⁓ management companies that are doing it more modern ways and are expanding very quickly based upon tech models and you have still the existing brands which partially are very much legacy in how they operate and run their hotels.

Jessica
So it really is like a two player race in a way, a two different worlds, that real, real legacy towards now what we're seeing. And I know Uli, today you're in a hotel that I believe it's not quite opened yet, did you say, or has it opened the hotel that you're in?

Uli
It's in the pre-opening phase, so they are only selling or giving the rooms to friends and family and partners, but they are not officially open yet.

Jessica
So I'm going to make the assumption that they're very much in the new breed of hospitality operator that is tech forward.

Uli
Yeah, it's actually a very exciting combination here at this property. It's in London, central London, a 43 rooms property next to the British Museum, just two minutes away. Very well located. It's a very nice boutique hotel, great rooms, great lobby, only 43 rooms. So to the outside world, to the hotel guests, it appears more a boutique style hotel with a lot of personal service. But what they are doing is everything behind. So all of the

operations, the procedures, wherever they can they automate those through technology. And so this is really something which we find very exciting because it's the combination of delivering personal service to the guests, so being a host. They are really hosts here to the hotel guests and at the same time they use technology wherever they can to become more digital, more mobile, faster, more efficient. And this is what we are seeing.

And I think Citizen M from Amsterdam was one of the first to tell chance that that started that 15 years ago Where actually their staff on site was shifting to be ambassadors? Rather than to be front desk Clark so they got rid of the front desk completely at Citizen M different type of hotels and because technology was supporting them in most of their procedures including registration check-in room keys and check out and so on the people they have their

could do many other things servicing the customers better than ever before. And this is a model which is still in the early stages with most of the hotel brands where you come, lots of them operate very traditionally, but we have a few players in Europe and other areas which do it in a much more modern way.

Jessica
mean, Citizen was so ahead of its time doing that real kind of service model of staffing or using staff in a very non-traditional way. Feels so sort of ahead of its time. But we're seeing more and more of this, aren't we? That sort of, it's that what you call the autonomous hospitality where you've got a lot of the operations now automated, but then that does free up.

the and we talk about it a lot don't we in hospitality that it frees up the staff to then do the human centered stuff. The what you called hosting that making sure that people have a good stay and comfortable and welcomed and that kind of thing.

Uli
And I do see the technology support there in different ways that kick in. One is obviously everything which has to do with guest facing things. So the guest journey, when we traditionally look at hotel groups running that it's very old fashioned and it's not a nice experience. You go to some website and you compare prices because they are cheaper on booking.com or Expedia. You do research, then you book on one site, then you have to enter your data there and then

You have to enter it again when you come to the hotel and when you come to the next hotel of the same brand, they ask you for the same information again. So I think because a lot of the technology today is operating in silos, different systems, data is not crossing, it makes it very hard to provide a good guest experience. When I look at some of the more digital players, actually their guest journey is very impressive. And when you look at what the hotel guests say is, they rate often those groups and those operators.

higher because the experience they have in a digital more mobile way is far better from what they know from the other operators and groups. So I think this is one side. The guest journey can be working throughout all touch points in a very nice way including payment by the way because this is what lots of people forget about. The payment needs to be part of the core guest journey and then when you arrive at the hotel you are pre-registered. You don't need to give all of the information anymore. You don't need to stay

in line to check in to get your room key and all of that is possible via a great guest journey today. So this is one side of it. That's really when it comes to the guest. And the other thing is when you go to a typical hotel and take a serious look and how much manual procedures are still existing in the back office of such a hotel, it's incredible. The hotel front desk and reservation people and revenue people are spending often

hours and hours on manual procedures that can be easily automated. So for me, autonomous hotel is not don't serve the guests with good service by people. It is more how you can free up hotel staff and employees to serve the guests better in all areas of a hotel business. So that's the two areas, efficient back office automation through technology and then guest facing, guest journeys.

that work much better. And I think this is actually going nowadays even much faster than ever before because AI is kicking in so people are shifting the focus on how they search for travel, search for hotels, destinations in a completely different way than it happened in the past. And this for me will be a big disruption in the entire travel and hospitality industry because people are getting used to have confidence in chatGPT and the

likes rather than how they traditionally looked at hotels.

Jessica
I really want to come back to that point, Uli, because I think it is such an important shift that's happening in that discoverability and how we buy the hotel product. But I just want to come back to something that you said and then reflect something to you. So traditionally, because staying in a hotel is such an analog experience, it's a physical experience, the guest journey typically would just be about the stay. But really today, it's being

seeing that whole everything from search and discoverability right through to thinking about before you come the relationship that a hotel can have with a guest before they even arrive to checking in to the stay and payment to post day as well. Like a guest journey is much more like a digital customer journey today than it ever has been before, which is important. Now, something else I want to talk to you about, Uli, is

In writing my book, Tech Enabled Hospitality, you were one of the kind of the core voices that I interviewed for it and gave some great insight. And you talked a lot to me about culture and the culture shift that is required for tech adoption and becoming really tech enabled from that operation side and the experience side.

and around how important it is for leadership to really buy into it and seeing technology as a strategic play, not as a sort of tactical tool play. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and how important that is today to see technology strategically and as a cultural business thing.

Uli
Yeah, and actually it's the same thing when you talk about us, about tech companies. What initiatives you want to drive, you have to drive them with the full team and make sure everybody is on board. And for the hotels, one of the challenges is that hotel business was always operated the same way. know, the same thing hotel groups and hotels have been doing for the past hundred years, 50 years, whatever it is, that still exists today. And that makes it really hard.

for the people to think differently. So from our perspective, when you look at modern hotel chains that do it in a different way, they would always go and say the top has a different strategy, the management, the creators of that concept, and they have this in mind on how they want to service the guests and how they want to operate the hotels. And if that vision is being set correctly and is adapted throughout the organization in all parts,

it will work otherwise it wouldn't work. If it's just for a hotel chain to replace their old on-premise PMS by a more modern cloud PMS that wouldn't change anything. It's the same type of procedures, processes they'll still try to use. You have to have a mind shift in being more digital and saying I want to run it in a different way. I want to provide a different guest experience. I want to allow this and this and this to happen and these things should not take place in my hotel anymore. And often that comes to the point where you say what is actually the product you're having. So it starts with a vision and a strategy and then you go and say this is the accommodation product you want to place in a market and it has to look like that the rooms should be looking like that. The guests which I expect should be those guests to raise the right expectations with these guests because still today you have lots of people that want to go into five-star deluxe properties and then they are better

to go to a Mandarin or Yantle or Ritz Carlton or whoever that is and the expectation is being set differently. When people go to a more modern hotel chain like Citizen ⁓ or Numa or Lime Home they know what they expect. They expect a product which is completely set digital. They will have to do everything in a digital way.

I think this mind shift is important to put it as part of your strategy and communicate it throughout the entire organization. And when you look at, for example, what Citizen Dem did since day one is, they said actually the guys we want to work with in our properties as ambassadors, they won't be hotel people. They won't be people that have had a traditional hotel education, but they can come from any industry because their focus is not on trying to type in a million things into a into a PC or into a laptop, take credit cards, run the credit cards through point of sale machines and so on. But their purpose was to say technology has to do everything in the background and the people have to focus on the guests. And if that's the case and the technology is easy enough, then actually you can use people from any industry to run your properties. You don't need hotel educated people anymore, which is actually another challenge a lot of hotels and hotel groups are experiencing in

Europe, UK, Germany, France, pretty much everywhere throughout. Labour cost has been rising extremely high. You don't find the people anymore that want to work in hotel businesses. Just in German hospitality you've had 800,000 people that left hospitality during Corona because the hotels were closed and they had to find a different job and they are not coming back into hospitality. So I think the mind shift needs to be there on what I

What do I do in three years, five years with my hotel or my accommodation business? ⁓

Jessica
It's interesting that shift because it forces

disruption, doesn't it? It sort of forces change, but also bringing new and different people in that may not have ever done hospitality also brings opportunity of different thinking and different ways of approaching things, different ways of looking at processes as well. I have a question for you. That mindset shift that an operator needs, where do you think we are at as an industry in terms of that mindset shift?

And is it accelerating at the pace it needs to be? So if we think on one level, we got the Marriott's with 40 year old tech, and then, you know, where we are today, do you think it's accelerating at the speed that it needs to, that entire shift?

Uli
Partially yes, partially not. think the existing brands are so old-fashioned in the way how they run their businesses. Whatever they do, they are trying to operate all hotels in the standardized way, which works in their model. But actually it's far away from offering modern hospitality products. The most exciting and most successful businesses we see that do it differently. Those are the ones that actually are

either not from the hospitality industry, are from other industries, e-commerce, digital, whatever, that are bringing new products onto the market, or it is people that say, you know, we start from zero, we have no hotels, we have a white piece of paper, we design our product, the strategy, the guest journey, the stay in a completely different way, and then we apply it from day one to what we are doing. Some of the existing brands, the bigger

other ones have tried to bring new concepts onto the market that are similar to a Citizen and others and lots of them actually have not managed to do it in a very progressive way. So this is also the reason why Intercontinental has acquired the Ruby brand, by Marriott has now acquired the Citizen brand earlier this year. These are brands that are operating completely different and when the hotel groups, the existing ones bring new concepts on the market, they run them exactly the same way they

as they run all of their other brands. And that makes it really hard. the most successful and best businesses digital-wise we have seen with new people coming into the industry and say, know, we will run it digitally. We create a new product. We create a new strategy with it. We create the expectations for the guests. And then we operate it in our way.

Jessica
can we go back to another disruption topic that you talked about just a bit earlier and that is around LLMs and how it's impacting how people search and buy travel. And we're seeing a lot of this now. And I think my kind of feeling is there are a lot of people a little bit asleep or certainly have been a bit sort of in denial about this, about how LLMs are changing consumer behavior.

And whether that's guests or whether it's you're buying a pair of shoes or other things you might buy, how you're looking for them, the way you're doing your research, but then also how you're actually purchasing. So in terms of for the hotel sector, it's obviously we've got the OTAs there, we've got the call for more direct bookings, and we also maybe have an unknown about how things will change. But I'd love to hear your thoughts.

on the disruption that we're going to be seeing here.

Uli
I think when you talk about the unknown, is something where nobody can really predict where this whole thing is moving. I mean, we are seeing lots of trends, new things coming onto the market. We see that especially the younger generation are shifting their trust. And when I say shifting their that means our generation and some other generations were still looking up hotels in a different way. They were planning their travel in a different way. There are travel agents formally which exist.

where people were going to travel agents, then it was shifting to digital research, comparing prices and travel on websites, booking.com and Expedia that went into flights and other things than just hotel rooms. But nowadays, actually, especially the younger generation, they are getting used to consult, chatGPT and the likes for anything. They go there and say whatever they want to do, they ask chatGPT and they trust the responses. So some of these will also have a huge impact on how quickly the research for travel trips, holidays, business trips, whatever is shifting and that will go faster than everybody might think. I'm in technology, have been in technology for the past 30 years, but what I've seen happening over the past year and then over the past six months and now over the past six weeks has been faster than anything before.

I think when you look at MCP servers and how that's all coming on board, that will cause a huge disruption because the models will change completely. Suddenly, you won't have data sitting in silos anymore, but agents are starting to talk to each other. And when agents are starting to talk to each other, that means actually any information you want to get as a hotel guest, as a traveler, but even as a hotel employee, you can get much

faster and in many different ways. So for me that will be a ⁓ big ⁓ shift which is already ongoing and we see some people that are again front on us and lots of people that are standing still and don't know what to do and I think that's the worst at this case, at this place. But also which is actually interesting is that a lot of the accommodation businesses in our industry they don't have the technical infrastructure to

even support or try or test or pilot MCP or agents or things like that. They are still stuck in old infrastructure technology with different software pieces in silos. So for those operators it will be very hard to move forward faster. A good infrastructure and open systems and platforms will allow to move much quicker in this area as well.

Jessica
So it sounds like the most important thing then is to make sure that the infrastructure is there and you've got those systems there to be able to do it. Otherwise, and also it's overwhelming, isn't it, for hoteliers to be thinking about, how do we move forwards here?

Uli
⁓ That's definitely something, but it's actually more than that. It's also with the current technology and AI available, you can actually try out many more things than you could ever before and much faster. So for me, it also means that it's not only having the right infrastructure in place, but don't stop. mean, really test things, go to people that are innovative, younger people, developers, AI developers,

see how those agents or whatever it is can be combined with your current tech stack and how you can use it much faster. Obviously, if you have closed systems in place, it's very tough to rely on those to put more modern agent technology or AI technology in place. That in many cases will not work. However, there are still ways available to make it happen. But ⁓ people that have an open infrastructure, open platforms can move much faster there.

Jessica
they can always talk to Apaleo as well if they're looking for a solution as well. ⁓

Uli

I think there are few players that have the offering the right platform approach. But when it comes to AI, we are not the AI developers ourselves either. We have an AI group with our development team, but what we do is we enable anybody in the world to put AI agents and agents on top of what we have. And that way we can be much more innovative and our clients can try and test things much faster than with any other platform.

Jessica
And another disruption or change that we're seeing in hospitality is that kind of convergence of asset classes as well. that sort of, we're not seeing, we're seeing a sort of a move away. Maybe it's less a move away, but a move towards something different. sort of different types of hospitality offering that may look a little bit more like a

co-living blend or a built to rent blend or a service department blend or a, you know, different types. And I'd love to hear your take on that. And then how, where you see that going as well, these different types of lodging types.

Uli
So first of all, think there are obviously new ideas coming all the time. So there are people out there that say, you know, this is the type of accommodation product I want to bring into hospitality because I haven't seen it. I don't know. It doesn't exist, but I have a specific idea. So you have entrepreneurs that start with fresh ideas and they bring them products to the market and concepts which are really unique. And this you see happening in different places throughout Europe and internationally already.

and come back to a few of them just to mention them. And then obviously there's also the legal aspect. So you have some laws that are kicking in in different countries and in the EU, which is driving innovation in hospitality. also mention the product, a new product there in a moment. And then obviously a lot of the existing operators are becoming more hybrid. And when I say more hybrid is the concepts are changing. It's not fixed hotel rooms anymore. It could be a combination of hotel rooms.

might have student accommodation, might have in the same building rooms that are being rented out for three days or a weekend, you have rooms that are being rented out in the same room as an apartment over three months or six months. So what we have seen over the past 10 years that those hybrid business models are coming more and more onto the market. And there are lots of operators that actually manage different types of properties that serve different segments. And this is something we are seeing more and more.

I just mentioned a few. mean, hostel market is becoming increasingly interesting. There is a luxury camping segment which is taking off in many European countries now. You have senior living, not senior living like we know it today, but really campus style senior living where people that have money can spend years and years. And they will have an offering which ranges from restaurants, bars, cinemas, sports.

facilities, anything you could imagine. So it's a different type of senior living we are seeing coming on board. And coming back to the legal side, I mean, one good example would be in Germany or in the EU, actually, as of January, a new law kicks in that ⁓ truck drivers that are driving throughout Europe all the time, they are not allowed to stay in their cabins more than one night. So before they were spending weekends in their cabins where they couldn't drive through on the roads. And nowadays the new law says they have

to spend ⁓ more than one night if they stay somewhere they have to spend at a hotel room. And so there's a new model coming where along the highways in Germany operators are putting kind of luxury cabins or reduced hotel rooms whatever you want with a complete digital guest journey where truck drivers can book the cabins online, they pay them online. It's not very luxurious but they have everything they need. And for those businesses for example truck drive

or transportation business, they couldn't afford to pay hotel rooms for their truck drivers because it's such a small margin. So this type of thing is coming ⁓ all over the place and we see lots of exciting developments. There's a German operator called Life. Raus, an ex-AirBnB guy who founded it a couple of years back and they are putting individual luxury cabins into the nature. So you go to somewhere, to a lake, to the mountains, to wherever, and you find one luxury cabin concept here in London today, are putting right in the center of Covent Garden, they are putting 560 pots into a building. The Japanese style pots, which are in a very central location, younger people will go there to party and they pay just then a reduced price per night for a nice cabin. So different ideas that are coming onto the market.

Jessica
Wow. Yes.

Yeah, no, that's interesting. And almost all of those, well, actually, all of those work perfectly, very, very well with the autonomous hospitality as well.

Uli
And they have to. mean, there's no way you can do it differently. And when you look at our children, they wouldn't do the old style hotel travel anymore anyway. They want to have everything online. They are used to it from all of the tools they are using. So unless they actually don't want to speak to people at the hotel anymore. So unless they can do their whole travel digitally. Yeah, that's another problem you have sometimes.

Jessica
Yeah.

I don't want to speak to anyone.

I'm actually taking my daughter to Japan next year and her wish list is to stay in a pod hotel. So we probably don't have to go there. We can just go to London and stay in Covent Garden. But just back to all of this changing the business models, if you like, and having kind of complex different business offerings.

makes it extremely complex, especially if you are looking at different market segments. So if you're looking at senior living for a later living product, but then you're also looking at short stay, a hospitality kind of offering, it's far more complex in a way than it might have been if it was just like, we're a hotel here, we've got X amount of rooms and we do this type of customer. So how do you see that complexity?

being operationally simplified going forward so that it is a growth model.

Uli
Yeah, I'm so-

One example would be short-term rentals. mean, in the past you had Airbnbs and others and you were able as an owner to rent your apartment out individually or one, two apartments. We see this industry also changing quickly. So you have more and more people that are actually growing by operating not one or two apartments, by operating 20, 50, 100 apartments. And in order to do this in a sustainable way

be

profitable and have a good model, they actually need to streamline their processes. And so those operators actually are looking at technology, digital technology and AI on how they can actually offer the guests a very good journey, a very good experience, but at the same time have the processes in place that support this. So Numa, as an example, they are operating in Berlin and other cities, quite a number of properties without staff. So it's entire

staffless but the guest feedback is very good because the guest journey is so good and the guest journey has to work 100 % reliably because there are no people on site that could help you if something goes wrong. So I would say the standardization of processes through technology and supporting the digital guest journey is a key for those. Otherwise their concept wouldn't be working. They would be switching back to the more traditional type of hotel style operations and that is not part of their business model.

same time they are then targeting specific customers. they say I don't want to be a product for everybody. If you want personal service, if you want to have a front desk, people to talk to, then go to a more three-star, four-star traditional hotel where you can do that. But be prepared that the guest journey is not that nice, that you have to queue in line for check-in and check-out and the whole experience is completely different. So again putting the right expectations in place on what your

product offers in accommodation is very important and very critical. And if your apartment or renting out a short term rental or whatever it is, you have to clearly position yourself so that everybody from day one minute one sees where I buying. And this we have learned from e-commerce, which exists in other industries. Other verticals has been existing there for quite a while in hotel business. E-commerce is still not fully understood by many.

people.

Jessica
And actually, the sort of the big wraparound of that is know your customer, isn't it? So make sure that you've got the right product for the right customer. Uli, where do you see things going? So I know that especially today, we can't have that magic crystal ball. But over the, I guess the short term, because again, long term, it's difficult to sort of see. But where do you think things are going for hospitality? So if you had...

to sort of guess what this time next year would be, what do you think we'll be seeing more of? And maybe what we might see less of in hospitality.

Uli
I think the existing hospitality businesses operating in a traditional way, they will be all struggling. So I think you still have the luxury segment of five star properties and chains that have their room. There's always an audience. There are always people, guests that want to spend their money, lots of money for that, and they want to stay in those properties. So I think they definitely have room. Everything below, they will be struggling because the old way of operating is

not efficient anymore. It will not produce the results the owners and the people that are investing into hotel businesses are expecting. So people will have to change drastically the way that works. So I think we'll see a lot of consolidation in the industry where the bigger brands are buying smaller groups because they can afford it and they have the efficiencies of obviously of structured corporate administration that is in place. So that is possible.

and will happen. On the other hand, think we will see more more new operators and ideas and concepts coming onto the market and some of them really will be disruptive. mean, CitizenM as we know it today, they have been completely new in 2008 when they opened their first properties. Nobody really understood it and lots of people tried to copy it, but they were not successful because they don't have the CitizenM DNA or had the CitizenM DNA. So the DNA

⁓

the passion for what you're doing and how you're putting products onto the market will be extremely important. And I think the direction of operating autonomous hotels and AI agent hotels that will change a lot of things in on a hotel and but as well on a corporate level how things are being done. So I would expect that even still in 2026 maybe middle of 2026 we will see the first agent operated

hotels, properties being on the market that test on how actually can I run a hotel through an agent and no more involvement ⁓ by people doing that. Let's see how successful that is. We already see within actually our customer base a lot of people that are moving that direction and they are piloting and trusting out and rolling out actually agents in different ways.

Jessica
that's so exciting to see how that rolls out as well. And no doubt it will have a little bit of a messy beginning, but then it's iterating and learning, isn't it? And for you Uli and for Apaleo, before we come to the end of the call, I'd love to know what you've got coming up. And then also, how can people find out a little bit more about Apaleo?

Uli
I mean anybody could contact us and look us up via LinkedIn or via our website apaleo.com. We have a lot of conferences, events where we are speaking and presenting, being invited to talk about what is technology changing in our industry. Also people can get in touch with me directly via LinkedIn. find out. But what's particularly interesting is when you look at the use cases which are popular on our website, you will find actually the different concepts which are there.

and which do support different ways of running accommodation businesses in all kinds of market segments. So that's a good starting point to get acquainted with what's possible. And then it's obviously for us moving the technology faster than ever. And I think we claim at Apaleo not to be an all-in-one property management system. We would never develop our own apps, modules, components. That's not what we are in for. We rely on

the ecosystem of apps and developers and to tell operators out there to do anything on top of Apaleo, put their own tech stacks together. And because we have a unique architecture in our industry, which is API first, very technical, but the API first means as well that we are agent first. And that ⁓ allows lots of agent developers and programmers and startups actually to come to us, develop whatever they have in mind on top of

Apaleo platform and then start rolling it out to our customer base. So for us it's more we have the transactional backbone to allow anybody to do anything what they want in hospitality.

Jessica
So often we, sometimes it said that there's not much innovation because it's difficult to do with the systems that are there, but what you guys are offering is true innovation ⁓ for the industry as well. So thank you, Uli. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's always a pleasure to speak with you and hope to have you back on maybe in six months and we can talk about the sort of the first agentic AI hotels.

Uli
Yeah, we will. Thank you very much, Jessica. It was an absolute pleasure