Direct Booking Summit 2026: Dedicated AI Training Sessions

The hotel industry has been talking about AI for years. At the Direct Booking Summit 2026 in Mexico City, the conversation ends and the work begins.

The Direct Booking Summit has always been the place where theory meets the real world. Hoteliers will share what worked, what didn’t, and what they are trying next, with the details you can bring back to your team.

The 2026 agenda adds a new element: a dedicated AI Training Track. Four sessions built specifically for hotel teams who know they need to do more with AI and are set to level up their skills.

Why AI is the defining conversation right now

The numbers behind this shift are not abstract.

80% of travellers now use AI-generated summaries for nearly half their hotel searches. Gartner predicts brands may lose up to 50% of direct traffic due to AI search by 2028. 24% of users already stop at AI summaries without clicking through to any website.

On the operations side, hotel teams manually run multiple reports daily.

These are not problems you can solve with a strategy session. They require tools, workflows, and skills that most hotel teams do not yet have. That is what the AI Training Track is built to deliver.

Four AI training sessions — and you can attend all of them

Each of the four sessions runs four times over the two days, with a 15-minute break between rounds. Attend all four, or spend the extra time at the sessions that matter most for your role. 

Here is what is on the agenda.

Adapting to AI Search & Optimizing Your Digital Presence with Ira Vouk, hospitality technology expert and author of Hospitality 2.0 and Hotel Tech 101.

When a guest asks ChatGPT or Google AI for a hotel recommendation in your city, your property either appears or it does not. The hotels showing up are not necessarily the best ones. They are the ones whose digital presence is structured in a way AI can read and recommend. This session is a live audit. You check your own property in the room, identify what is costing you visibility, and leave with an action plan.

AI & Automation in Your Day-to-Day with Ben Teresi, COO, Hawkins Hospitality.

Every Monday morning, someone on your team logs into five systems, pulls last week’s numbers, formats the report, and emails the GM. Then does it again for the comp set. All of it can be automated with tools available right now. This session will show you how.

AI Tools Demystified with Ben Stagakis, Triptease AI Champion.

Ben will walk through the AI tools that matter for hotel teams right now. You’ll get a decision framework for which category of tool solves which category of problem, and how to evaluate what is worth your time. Built for leaders who want to do more with AI but are not sure where to start.

Vibecoding: Build Your Own Tools Without Writing a Single Line of Code with Larry Hogan, Global VP, Customer Success, Triptease.

MIT Technology Review named vibe coding one of the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2026. The concept is straightforward: you describe what you want in plain language, and AI builds it. Attendees leave with a working example built in the room and a clear understanding of what they can create independently.

AI on the main stage, too

Beyond the training track, AI runs through the main stage agenda across both days.

On Day 1, Karina Alarcon, Search Product Partnerships for Latin America at Google, will break down The Google Hotels Opportunity: Free Reach, Hotel Ads, and the Agentic Booking Era

Now new capabilities like AI Mode, AI Overviews in search, and AI-powered Ask Maps are changing how travellers can find and book hotels – with more agentic capabilities on the horizon.

Karina Alarcon is Google’s first dedicated Hotel and Lodging lead for Latin America. In this session, she breaks down what is free, what is paid, how connectivity partners unlock both, and what AI could mean for your revenue strategy.

On Day 2, Ira Vouk and Patrick Upmann, AI Governance Expert at AIGN Global, will tackle a question most hotel teams have not asked yet: who is responsible when the AI gets it wrong? With the EU AI Act classifying automated pricing engines and guest profiling tools as high-risk, the governance gap is a legal and commercial exposure that most operators are unaware of.

The rest of the agenda

The AI track is new. Everything else that makes DBS worth the trip is still there.

• The Grupo Posadas team, Julián Díaz and Alma Medrano, will walk through how they are building a direct booking operation across 200 hotels.

• Bernard Tan, Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, Castle Resorts & Hotels, joins a panel to share how independent boutique hotels are pushing direct bookings.

• Gopu Menon, EVP Revenue and Distribution at Highgate, will cover how to win on metasearch without overspending.

• Andy Acs, co-founder of @hotel and Tripscout, will look at why hotel websites are losing the trust battle in the era of AI, and what to do about it.

• Liz Segel, Director of Marketing at Nobu Eden Roc Miami Beach, will unpack how a 621-room iconic resort sources, manages, and deploys creator content across its marketing channels. 

Full agenda here.

Who should be there

If you are responsible for direct bookings, digital marketing, revenue management, or e-commerce, the Direct Booking Summit 2026 is the event you simply can’t miss.

Bring someone from your team. The AI training sessions are built for both technical and non-technical attendees. There is no reason to send just one person, and we have created a bundle offer for this exact reason.

The Direct Booking Summit 2026 takes place at The St. Regis Mexico City on 12–13 May 2026.

About Triptease

Triptease are the pioneers of the Direct Booking Movement. For more than a decade, the company’s unique technology has helped thousands of hoteliers around the world to fight back against OTAs by driving more direct bookings and winning more valuable guests.

The Triptease Data Marketing Platform is a full-funnel marketing solution designed specifically for hotels, powered by their unique price, market and customer data. This data is applied across a range of industry-leading marketing products–including Metasearch, Paid Search, Display Retargeting, Website Personalization, and Email–to help hotels build direct guest relationships, reduce their cost of sale, and increase revenue.