How HotelPORT is Streamlining Hospitality with Fred Bean, CEO

Hotel listings are supposed to be the easy part of distribution. Then you look closer and realize how often the basics are wrong: amenities, room details, policies, photos, outlet hours, phone numbers, and even where that information appears across OTAs, GDSs, maps, and review platforms. In this Captains of Industry episode, we’re joined by Fred Bean, CEO and founder of HotelPORT, to explore why content accuracy became a blind spot in hospitality technology and what it really takes to fix it at scale.

We unpack how HotelPORT built Property View to audit and verify hotel content across third party endpoints, creating a structured system of record that teams can actually trust. Fred also shares a surprising operational reality: hotels can leave meaningful revenue on the table when OTA payments are not reconciled and collected on time. We discuss why this happens, how to reduce breakage, and what a practical, transparent approach looks like.

From there, we turn to the impact of AI. As large language models and AI powered search begin to answer travel questions directly, inaccurate data is no longer just an inconvenience, it becomes a real risk. Fred explains why governance and normalized structured data are critical before adopting agentic AI, and why the industry may be moving toward a future where facts travel farther than traditional brand storytelling. We also touch on team culture, remote work, global expansion, and the broader consolidation trends shaping the industry.

👉 Listen to How Hotelport is Streamlining Hospitality

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:05

Hello, everyone, and welcome to season seven of Travel Trends. This is your host, Dan Christian, and I'm thrilled to be back for season seven and also with an amazing captain of industry that I was really keen to bring on to this season. I've read a lot about him. He's a very impressive executive in the travel industry. He's based in Miami, which is one of the most uh beautiful cities I think in the world. And Fred Bean runs Hotel Port. He's the CEO and founder of Hotel Port. Fred, it's great to have you on the Travel Trends Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. For sure. I've read so much about you, and I know that you're solving some really interesting problems within the hospitality space. But first of all, tell everyone a bit about you and your background. I know you're from Nebraska, and I was asking him before he's got a bit of a Canadian connection. But yeah, tell us a little bit about your background.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

So yeah, I'm originally from Omaha, Nebraska, uh, born and raised. And most of the time when people hear that, they go, oh, wow. Haven't met anybody from Nebraska. Uh, but in the travel industry, my background, I always like to tell people I'm kind of like the forest gumpf of travel distribution, in that I just happen to have been in a lot of the foundational areas that laid the foundation for travel distribution. So in 1994, I was at Hyatt, where the first hotel reservation online was done. In 97 and 99 at Saber, where we did a lot of industry first there, moved out to Silicon Valley for World Res, and then to Texas uh again with Travel Web. I also worked for Travelocity in there, then Travel Web, and then Senate Corporation, and then I started my own company in Miami in 2006. And that's kind of how we got to where we are today.

SPEAKER_02 1:34

Yeah, Travelocity, everyone remembers the GNOME. If you if you know, you know. Yeah, Travelosity at the control. That was a whole other era of OTAs with Travelocity and um before X Expedia dominated that space and then booking came in. So yeah, you've been on this journey for you know more than 20 years. So uh you clearly have a lot of expertise in it uh in this space, but tell us a little bit about Hotel Port specifically, because I know you had your own business and you created Hotel Port, but tell us a bit of the backstory about Hotel Port and a little bit more about the company.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Yeah. So when I left Centon Corporation back in like at the end of 2005, early 2006, I started consulting and launched my company, Rebel Travel Corporation. And over the next few years, things were going well. I was retained as a consultant. But in 2009, Starwood reached out to me and said, hey, we're having problems getting content updated across third-party channels. And that didn't make sense to me because I had been in the industry for a long time already at that point, worked with a lot of the launches of OTAs and intermediaries and things of that nature. So I knew content was getting distributed. But it turned out as we started to investigate it, and I went and talked to all of the industry players and said, hey, there's a problem that Starwood has. Let's get this fixed because you guys are already connected to these channels. Uh, none of them wanted to touch it. And I realized as we started to look further into it, they didn't want to touch it because it was a very complicated problem. And so as I started to peel the layers back, I realized there really was an issue. We started with a three-column spreadsheet and a three-property pilot. And I was going out and auditing OTAs myself and making updates and showing the reports. It was a really ugly report, but they loved it. And then they said, this is great. Let's move forward. We're going to give you more properties, incorporate you into the brand transition process. And we went from there. So me in South Beach doing audits in my living room while I was doing consulting on the side, thinking that eventually somebody's going to pick this up and take it, and I won't have to do it all the time. And then here we are 16 years later.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

Yeah, that's cool. And I know you have your, you know, your company's been around for 20 years, the being a telesphere group. And then, but Hotelport launched in June 2019, which is uh inauspicious time given what we all know when we went through in 2020. And that's one of the questions I have to ask you. But before I do, tell us the problem that you were trying to solve with Hotel Port. What was it about the startup concept that is the reason that customers took to it and that it has grown so significantly post-pandemic? But yeah, what what were the challenges you were trying to solve?

SPEAKER_00 3:57

Yeah, and and to clarify as well, we we launched the Hotel Port brand name in 2009 when we started the Starwood thing. And then in 2019, because I got tired of using a third-party technology or spreadsheets, I partnered with a company called GP Solutions out of Germany, uh, who does a lot of tour operator and wholesaler development. And we built the Property View platform, took it from third-party technology to proprietary. The problem that we're trying to solve is that content is something that's been largely neglected in the hospitality industry over the last 25, 30 years. And the challenge is that hotels have a fragmented distribution system that they're responsible for managing and keeping accurate across an array of third-party channels. Most of the time, they don't even have any idea where their content is displayed and whether or not it's accurate. And there were no tools that were built to help them. Everybody's focused on availability rates and inventory. Nobody was focused on content.

SPEAKER_02 4:49

This is the part that I find fascinating because clearly companies like Muse, that especially in the hospitality space, there is a lot of friction and there is also lots of challenges with distribution, obviously, uh, in terms of yourself with content and um but I guess when you identify the gap, so you knew there was a gap in the market because you've been consulting in this space, but you actually saw there's an opportunity to create the technology of the software that companies would use. So tell us a little bit more about that journey specifically, because you know, when I was checking out, and people, if you want to follow along, uh, or multitask, it's hotelport.co. And so tell everyone a little bit about what software, because I know it's now become kind of very focused on AI, um, but what was kind of the initial premise of the software that you were looking to create that didn't really exist?

SPEAKER_00 5:36

Well, I wanted to be able to create a view of the information for hotels across their portfolios and across the channels on which they had content. I learned a long time ago in my travel web days that even if you develop something for the brands, because we had uh obviously Starwood as our launch partner, it wasn't until we started talking to the management companies that we realized that there was a bigger problem here, and it was across hotels. It wasn't just Starwood, because we were talking to management companies that would say, hey, this is a great solution, nothing like it exists, but I've got Hyatt's, I've got Hilton's, I've got you know Windham properties. How come you're not doing it for them? And I was like, oh, you know what? That's a good point. And then as I started to extrapolate the number of brand conversions and things that happen where all these gaps are, I was like, okay, this could be a real business. And it actually got to a point where I believe it was early in 2010 or 2011, um, another very large uh multinational chain reached out to me and said, We love what you're doing for Starwood, but we've got 600 hotels in our Select Service and Extended Stay portfolio that we'd like you to provide the service for. Now, at that time it was just me doing the audits myself in my living room in South Beach. Now, the greedy part of my brain was like, take the deal, take the deal, because it would be, you know, over a million dollars in revenue, uh, which looked really good right after the economic collapse, right? Uh, because that's the other thing. We've been through two of these now. So 2009, 2010. So uh, but I couldn't, in good conscience, take the deal. So I said, look, I I we can't do that right now, because I knew I would irreparably damage my relationship with them by taking the money and not being able to fulfill. So we worked out a deal where they two would just give us properties one by one that were transitioning into their portfolio. And they were giving them at a larger clip. And then I started hiring people working out of my living room in South Beach, and then we built the business from there. That was the aha moment, because a lot of people go, What was the aha moment? Well, that was it because it was a large multinational chain comes to me and says, Hey, we want to give you all of the hotels in our portfolio, and I couldn't service it, which led me to believe that there's a real business to build here, even though nobody was going to give me six figures at the time to build a platform. We could start manually and then work our way to the point that we could invest in the platform.

SPEAKER_02 7:49

Very interesting. And one of the things, uh, one of the reasons I was keen to have you on, I had read the article that you were featured in in FocusWire with a CEO spotlight. And the reason I want to mention this now is because I always like to get to know the cool thing about this discussion is that we've not met before. Obviously, I look forward to seeing you at some point over the course of the year after we've had this conversation. But for me with the podcast, it's about meeting fascinating people that are doing really interesting things and making a difference in the industry. And what really stood out to me not only is what you had accomplished, um, which is why I want to discuss hotel port, but your background and one of the things you got asked by their team was if someone want to buy hotel port for 50 million and you had to kind of decide to walk away from travel, what would you do? And I just wanted to highlight to our listeners the foundation that you created because it it really stood out to me, and I think this is very meaningful. Um, tell us I know you you work with uh kids that are food insecure. So tell us a little bit about that, because obviously I think that that that uh shines a light on the person behind the business that I think is incredibly important.

Big Foundation And Giving Back

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Yeah, you know, it's interesting because this actually struck me because I was approached by um the high school here in in the city, and they were looking for food to provide for their band and I guess for the football team because they said this might be the only meal that these kids have during the day. And so I started to dig into this a little bit more after going and talking to all the restaurants in town and saying, hey, can we contribute food for this? And everybody's like, no, we're too strapped, we can't do it. And I was like, why isn't there somebody that's just doing this? And so, you know, I started to study up on, you know, where are we from a food insecurity perspective? And I found out that in Miami Dade County where I'm located, about 14% of school-aged kids, K through 12, are food insecure, meaning they might get one meal a day if they're lucky. And 70% of those kids don't qualify for benefits. And as I started to dig further into that, a lot of those kids have families that work in the hospitality industry. And to me, that was just unacceptable. And so I said, you know what, we've got to do something about it. And I will tell you that starting Big Foundation, it's it's kind of a labor of love because uh, one, it's it's something that's kind of a legacy to leave behind, but it doesn't make sense to make a lot of money if you're not going to do some good with it. And so what we're doing right now is we're in the process of raising money, finding hospitality partners, because the idea is to launch a culinary skills initiative to not only just give kids food, it's about teaching them skills that will then give them a pathway into the hospitality education system if they want to go through uh hospitality education, like I'm an advisor for St. Thomas University, you know, we've got other universities in the area, or into the job market, which is probably even going to be more important these days. So that's kind of what my objective is. And we're kind of raising money on the side with that, what we're doing with uh Hotel Port and my other companies. Uh, but yes, at the end of the day, if I ever were to sell Hotel Port, that's what I would be doing full-time is pestering people that I've met through the industry to help me feed these kids because you know we're we're doing this, trying to start this in Miami, but there are other markets, even like Toronto, Dallas, and other areas where people have expressed interest and wanting to get involved. Uh, and I think it's a great cause, and it's something that we should all want to contribute to because we're creating more resources and we're going to need those in the hospitality industry, and we're doing good in general.

Auditing Content Plus Lost Revenue

SPEAKER_02 11:10

Yeah, I love that. Absolutely love it. I was uh, you know, when you and this I find the consistency in entrepreneurs that have um a real commitment to the industry and obviously a big heart as well, that actually it's that intellectual curiosity when you kind of uncover there's another problem and you're like, how can I actually help and get involved and solve it? And you come from a real genuine and sincere place. And if, you know, if our mission in the industry is to kind of improve people's lives, and and we obviously there's ways to do that through business and to generate a profit and hire staff members and and and support them, but at the same time, um having these initiatives, like I think it's incredibly important. So I just wanted to call that out at the beginning, but to kind of go back to Hotel Port and what you've built, I want to talk through a little bit upon the solution side, and then we'll talk a bit about uh the team as well. So I understand the property view, like this content monitor, um, that obviously was kind of like the key to your success. But when we think about and and people listening to this trying to figure out, wait a second, am I a target uh uh for uh the solutions they have? Take us through. I know you guys you do content marketing, you do guest engagement, uh, you even do reputation management for that matter, um, um, and a lot of verification, content and payment. So take us through some of the things that Hotel Port does that doesn't really exist elsewhere or that you do uh, or I'm sure better than others.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

Well, so our content auditing platform that we have, it we built that, we basically created that market because again, it didn't exist before we started doing it. And rather than being a distribution platform, we wanted to build an auditing layer over the ecosystem. So we have the ability to log into and work with pretty much every content distribution entity that's out there on behalf of the hotels. And that's sort of where we started. But once we got in there, we started to realize that there were other issues that hotels were having when it came to distribution, one of those being reconciliation of their payments across the online travel agencies. We did an audit on a couple of the largest platforms to see how much revenue had hotels not collected over the last 12 months. We audited about 1,500 hotels, found$7 million that was uncollected. And as we started talking to the hotels, I was wanting to know why, because and this is probably not gonna make a lot of people happy that are on this side of the fence, but the reconciliation business, which is very lucrative, is is really an a niche that shouldn't exist. And what I mean by that is if the hotels were actually doing their job and collecting the revenue when it should be collected and not leaving it as breakage for the OTAs to claim, uh, they'd have a lot more revenue on their bottom line and the these other vendors wouldn't exist. Now, I shouldn't say that because I'm one of those vendors that's helping to do the reconciliation, but I like to think that we're doing this as an honest broker because we're saying, look, if you don't collect the revenue, you're gonna lose it. So the way that we handle that right now is we wait 60 days to give the hotels the opportunity to collect, and then anything 60 days or more past due that's checked out, we'll go collect, reconcile it, and submit the payment back to the hotel. Um, but again, that's because the hotel's resource constrained. There are other issues that they have, and to me it was another problem to solve. And I think the the difference, and also part of the frustration that I have, and hopefully that didn't come across in the FocusWire article, is that there's a lot of money that gets spent on a lot of startups in the tourism and hospitality space. The majority of them are not good companies. The majority of them are products, they're not companies, they're things that can be tucked in. Um what we've done, and we've bootstrapped pretty much up until last year until we took the the venture debt was talk to the hotels, figure out what the problems are that they need solved, and then build a solution to actually solve that particular problem. So we're not creating a solution that's searching for a market. We actually have a market that's got problems that they need fixed, and they need somebody they can trust to work with, and that's why we focused on that. And to that point, on the reputation management side, um, which I try to call it guest engagement instead of reputation management, because I think that market is saturated. Uh, but what we found was that the hotels needed uh a very light touch solution that could leverage AI to help them generate responses, approve the responses, then publish them. But uh, in talking to hotels, many of them are spending hours upon hours a week responding to reviews and they just don't have the time or bandwidth to do it. And when they get frustrated, they just stop. So being able to provide a lightweight solution that supports their most important channels has peeled already from one of our hotels. They told me it's saving them about 25 hours a week. And so it's also one of those things because it leverages AI, it helps them dip their toes in the water without being intimidating and also not selling a lot of the hype that's in the AI industry. And we can talk about that later, but um that's something that's obviously coming uh down the line with everything else that's going on.

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SPEAKER_01 15:59

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Hotels Restaurants Spas Target Clients

SPEAKER_02 17:46

And now back to the show. I also want to talk about the type of clients that you work with, because as you've highlighted, I mean, hotel port is focused on hospitality, but that's not exclusively hotels and resorts. You actually work with restaurants and spas. And so you're just keen to get your take on, you know, what is a who is your target client? Because it's always interesting when you build some technology, you're like, wait a second, this works as well for restaurants as it does because obviously they're part of the hotel experience, as are spas. So how did you decide to break those out? And who would you say is your your target audience?

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Well, it all starts with the hotel because the reason that we expanded into restaurants and spas is that we found that hotels were underutilizing assets that they had internally. And when they were focused on things like brand conversions and other work, they weren't including the outlets as well. And so we decided to start taking a look at what was going on there and said, look, there are listings that are separate and profiles and distributions separate for restaurants and spas. And a lot of that information is outdated. Now, many of those channels are poorly managed, but you also have these super channels like Open Table and others, Yelp, even where they're just poorly managed because the hotels don't have time to go in and deal with them. And then when you look at the FB side of things, they're usually even more challenged because a lot of them don't understand distribution beyond one or two channels, aside from their own website. So what we decided to do was one, start with the hotels, streamline that process that we've already done for hotels, add that technology for restaurants and spas, and then sort of continue to grow in that particular space, especially because I found that restaurants were really neglected. Spas are their own sort of similar issue, uh, but there's what, over 15 million restaurants worldwide, and many of our luxury hotels have restaurants within them. That's an another asset that can generate ancillary revenue for them, especially if they're also marketing to the local market. So making sure the telephone numbers are correct, the website information, the menus are correct. That's a lot of work to do, and they don't have the resources to do it. So we decided to take that burden on for them so they could focus on the strategic aspects of marketing. Um but to your point, our our target customers are hotels. Uh that includes management companies, ownership groups, brands. Um, you know, we love all of them. Uh I love the management companies probably the most because uh, you know, brands are are difficult to work with. Even though I know most of the people at most of the brands and worked with them over 20 years, you know, they've got a long list of people that are trying to get in the door there. And most of them, you know, they've got to sift through the garbage and everything else. But management companies are the ones that are managing the assets. And so they bring us in, we solve the solution, we become brand approved, and then we can work with anybody. Um, so hotels, uh management companies, uh brands, as I mentioned, ownership groups, and then restaurants, we can work with chains, we can work with independent operators. Um, we love independent operators as well because most of them don't have a tech stack that, or if they do, it's very fragmented and difficult to manage. And then, of course, you have the turnover situation. And one example that I love to use as it relates to why this is effective and sticky, uh, and I just had a call with them the other day. I love to use my my longtime partner uh Viceroy. So aside from I guess Marriott, because they acquired Starwood and we started this for Starwood, uh, we've been working with the Viceroy uh hotels and resorts team for 16 years. So they were with us before we built our technology platform. They were back with us back in the third-party technology in the three-column spreadsheet days. Um, and we just realized uh in talking that the longest tenured person that's there now, I've been there four years longer than they have. And so what that and I say that to to basically illustrate that the service that we're providing does provide value, it's very sticky, and it solves a problem or a point of pain uh for our clients. And that's what we're building. Now, we've been asked to expand into golf clubs and courses and other things. Um, we're looking into that uh because if it's a need, we'll fill it. Um, but I'm trying to be more you know deliberative about how we go into other things so that we don't spread ourselves too thin.

AI Search And Verified Structured Data

SPEAKER_02 21:51

For sure. And obviously, you have to make those uh difficult decisions, but clearly there's lots of opportunity to expand. Um, given you have to focus on being a technology. Business and solving some of these pain points for customers. I'm very keen to open up this AI conversation now because you had highlighted in that article that if you see something that's that doesn't work, you kill it right away. And um uh because obviously AI isn't perfect, but I know there is, you know, uh clearly across the board, there's massive need to embrace uh uh AI tools and people are looking to company. Obviously, your investors are looking to you to figure out how you're becoming more efficient using AI, your customers are looking to you for the same reason, but also how you can improve the solution for their benefit. And one of the things that you specifically called out in that article was the fact that companies, hotels specifically, are not ready for uh this new era of large language model and consumer search behavior. So tell us a little bit about, I guess, first of all, maybe Fred, your approach to AI at Hotel Port. Um, and then specifically where you've applied it so far. And then I'd love to hear more about you know how you're trying to educate hotels about the need to ensure their content is indexable.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

Yeah. Well, so uh, and again, I'm a big fan of AI. I'll never trust it 100%. I always tell people I've watched far too many episodes of Black Mirror to think that uh AI is just gonna be a wonderful thing and everything's gonna be roses. But um, you know, from my perspective, uh, we've been working with forms of AI for quite a quite a long time. So we've we had machine learning before large language models became you know prevalent in the industry, because that's what everybody's focused on right now, which is which is very exciting, but it's also somewhat challenging and problematic as you see the different stories that are coming out every day with what's going on. Um the way that we're trying to leverage this and be smart about it for hotels is to educate on the fact that large language models, for the sake of just having them and implementing them, in an environment where you don't have structured data or any kind of governance as it relates to your content and the accuracy of your information, is basically going to set you up for failure. You're going to have more problems, more hallucinations, and more things that you have to track down when you don't have the resources to track track them down. Part of the challenge is going to be the overwhelming amount of data that is going to be coming at the hotels, and they already have a problem with the legacy distribution environment. So what we're trying to say is Property View that we originally built as a content accuracy engine is a system of record for you. It's normalized structured data, and we have the ability to provide that for you, which you can then distribute via an API if you want somebody to plug in, pull that information. We're going to let it be crawled by the large language model uh bots to help improve their position as an authority on uh the accuracy of their content. And then we also will let them activate that with Engage, which are our AI platforms from a voice, um, chat and text perspective, because we have that hotel verified or restaurant verified information in our platform. So we know that the responses or the information that customers are going to get when they engage with the AI is going to be accurate, whether it's our AI or somebody else's AI that they plug into. We have another partner um that is doing a pilot with an AI group, and they allowed them to plug into our API because we have the verified content so that they can feed the LLMs on their side. And so we're we're making it very simple in that you have the governance layer, which we're providing for you, which is structured, normalized, and verified, which is a beautiful thing. There are also then right now a number of channels that LLMs are viewing as authorities for hotel content. And this is something that will continue to evolve over time, but we're already perfectly positioned, as are the hotels that work with us and restaurants at SPAS, in that we were built to audit endpoints. And so those 20, 25 endpoints right now that are viewed as authorities by the LLMs today, that will continue to evolve. We have the ability to audit all of those for accuracy for the hotels and our other customers, and then we can help facilitate updates so that we can, again, the verified source of truth or system of record continues to monitor that information for them.

SPEAKER_02 25:56

So that's yeah, and this is the part that I'm still amazed. Like there was a stat that Propelic, who has been a part of our podcast, a digital marketing agency, and not only the reason I'm referencing them in this in this instance, is because they've done some research on AI utilization and how it's changing consumer behavior. And there's obviously a lot more now on this topic as companies are trying to figure out. But we were looking at the stats that maybe it's 5% today, but in two years it could be 50% of searches that are going to be AI driven, and it seems to be moving even more quickly given um Google AI mode and just the shift with Gemini and all these dimensions. So I'm I am seeing one company after another uh telling me that they're getting more traffic now uh from LLMs than they are from traditional search. And this is like this is happening very quickly. So that's why I wanted to call that out because I feel like so many companies are gonna be behind the curve on this. Um and it's it's it's no matter how loud we all shout about it, um, it's just not a core competency for a lot of businesses to be, you know, adapting to change this this quickly and realize you know they're all panicking because they're seeing their Google search numbers decrease. But the whole business model, Fred, and obviously you've known this being in this industry for as long as you have, and even mentioning companies like Travelocity. I mean, there was a time when, you know, when it was all about the OTAs and it was about the search experience, and you search and got results, and then you found options on OTAs or direct with hotels, and that's changing. So I'd love to get your take on that because clearly you need to be at the forefront of these developments. And certainly a big part of that is getting this content right for partners. And um, but I guess I'd love to hear where you think this is going, not just AI, but our the hospitality industry in in general and what you're working on.

SPEAKER_00 27:37

Yeah, I I mean you did a great job of making me realize how old I am as it relates to how long I've been around in this business. I mean, we you know, when you and me both when we started, yeah, I mean when we started, it was commissions. I I remember having meetings at Travel October about how are we going to collect these commissions from hotels, and then you know, 9-11 hits, and then all of a sudden it's about all right, we're moving to the merchant model. And so that was the big thing that was an evolution for hotels, and we had to get together with Travel Web to revise legacy technology to adapt to the new model. And then, of course, everybody made that an industry standard after we adapted that. Um, you know, the way the way that I see this, and we kind of went through this with um blockchain for a little bit, everybody got excited about it. Same thing with vacation packaging, same thing with group travel. You know, everybody gets really excited about new iterations of distribution models. And that's really what I consider AI in the context of hotels or travel. It's another distribution model. But we're also kind of in that phase like we were in the original dot-com bubble. We've got a lot of pets.coms in the AI space right now. And there's a lot of noise there, and a lot of that's that dust is going to settle over the next couple of years because the majority of the applications that are out there, or the solutions, if you want to call them that, are really nothing more than wrappers on top of Chat GPT or many of these other things that don't really ultimately provide value and won't scale for the needs of the industry. But we are have we do have to prepare for a post-website future. And a lot of people don't want to hear that because there are a lot of businesses that are making lots and lots of money on fomenting a war between the OTAs and the hotels. And those are usually a lot of the digital marketing agencies that are like, oh, you're paying 35% commission. You should spend$5,000,$10,000 a month on digital marketing and we can drive everything directly. Well, they're they're going to be disrupted now that things are going to a post-website future. So you're going to start to see a lot of people selling, oh, we're going to optimize you in the LLMs. Okay, that that's probably not really true as to what you're going to do. Um, there's a lot of blocking and tackling that needs to be done. Um, but what I do see that is going to happen over the next few years is that websites are going to be less and less important because that's where the hotels are creating the narrative and telling their story. The fact-based things with the structured content that the LLMs are looking for, it's really going to be a major focus on making sure that your information that's being distributed, where they're picking it up, is actually accurate. Keep telling the story on your website, keep it optimized, do all of that stuff because search isn't going to go away, much like the GDSs, where everybody says, oh, the GDSs are going away in five years, and five years later they're going away in five years. I don't think search is ever going to go away, but it is going to continue to reduce compared to the LLMs. And then the LLMs are going to become another form of search because they're going to start prioritizing results, they're going to start selling ads, they're going to start doing the other things. So it's just going to be an evolution of search in general, but it's going to be less important that it's done on the website and more that it's going to be going through these language models and whatever it is that they evolved to, whether it's agents or you know, something that's coming through your Alexa or one of the other agents that you're using from a voice uh assistant perspective as well.

Team Culture Remote Work And Hiring

SPEAKER_02 30:46

Tell us a little bit about your team, because I think this is also interesting to understand for technology companies. I was having a look at the overview of your team on your website, but yeah, give us uh the I guess some details on the size of the team that you have now. I know you guys have been hiring, but yeah, and especially in the technology side, because that obviously is changing considerably with the use of these tools uh for coding purposes. So yeah, tell tell us a bit more about the team.

SPEAKER_00 31:11

I have an amazing team, and I'm I'm very fortunate to be where we are with the team that we've developed and evolved uh over the years. And the partnership that we've had with GP Solutions has been uh a substantial part of that in bringing in the right resources, giving me an opportunity to go to places in Europe that I never would have ever thought that I would have gone to develop uh teams and associations. But um, you know, we've got a very interesting uh group of what I call technologists, but also uh subject matter experts in that uh learning from what I did in the old days, like when I worked at Sendon Corporation and we acquired Orbits and Lodging.com and cheap tickets and a bunch of things, and I forced our team to manage all of these distribution channels when they were all used to managing individual channels. And there was a lot of pain and resistance as it related to that. But we took those learnings with the team that we have that do our content analyst, uh content analysis on behalf of hotels, because that's the way that hotels operate. And our team has been very flexible and very good about saying, look, we've got to understand and be experts on all of these different types of channels because the hotels are forced to do the same thing. And then we also have the flexibility to increase or decrease uh the resources that we have from a technology perspective because of the augmented uh development resource uh process that GP uses or has used over the last 20 years. Um, so we've got a really good mix of people that are passionate about the business. A lot of the team members have been with us for more than 10 years, which I think is incredible when you talk about technology, especially for the type of work that we're doing, because I used to do this stuff. So I know that content auditing isn't sexy and something that you get excited to go do every day, but we've got a team that's very dedicated to doing that. But first and foremost, they love to solve problems. And those are the types of people that we look for. You know, I'm not looking for somebody to come in and just say, oh, you know, I'm doing nine to five, clocking out, I hate this job. And I also don't say, you know, we're family. I'm saying, look, my number one objective with this company is to build a company that doesn't suck to work for. And the team members that we that we go out and we recruit, that's what we're looking for is how are you going to contribute to the culture? We want you to be absolutely fantastic and phenomenal at your job, but we also want you to be contributing to the culture because, you know, we solve a lot of problems. You have to have the right mentality to want to do that. And because we're a hospitality business, um, which is always a challenge on the technology side, and it's funny, uh, because I've tried to work with other technology vendors in the past to help build platforms. Technology companies don't always get how the hospitality industry works, and it is very much a relationship business. And so I have to educate my employees and my team on that. That look, this isn't just some vendor that you're talking or some supplier that you're talking to, this is a partner. And the biggest compliment, and this has been ingrained with my team, you know that you're serving servicing your customers correctly. If the email that they send you starts with, hey, team, and the majority of our hotels do that. I like to say that we don't have customers, we have partners. So our hotels, our restaurants, and our spas, they basically look at us as an extended arm of their team. And that's what I impart to our employees, and those are the types of people that we look for. And we are we are currently scaling and building team. We're gonna hire more resources here in the US to do hotel relationship management, uh, management on the channel side. Um, and I'm excited about the opportunity as we continue to scale to start working again with a lot of the people that I've worked with uh in the past, because you know, one of the other things that's happening is clearly a lot of people are getting laid off from a lot of companies. And that's partially because of AI, part of it's because of other excuses that companies are making. Um but in the distribution environment, there are a lot of people like me that I like to call dinosaurs, other people, because I'm a dinosaur, other people don't like to use that term, um, but they're very good and very smart and know more about distribution, probably forgotten more about distribution than a lot of people that are coming up in the industry know. And that is a skill set that's being lost that we need to maintain. And I'm looking forward to the opportunity to bring a lot of those folks back in uh to the fray here because there's still a lot of work for us to do. We we're only at maybe 10% of the sort of target market that we can go after with what it is that we do. So definitely exciting days ahead. But um, you know, I'm I'm a big fan of my team, and you know, we have a monthly uh or quarterly all hands. So everybody around the world, I think we're in seven countries right now. We're about 75 people total. Um, but yeah, we're i i it's a great group uh to work for, so it's a good position to be in.

SPEAKER_02 35:49

Yeah, well, so I'm gonna a couple things I want to comment on. One uh dinosaurs, which uh so the reason I referenced this is because the producer of our podcast runs a company called Dinosaur Trips. He's a huge uh avid fan of dinosaurs and he's turned it into his career, and he also does um uh podcast production. He's a good friend of ours, but uh dinosaurs were on the planet for 165 million years. We've only been here for maybe five or six. So they in terms of how long dinosaurs actually lasted, it's more than 500 times than modern Homo sapiens on the planet. So there's something to be said for dinosaurs, and um and I and I'll and I'll that's why I say I'll put my lot in with you as far as how long we've both been in the industry. And there, and with that comes uh wisdom, knowledge, seeing, like you already mentioned, two major, you know, the global financial crisis, the pandemic, and I haven't come back to that yet. It was how you navigated the pandemic, because that's the whole reason the show got started, was because I and many of the other executives are trying to understand consumer behavior post-pandemic, and we're still only uncovering what's changed. It's not, it wasn't just revenge travel and that was it. So people and and technology changes as well as consumer behavior. So um the one thing that obviously is just being adaptable, and clearly you are, and you obviously have a sense of humor about it. But the um the other thing I wanted to comment on about your recruitment, because so many people listen to our podcast that are trying to get into the industry or even looking to change roles in the industry. I keep hearing it every time I meet listeners to our podcast. They tell me that I've, you know, I've listened to each of them. I then reach out to the person. I found my latest role from that opportunity, and it's certainly been a focus. We did a great episode with Fora, um, which was designed um to highlight the company and the culture because they're trying to hire engineers with a company called Railbookers. Frank and the team has a similar skill.

SPEAKER_00 37:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:32

Yeah, amazing company culture, totally remote base. I've been to their conference, and it's like people are tripping over themselves to work there. And so that to me is another reason why I was keen to have you on the podcast because my sense is that the your company um has a similar dynamic and uh, I guess I say a vibe about it. Um, that you're growing and like it's evolving, and it's in this is uh But tell us a little bit. You mentioned about the size of the team and where you're you're firing in the US, but the part I wanted to ask you is whether or not the roles are remote. Are you based in an office, or is it just you happen to be in the office or is part of the team there? Tell us a little bit about that structure.

SPEAKER_00 38:05

Yeah, so I I am in an office. The rest of the team, aside from my executive assistant, are remote. Um that happened because of the pandemic. We used to have a larger team here in Miami. Um, but yeah, you if you're on one of our quarterly meetings, you'll notice that um many of our team members will have their children sitting on their laps and things of that nature because you know we're very flexible as it relates to that. Because you have to be. I mean, after the pandemic, um a lot of people had to move. And we have also a unique situation, well, not so unique, that because we have people in certain countries that are going through some geopolitical uh problems, uh they've had to relocate to other countries, and and we have to deal with that as well as part of it. So we like to try to be as flexible as possible because from my perspective, while it is, I will still say that some of the best sort of professional times that I've ever had were working in an office with a team of people that I really liked. You know, when I worked at Travel Austin in San Francisco, you know, we'd stay till seven or eight o'clock at night, we'd be drinking beer in the office, playing pool, doing ping pong, all that stuff. Those were great times where you were, you know, educating yourself and working with colleagues. We were all a little bit younger back then. Um, but now with the changing dynamics of the world and the way that things work, and because we have more technology to stay in touch, um you have to be flexible to find the right employees uh over the right fit that you're looking for. And, you know, we have customers all over the world, so it's okay to have resources all over the world as well. As long as we're providing them the tools that they need, we're providing them the compensation and the career path opportunities, which is is one of the more challenging things that I think people overlook when it comes to remote staffing, is that, you know, making sure that there's a good communication process, but also a career path that you can provide to the employees. Um, because a lot of people that have worked for me in the past are now CEOs, CPOs, and other things uh in this industry. And those are the types of people that I look for that I like to try to develop so that they can go off and do more things. That to me is satisfaction in that if I see somebody that has worked for me that's able to go on and do bigger, better things, then I'm doing the right thing as a leader. And I want to make sure that we are able to continue to do that. And part of that is bringing in the right employees, give them the flexibility that they need. Um, but if they want to be here in Miami in the office with me as well, they have that opportunity. Um, but yeah, right now we do maintain the office. I will always have the office. I need to be in the office because otherwise I will work 18 hours a day. So at least I'll get that break to drive home sometimes and sit in traffic for two hours, even though I live four miles away. Um But you know, the the industry itself provides us that flexibility, and and I like to make sure that we can take advantage of that wherever possible.

Sponsor Messages

SPEAKER_01 40:45

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Global Expansion And Industry Futures

SPEAKER_02 43:14

And now back to the show. In terms of where you guys are growing, clearly, you know, you've got a massive market in the US. Your CTO, I did want to call out, is Canadian. That's another big advantage for you, is having a Canadian CTO based here in Toronto, uh like myself. But yeah, in terms of the growth opportunities for a hotel port, is it still very much the US domestic market? Are you already expanding internationally? And if so, where?

SPEAKER_00 43:38

Yeah, we we are span expanding it internationally. So the to answer your question, still tremendous growth everywhere. Um, we are still a relatively small team. I'm still our number one salesperson, even though we have a lot of uh partnerships because I want to be smart about how we grow and scale. Um, but yeah, there's still plenty of growth in the US market. Um We're having a couple of conversations. You know, we already have one very large multinational with 8,000 hotels. We are talking to another that's got 9,000 and more conversations that are going on. Um, but we're growing in every region on the planet. We just got our first hotel in Africa, we've got hotels in Asia, we've got hotels in Europe and the Middle East. So um, what we do is important to any hotel that distributes their content to third-party channels. And from my perspective, that's every hotel on the planet, assuming that they're, you know, let's say three stars and above. Um that's kind of where my target is. Um, and if we think about that, if there's 700,000 hotels technically around the world, even though some people say they have a million or more, um, we still have a substantial opportunity from a growth perspective. But on top of that, we can also audit in multiple languages. So, you know, as we talk about how we continue to grow and layer in what we do, uh, in addition to growing within our existing footprint of customers by layering in additional services and features that they're looking for that they request from us, um, our growth opportunity is still quite substantial. Um, I won't say where I believe this company could go from a valuation perspective because everybody goes, oh, you're nuts. But I will tell you this if every hotel, restaurant, spa needs what we do, it's really a matter of me figuring out how to execute, to get in front of all of them, to show them, show them the value that we provide so that they can go along for the ride with us. Um, but you know, we're we're nowhere near um where we could be. And I think if we talk a year from now, um we will be a much different animal. Same culture, same sort of vibe, if you will, as the kids say. Uh, but uh we'll continue to scale as it relates to our revenue growth.

SPEAKER_02 45:44

Yeah, no, it's exciting. Obviously, new markets, new features, and and clearly um um many new partnerships. Uh so hotel port obviously exists in you know a uh a competitive space as well. And um clearly there are you know a lot of moving parts in the hospitality area, and clearly you're obviously looking at trends beyond what you're currently focusing on. I want to maybe just expand for a moment looking outside of um your office and the business as it is today, because I uh I liked where you're going with you know what does the company look like five years from now, but really what does the industry look like um in the next few years and what excites you about that? Because clearly it's one of the things that like it keeps you up at night, but also gets you up early in the morning because it does continue to evolve. But yeah, I'd love to hear your views because obviously that's one of the big focuses of our podcast, and people are very keen to hear the trends from people in the know. What are some of the other things that you would point out that you're paying close attention to?

Agentic AI And Where To Be Cautious

SPEAKER_00 46:44

Well, I you know, I always like to say that we don't really have any competitors and people don't believe that, but you know, we're the only ones that are really auditing, and every platform in our industry has been primarily built for distribution. None of them were built for auditing. So what we do on the auditing side of things is not really uh, there's not really a competition out there yet. It's going to come inevitably, um, because we talk to investors about that all the time. Uh, but the the way that I see what's going to happen from an evolution perspective, there's going to be more industry consolidation, obviously. Um, I think we're going to still see some additional consolidation from the big brands on the hospitality side, but on the technology side, we're going to see a shedding of a lot of companies on the periphery. And there's going to be more consolidation as it relates to things like property management systems, central reservation systems, um, and some of them may eventually be getting swallowed up by some of the larger names that are not currently in the space. We've already seen that the credit card companies are starting to compete with the OTAs. It wouldn't surprise me if at some point that one of the credit card companies acquires one of the major OTAs because it's now becoming more of a loyalty play than anything. And it also puts them in a position where if we do migrate to a post-website future, they still have access to all of those assets, those customers, the ability to process transactions. They could also probably even do reconciliations if they wanted to. So I think those are what we're going to start to see is that more sort of industries outside of our vertical are going to start tapping in, acquiring assets, and evolving the model. And a lot of that's going to be driven by the adoption of the LLMs and their continued growth. Um, I still don't believe that the GDSs are going to go away or anything of that nature. Um, there's still going to need to be that structured data opportunity, uh, which is why I'm very confident with where we're positioning ourselves, because many of those channels that are out there are all having content issues. If you look at the four three major GDSs, they have content accuracy issues. So that's why we're secure in where we are and why we'll we will continue to evolve. Um but again, post-website future. It's things are going to change. People are going to be searching in the LLMs, it's going to be more and more prevalent. And what an LLM even is at this point is going to continue to evolve. Where it's going to be integrated, it's going to continue to change. So I'm excited about the future. I love innovation, but as I look at what hotels are dealing with and the resources that they're trying to hire, um, that's why turnover is so high. There's so many different systems to manage. It's very difficult for them. People get frustrated and they want to leave. Um, you know, it's going to be an interesting, interesting challenge. Now, we we still have some other problems to solve as well, because, you know, we're all talking about LLMs, but there's still blockchain and what's going to happen there, how that's going to change the distribution model. There's payments and problems there, and how that's going to change. All of those things are still going to be involved in the transaction chain. And that's the other opportunity is to reduce the links in that transaction chain, because every link in the chain right now is a cost for hotels, especially when we're talking about hotels specifically, but even other folks that are in activities and things of that nature, uh, which will be the other thing. You will start to see hoteliers acquire ancillary platforms and become more destination marketers than just uh marketers with hotels. And again, that's going to be forced by the post-website future. So again, there's a lot of stuff going on, a lot of changes. I think they're all very exciting. Um, it's really going to be about separating the noise from what's actually the trend that's moving things. Um, but again, the people that are in the best position will be the brands, major OTAs, and then of course those that are outside of the space that are keeping track of what's going on because either they're on the periphery, but they've got massive amounts of capital, or they've got massive amounts of customers that they can further monetize by utilizing travel.

SPEAKER_02 50:34

Well, I have one more question on for you on this topic around technology and the future of the industry, because I'd love to get your take on this, and that is agentic AI. We've talked about AI, but certainly this is the year where many more people are waking up to the reality of what is agentic AI. We've got, you know, we've had three years since ChatGPT launched, and people are trying to wrap their head around generative AI. And to use your analogy of the dot-com boom and bust, you know, it almost seems like the LLMs are most people see them as if they're the new web browsers. And my good friend John Lyotier uh referenced the fact that, you know, all along Google had the I'm feeling lucky button, but very few people used it. But now when it comes to agentic AI, now you're actually choosing the rather than getting results and decide making your own decision, you're now asking the platform to make the best guess for you based on what it knows about you. So as it relates to agentic AI, which most of our listeners have a good comprehension of, and certainly the OTAs, or we can see what's happening in MetaSearch, um, with that business model being completely disrupted by the introduction of agentic AI tools and even the whole flight search process with different prompts, like, and this is where I'm I'm like reinvigorated and excited again about the travel industry with the introduction of this technology because I came into this business during that dot-com era, like 99, 2000. And um, and so I'm seeing the travel industry much like you going through this massive kind of next shift and wave. And agentic is top of mind for everyone today. But my specific question, Fred, on this topic for you is how are you embracing agentic AI as an organization and and how are you encouraging your partners to understand agentic AI and what it what that specifically means for them?

Conferences Ways To Connect Closing

SPEAKER_00 52:10

Well, we're uh I don't want to say that we're you know, we're taking a um very sort of cautious approach to it. Uh just because everybody's excited about it. I'm excited about it as well. I'm excited about the opportunities. But again, I go back to that. I'm also suspicious of the downsides of it, and I want to make sure, because our job is to find and fix the problems that are related to it. And uh aside from the societal problems, from a distribution perspective, um, I think there's a lot of cool things that are already going on. Um, but you know, I again look at it from a foundational perspective, which is in order to participate, you've got to have the foundational elements correct. And a lot of people are going off and dealing with the bells and whistles, and they don't have the foundational process or uh pieces uh correct. So um, you know, I I move forward with caution always. I don't like to be the first mover in a lot of these things. I like to see what people are doing and and what the results are so that we can look at, hey, where is it breaking? Where is it falling down in the process and how do we fix it? And then we can impart that information to our our clients as it relates to that. Because that's typically what happens is somebody will come to me and say, hey, we've just signed up with this agentic uh company that's doing this, that, or the other, but we're having these problems. Can you take a look at this? Effectively, can you audit this? And that's really the role that we're going to play as things go forward is you know, auditing, fixing, and then educating as it relates to what we found from a results perspective. Uh further than that, though, I think agentic is going to be very disruptive from a resource perspective on all fronts. So we're talking resources at the hotel, resources on the technology side, because that's the the other piece. We've got a lot of development companies that are out there that have hundreds of resources that are built to deploy and do dedicated teams and staffing, augmented resources, things of that nature, um, where this is already starting to become very disruptive. So I have a keen eye on that and what that's going to mean for us as well as for the companies that we serve, um, because I think that it's it's rough with challenges, but um the opportunities I think outweigh that. We all just have to be very smart about how we approach it. For sure.

SPEAKER_02 54:26

And we have an agentic series as part of season seven as well, that uh depending on when you're listening to this, you can either go and find that, but also be ready for it. And certainly, Fred, we need to have you back to see how things have progressed in a year, 18 months from now, obviously with hotel port and with the industry itself. I was really looking forward to this conversation and I now understand why. And I'm I'm sure many of our listeners want to know how they can connect with you as well. I know you're active on LinkedIn. Obviously, I've mentioned the website, but one thing I might be worthwhile to mention to our listeners is some of the conferences you're going to be at this year. So, what would be the best way for any of these listeners to follow up with you, whether they be partners or even potential uh uh new uh team members?

SPEAKER_00 55:07

Well, I will be at ITB Berlin uh next week for a couple of days. Then I will be at high tech, uh, and then I'll also be at high tech is in June, and I think it's either in San Antonio or yeah, San Antonio. And then I will be at the at Hedna in Portugal in September, which is also over my birthday. So if you want to come and party in Portugal and talk about distribution, I will be there. And then uh at the hospitality show, which is in lovely Miami Beach in October, which I want everybody to come down and be a part of uh because it's gonna be a great time. And then, of course, on LinkedIn, you can subscribe to The Big Idea with Fred Bean, my newsletter. Um, and please reach out. Um I'm always available to talk.

SPEAKER_02 55:46

I love that you want to talk distribution on your birthday. That shows you really passionate about this industry.

SPEAKER_00 55:50

Either that or I have nothing else to do. You know, it's one of those things.

SPEAKER_02 55:54

That's awesome. Well, it's a real pleasure to meet you, Fred. I wish you and the team every success this year. I look forward to seeing you at some of the events over the course of the year and uh and definitely staying in touch. But thanks again for joining us.

SPEAKER_00 56:04

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 56:04

And thanks so much to Fred for joining us for this season seven episode as we focus on hospitality, we look at luxury hotels, understand what's happening in technology. I hope you enjoyed today's discussion with Fred as much as I did. Obviously, you heard the best ways to connect with him, and of course, the best ways to connect with us, traveltrendspodcast.com and all of our social channels, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram at Travel Trends Podcast. We do post clips across all of our channels, and of course, we have our monthly newsletter. So make sure you're subscribed on the streaming platform of your choice. And until next week, safe travels.