Hotel Moment

In this episode of Hotel Moment, host Karen Stephens, CMO of Revinate, sits down with Dina Niekamp, SVP of Brand and Marketing at Aparium Hotel Group, a lifestyle hospitality company known for building hotels that feel deeply rooted in the neighborhoods around them. Dina explains why emotional connection, not just amenities, has become the new standard for luxury travel, and why she believes AI will never replace the most important skill in hospitality: reading the room.

Dina shares the story behind Aparium's "As Told By" campaign, which puts local collaborators and small business owners at the center of each property's marketing, and breaks down the philosophy of "translocal" spaces, where a business traveler and a neighborhood local can feel equally at home at the bar. She also introduces Aparium's "fifth meatball" mindset, a simple internal philosophy that empowers every team member to create small, unscripted moments of delight. With eight hotels currently operating across cities like Seattle, Fargo, Kansas City, Detroit, and Alexandria, Virginia, and several more in the pipeline, Aparium offers a clear blueprint for building hospitality brands that feel genuinely local rather than mass-produced.

In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens sits down with Jeff Michael, Area Director of Revenue Management at Sage Hospitality Group, who brings more than 25 years of hospitality experience spanning operations and commercial leadership. Jeff explains why the explosion of hotel data has created a new kind of paralysis, why "commercial alignment" so often fails when departments chase different incentives, and how AI is finally turning guest lifetime value into a metric hotels can actually use. His core message: stop drowning your team in reports, tie every department back to one profitability goal, and let AI take on the analyst work so revenue managers can think like strategists again.

In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens, CMO at Revinate sits down with Dylan Cole, Managing Director EMEA at Revinate, to unpack the most consequential shift in hotel distribution in years: the rise of AI-powered booking discovery. With insights from leaders at Starwood Hotels, Highgate, and Twilio woven in, Karen and Dylan trace the arc from Google's Universal Commerce Protocol announcement to the not-so-distant future of agent-to-agent vacation planning. Their message is direct: properties that invest in clean data, direct booking infrastructure, and first-party data strategy now will be positioned to compete before everyone else starts scrambling.

In this recast episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens sits down with Wilhelm Luxem, head of quality commission at Swiss Deluxe Hotels and former GM of the iconic Baur Au Lac hotel. With 50 years in luxury hospitality, Wilhelm shares his philosophy on technology adoption in five-star hotels, emphasizing that tech should always complement service DNA while staying in the background. From his experience with a seven-generation family-owned hotel to his insights on evolving guest expectations, Wilhelm offers valuable perspectives on maintaining luxury standards while embracing innovation.

In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens, Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate, sits down with Jarrett Tomback, Vice President of Digital Strategy and CRM at Starwood Hotels, for a conversation that moves from rethinking loyalty to the most urgent distribution question in hospitality: how do hotels win direct bookings in a world where AI search models give guests three to five recommendations instead of pages of links? Across 1 Hotels, Baccarat Hotels and Resorts, and Treehouse Hotels, Jarrett has built guest engagement strategies grounded in purpose, clean data, and a human-first AI approach that keeps the brand at the center of every interaction.