Hotel Moment

In this recast episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens sits down with Aradhana Khowala, CEO of Aptamind Partners, a visionary leader in regenerative tourism development. With over two decades of experience across five continents, Aradhana challenges traditional tourism models and explores how the industry can evolve beyond sustainability to become regenerative. From her insights on AI-driven travel innovation to navigating geopolitical challenges, Aradhana offers a bold perspective on the future of hospitality and the urgent need for systemic change in how the industry operates.

In this episode of Hotel Moment, Dylan Cole, Managing Director EMEA at Revinate, teams up with Nick Ellis, Country Director Oceania & Indonesia and Enterprise Director SE Asia, Revinate, to translate the five major 2026 trends into what actually works for Australia's unique hospitality market. Because Australia isn't a copy-paste market with global best practices, it's one of the world's most aspirational destinations with some of the planet's highest labor costs and unusual hotel mix. The conversation covers how Australia's commercially savvy hoteliers use personalization not for fancy subject lines but for driving direct bookings and on-property spending.. Nick shares his GM experience where every guest handed staff tiny jigsaw puzzle pieces of preferences, but no one had the complete picture — emphasizing the sweet spot of using data before arrival and during stay to create memorable moments.
Dylan and Nick discuss Customer Data Platforms as practical Aussie solutions — providing one clean guest profile connected through APIs, and emphasizing real-time data's critical importance, privacy as front-page news, and unified guest engagement platforms replacing stitched-together systems.

In this strategic episode, Dylan Cole, Managing Director EMEA at Revinate, debuts as co-host, and applies regional context to the five major 2026 hospitality trends. While hyperpersonalization, unified tech stacks, real-time decisioning, cybersecurity and privacy, and guest engagement platforms matter globally, Dylan demonstrates how UK and Ireland hoteliers use personalization to defend margins against OTA dominance, DACH guests demand clear consent without creepiness, Northern Europe expects zero tolerance for generic communication, and Southern Europe leverages personalization for in-stay revenue. He reveals that operations teams drive tech unification over IT departments, real-time data priorities vary from survival to precision to value capture, and privacy functions as a brand promise rather than compliance checkbox across European regions.

In this recast episode, Hotel Moment co-hosts Karen Stephens, Chief Marketing Officer at Revinate, and Brenna Turpin, Marketing Coordinator at Revinate, preview the five critical trends that will shape hospitality in 2026. Drawing from guest conversations throughout 2025, they explore how hyper-personalization is evolving from data collection to activation, why unified tech stacks with CDPs as anchors are replacing legacy system patchworks, and how real-time decisioning enables dynamic responses to weather, events, and occupancy patterns. They also address escalating cybersecurity concerns and the evolution of guest communication platforms into orchestration hubs that create seamless experiences across the entire guest journey.

In this special New Year's Eve episode, Brenna Turpin, Marketing Coordinator at Revinate, celebrates Hotel Moment reaching over 500,000 listeners by revisiting the year's most memorable conversations. She highlights Jeff Wielgopolan from Meadowood Napa Valley defining luxury as "the ability to not have to think," Sky McLean from Basecamp Resorts describing her unconventional path from two Airbnbs to a $600 million empire, Ben Campbell from Hospitality America sharing crisis management during Hurricane Helene when hotels operated without water for three weeks, and Agnelo Fernandes from Cote Hospitality explaining why culture came before revenue in his strategic priorities. The compilation demonstrates that hospitality excellence comes from bold leadership decisions centered on people.