Yes, you can book a hotel with AI.

Anyone who has worked in the hospitality industry knows that hotels don't operate at a high level in terms of technology adoption. In fact, many still use spreadsheets for rooming lists, often manually entered into the hotel's reservation system - and don't get me started about how that intersects with PCI compliance. That's for another article, but it demonstrates that the hotel industry has a serious technology problem - now compounded by the rush of AI adoption.

This is recently evidenced by the guys on the All-In podcast who pointed out that it is hard to buy the argument that AI will kill us all when it can't book a hotel room.

To almost no one's surprise, the hotel industry is actively lagging behind once again as AI changes the way everyone will operate everything. So far, all we've seen in hospitality is partnership announcements and promises - but no real AI tech solutions. Part of the problem is access - if you want to sell live hotel inventory, good luck wading through the sea of middlemen. Bring your wallet and your patience. Ask me how I know.

We didn't set out to be the AI trailblazer, or to be 'stealthy', but last fall decided 'Why not us'. Let's give this a go and see if we can use what we've learned (the hard way) to create the path for AI to book through our platform's live hotel inventory. We've been powering reservations for a wide variety of clients for many years, and have done more development in the last year than in the last decade.

Six months of work later, I'm proud to say 1Stay.ai is live in the Anthropic directory. Is it perfect? No, but it's more than an MVP. 1Stay will surface hotels for you, quote live rates and hand you a secure payment link and a real confirmation number. Our little bootstrapped company may not be able to compete with the billion dollar ad budgets of the major online travel providers - but we also aren't charging hotels 28% commission.

Stayker's mission has always been to connect guests with hotels they love. With 1Stay we hope to also help hotels reclaim some of the customer relationships they've lost to the OTAs over the years.

So yes, Jason - you can book a hotel with AI, and it wasn't done by a Y Combinator startup. Just a southern girl with a great team and a dream.

Please give us a try - claude.ai/directory/1stay - and let me know how it goes. We can't wait to show you what's next....

Have a great stay,
Amy