HEDNA and the AI Hospitality Alliance map 109 hotel AI use cases, free to browse

There is now a free, public catalogue of what AI is actually being used for in hotels. The AI Hospitality Alliance and HEDNA published it on 28 September: 109 unique use cases, distilled from 198 submissions gathered during August 2026.

For anyone trying to work out whether their PMS vendor's AI roadmap is ambitious or ordinary, it is a useful reference point. It is also worth reading with one eye on who filled it in.

How it is organised

The 109 use cases sit across five hotel functions: Guest Experience, Revenue Management and Business Intelligence, Operations, Distribution and Commerce, and Marketing and Sales. Three cross-cutting infrastructure layers sit underneath, covering payments, data and middleware, and hotel development intelligence.

The submissions span 39 hotel systems, including property management systems, central reservation systems and revenue management systems alongside guest-facing tools.

Within each category, use cases are ranked by a score that combines how broadly the use case creates value, how mature adoption is, how much measurement evidence exists, how much industry interest it attracts, and how far it reaches across functions. The catalogue is presented as an interactive map and costs nothing to browse.

"This catalogue makes AI tangible. It gives hoteliers a clear view of where AI is already being applied," said Ira Vouk, founder of the AI Hospitality Alliance.

Who actually contributed

This is the number to hold on to. Technology vendors made up 39% of contributors. Consultants made up 32%. Hoteliers made up 8%.

So roughly seven in ten submissions came from the supply side, and fewer than one in ten from the people running hotels. That shapes what the catalogue is. It is a strong map of what the industry is selling and advising, and a much weaker map of what operators have deployed, kept, and measured.

The scoring model does try to account for this. Adoption maturity and measurement evidence are both inputs, which is more rigour than most vendor-led surveys bother with. But industry interest is also an input, and industry interest in a supply-side sample tends to mean vendor enthusiasm. A use case can score well because a lot of vendors are building it, not because a lot of hotels are getting results from it.

What operators can and cannot do with it

Use it as a vocabulary and a checklist. If you are in a procurement conversation and a vendor describes an AI capability as novel, the catalogue will tell you quickly whether 30 other systems claim the same thing. That alone is worth the click.

What it will not do is take you from a use case to a product. The public catalogue does not name individual PMS vendors or technology providers against each use case, so there is no shortlist to be had from it. You will still be doing that research yourself.

Nor should the ranking be read as a recommendation. A high-scoring use case means the industry is converging on it, not that it will pay back at a 40-room independent. Deduplication of 198 submissions into 109 use cases also means some entries merge quite different implementations under one label, so the count flatters the variety somewhat.

The alliance says later submissions are marked as added after the study, which suggests the catalogue will keep growing rather than being frozen as an August 2026 snapshot.

The catalogue is at aihospitalityalliance.com/ai-use-cases. Hospitality Net carried the announcement.