A first, focused step for the hotel management business: one workshop that turns real energy and scattered effort into a single prioritised plan the executive team owns.
Peter's early move into foundations put AI in front of the executive team and a good number of general managers, and it landed. Around forty of the team work with ChatGPT day to day, a smaller group is in Claude, and one or two have built working tools that properties have adopted. There is a policy, a steering committee and enterprise licences. For a company with no technology executive in post, that is further than most of the industry has travelled.
What is missing is not more tools. It is a shared direction. Twenty good ideas are pulling in twenty directions, no one is quite sure who is where on the journey, and there is no plan, no rules on what is safe to use, and no agreed measure of what any of it is worth. That is a strategy and alignment problem, and it is the right one to solve next.
This proposal is deliberately scoped to one part of the group. Michels & Taylor works across three lines: hotel management, asset management and advisory. What follows is built for the hotel management business, the operating side that Peter leads, where value can be shown quickly. Asset management and advisory sit outside this piece, and are the natural place to extend once the approach has proved itself here.
One principle guides everything below. If there are ten days in a piece of work, eight belong to understanding the problem. Once the pain is genuinely understood, the answer is rarely complicated, and often it is not even AI. Sometimes the real move is a shared service, a cleaner process, or a reporting line that does not exist yet. We find the business move first, then bring AI to bear where it earns its place.
For a management company this matters more than usual. You do not own the assets, you manage them, so the questions that count are where the fee is made, where margin quietly leaks, and which parts of the work a portfolio could carry with fewer people, not more.
The biggest wins in a group like yours are synergies, the things a single hotel cannot do but a portfolio can. Procurement consolidated across the estate. A management blueprint, so every property runs to one playbook rather than reinventing it. Shared services and cluster structures that take on more hotels without adding head office. And, because you operate under franchise rather than owning the bricks, real flexibility in how people are deployed across properties and brands, a workforce built for the group, not the building. None of these are AI projects. They are business moves, and AI is the enabler that makes them work at a scale and speed that was not realistic before.
Two things run in parallel. We learn the business properly: the operating model, the fee structure across the managed properties, where performance leaks and why. And we interview the people, one to one, across the above-property leadership and a targeted group of the most engaged general managers, because the property is where the work lands and co-creation beats imposition. Each conversation is short and structured, and it doubles as the voice of the property in the room. Everyone invited receives a pre-work pack: a few questions to think through beforehand, at the level of themselves, their team and the organisation, so the day starts full rather than cold.
A short, honest present-back of what we heard, so the room starts from a shared picture. Then a structured strategy session, using a simple and familiar lens of customer and market, process, people and value, to surface the opportunities and funnel a long list down to the few that genuinely move the needle. Not a wall of sticky notes that falls off by lunch, but a ranked portfolio the team argues for and agrees, each move carrying its own return. We show, from real work rather than slideware, what AI can now do, chosen to lift the ceiling on what people believe is possible. And the signature of the day: AI in the room throughout, in the open and with everyone's agreement, capturing and consolidating the group's own conversations so the strategy assembles itself from what they say. The room leaves having built the plan, not been handed it.
A summary lands in Peter's hands within days to circulate, and remote follow-up sessions keep the portfolio moving through the autumn.
There are three pieces of work here, and they are best kept apart. This proposal prices the first. The other two, the Foundations training extended to property level and the Champions programme, would be scoped once the roadmap exists, because they should be built to the initiatives the executive team actually prioritises rather than lifted off a shelf.
We would recommend they follow directly. If the people trained to deliver the roadmap are taught AI in the abstract by someone with no stake in your twelve initiatives, the plan and the capability drift apart, and within six months you have a well-trained organisation and an unexecuted roadmap. A simple 30-60-90 rhythm holds the teams accountable in between. We are also perfectly happy to run the workshop on its own and let the quality of it make the case.
Being clear about where we stop matters as much as what we do. This is the strategy and the plan: the understanding, the workshop, the funded portfolio and the value model. It is not the M365 migration, the data foundations or the SharePoint work running alongside it, nor any platform build, and it is not the ongoing managed-service transition. Those need other hands, and part of what you get from us is a clear view of which ones and where they fit. You have told us you expect to work with several partners across this journey. We are the one that maps the landscape and sets the direction, rather than claiming to be all of it.
Deep Hospitality is Caroline Hardman and Nitin Thariyan. Between us we have spent more than four decades inside Marriott, Starwood, Jumeirah and Minor, in the strategy, transformation and quality roles that decide whether a plan like this holds.
Caroline spent eight years as Group Director of Operational Excellence for Asia, the Middle East and Africa at Minor Hotels, running quality and guest experience across more than five hundred properties, after starting in professional services with PwC and Deloitte. Nitin led continuous improvement and transformation for Marriott across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and is a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and a certified AI practitioner. We have facilitated strategy to boards, run PMOs, and led the messy work of merging operating teams.
We have also built the exact artefact this workshop produces. One of us shaped the strategic blueprint that took a global luxury group's Asia-Pacific portfolio from thirty to sixty hotels, decomposed into work packages and project charters. And in a white-label operator engagement, a multi-track advisory retainer reporting to the operator's chief executive, we stood up the data governance, the IT strategy and the productivity model, the backbone, inside nine months. That is the closest precedent we have to what you are buying here: a prioritised roadmap with owners, charters and a governance frame, built for an operator and made to run.
On the AI itself we are deliberately brand-agnostic. We do not sell software or a platform. We teach the thinking, build the first solutions alongside your people, and hand the capability over so your own champions carry it when the next model arrives from somewhere none of us has heard of yet. Today it is Claude and GPT. Tomorrow it is something else. The way of working is what lasts.
And this is live work rather than theory. We are currently inside a brand-agnostic third-party operator across more than twenty countries, the world's largest white-label operator has taken our executive AI session, we ran AI readiness conversations with eight member organisations of the IHG Owners Association in July, from single-property owner-operators to international management companies, and last week we ran an executive leadership workshop for more than seventy organisations in Tbilisi. We work under confidentiality with all of them, which is the discipline you would want us to bring to yours.
Two days rather than one is a deliberate choice. A single day cannot both lift the ceiling on what the team believes is possible and land six to eight funded charters with named owners and first numbers. The scarcest resource in this whole exercise is executive diary time, and we would rather protect it once and get both halves of the job done than take the room twice.
Six weeks is achievable if the pre-work starts promptly. Getting it right matters more than the date, and we would rather agree a little more time than compress the understanding that makes the day work. We will bring firm date options to the confirmation call so you walk into the steering meeting with a schedule, not an intention.
The executive workshop is a defined piece of work, delivered by both founders. Most of its value is made in the pre-work, the understanding gathered before anyone walks into the room, and the fee reflects that depth rather than the day itself. The pre-work, the workshop and the follow-up are one piece and are not delivered separately. What you hold at the end is a funded portfolio and a value model you take to the board, the instrument that makes the case for everything after it.
The enablement, Foundations and Champions, would be scoped and priced once the roadmap exists. What they should contain depends on what the executive team prioritises on the day, and pricing them now would mean guessing at the roadmap.
A short conversation to confirm the scope and lock the dates, ahead of the steering meeting. From there we agree the workshop dates and begin the pre-work.