What if the future of hotel discoverability starts with the design of the space itself?

Ruud Belmans, co-founder and Executive Creative Director of WeWantMore, explores the role of design in an AI-mediated hospitality landscape.

First published in Family Office Magazine.
Read the full article below or in the Summer 2026 Issue (pg. 130-133).

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The significance of AI in hospitality is often discussed in terms of guest-facing technology. At WeWantMore, we think that misses the point.

There is a moment every frequent traveller knows. You arrive late, disoriented by time zones, and the room is just a room: generic, indifferent, waiting for you to make it comfortable. You adjust the thermostat, search for the light switches and work out how to close the curtains properly. Small tasks, perhaps, but together they amount to the opposite of hospitality.

Now imagine the room already knows. Not in a gimmicky, voice-assistant sense but quietly, almost invisibly. The temperature is set exactly as you like it. The lighting has softened to help your body ease into a new time zone rather than resist it. Familiar music plays softly in the background, or none at all, because you prefer silence when you travel. Nothing announces itself or asks for attention; the environment simply feels right.

The real transformation is happening beneath the surface. AI is becoming an intelligence layer that sits underneath hospitality itself, informing how spaces are designed, how teams deliver service, how sustainability decisions are made and even how travelers discover destinations in the first place. 

This is where AI in hospitality is heading. For those who own, invest in, or develop hotel assets, it represents something far more consequential than a technology upgrade.

It is a fundamental redefinition of what a hotel can be: not simply a place to stay, but an environment that anticipates, adapts and responds to the individual guest, with implications for everything from operational performance to long-term asset value.

The Intelligence Layer

Working across hospitality strategy, design and guest experience, we are rarely surprised by where the industry is heading. What occasionally does surprise us is how quickly the gap between concept and deployment is closing.

The AI transformation in hospitality is not primarily about what guests see or touch. It is about systems that continuously interpret and act on information, aggregating data from booking behaviour, past stays, arrival patterns and even flight schedules and in turn feeds those insights back into the physical environment before a guest has even unpacked. At its best, this technology is functionally invisible. It asks nothing of the guest and simply acts.

Perhaps most importantly, AI empowers the people responsible for delivering the guest experience. Will Guidara's book Unreasonable Hospitality described what it took to make every guest feel genuinely seen at Eleven Madison Park. This included a dedicated "Dreamweaver" whose entire job was to research guests and orchestrate personalised moments. It was a remarkable model, but one that depended on extraordinary human effort and didn't scale. AI changes that equation.

A well-trained system gives every member of a front desk team a genuine, nuanced picture of a guest  before they arrive: their preferences, habits, and priorities. Historically, this level of personalisation didn't scale. AI makes it scalable. Major hotel groups including Marriott, Hilton and Accor are already investing heavily in AI-driven personalisation, recognising that deeper guest understanding can improve both loyalty and operational efficiency. 

The Design Brief Gets Quieter

There is a productive paradox at the heart of all this. As rooms become more intelligent, they tend to become visually simpler. When technology handles the environment (anticipating needs, removing friction, personalising the sensory experience) the room itself no longer needs to demonstrate its own sophistication. The interfaces recede and the craft comes forward.

This is where the discipline of design becomes more important, not less. A quieter room demands better materiality, more considered proportion and a deeper attention to light and texture. What we're seeing instead is a growing desire for spaces that feel human, handmade and specific to a place. Counterintuitively, AI-driven intelligence is not diminishing the importance of craft; it is reinforcing the value of authentic materials, local character and human-made detail.

It is also changing how we think about sustainability in the design process. Monark, a sustainability platform that originated within WeWantMore and has since become an independent spin-off and reflects a broader shift towards data-driven sustainability decisions. It was born from a simple observation; designers need environmental intelligence when decisions are being made, not after a project is complete. By bringing environmental impact data into the design process itself, sustainability becomes part of decision-making rather than a compliance exercise at the end.

This is AI-assisted material intelligence applied at the point of choice. For asset owners and operators focused on long-term value and ESG performance, the real significance lies in the shift from sustainability as aspiration to sustainability as default.

When Walls Begin to Respond

One expression of this shift that sparks the imagination is the emergence of responsive surfaces. A guest arrives to find walls displaying work by a local artist whose aesthetic aligns with their own sensibility, or imagery connected to the destination itself.

We are close to a point where personalisation becomes truly spatial: not a welcome message on a screen, but an environment that has been, in some small and specific way, composed for the person arriving in it. That changes what interior design means.

The technology to make this possible is closer than many operators realise. E-ink and OLED surfaces are already making dynamic environments technically feasible.

The cost and durability constraints that have limited wider adoption are narrowing faster than expected.

Places Worth Finding

There is one more dimension to this story that is often under-appreciated: the connection between technology, identity and asset value. 

We often describe these as places worth finding: hospitality experiences with enough genuine identity to justify being sought out, specific, sensory and irreducible to a category.

In an AI-mediated world, that idea has acquired a new layer of meaning. Travelers are increasingly discovering hotels not through search engines but through conversational AI, asking ChatGPT or Perplexity where to stay in a city for a particular kind of experience. These systems do not return ranked lists. They suggest and recommend places they can describe with confidence and specificity.

That identity is expressed across an entire ecosystem of experiences. The restaurant, wellness offering, service philosophy, cultural programming and guest rooms all become chapters in the same story. The more coherent that story becomes, the easier it is for both guests and AI systems to understand what makes a place distinctive. 

Generic design is not just aesthetically weak. In a world where AI mediates the first encounter between a guest and a property, it is becoming commercially invisible.

Two forces are now pulling in the same direction: AI is personalising the experience inside the room while also reshaping how hotels are discovered.

The underlying logic is identical: specificity wins.

Places with genuine identity and those worth finding are the ones that will hold their value, attract the right guests and remain legible to the systems that now shape how travel decisions are made. Hotels that invest in becoming authentically, specifically themselves through their materiality, atmosphere and service intelligence are not just creating better guest experiences, they are building assets with a more durable competitive position.

That, in the end, is what AI makes possible; not the smart room but right room.