What Misrecognition Taught Me About Today's Quiet Problem in Hospitality Discovery

Long before I noticed it happening to hotels, it was happening to me. A hotel can do everything right and still be misread by the systems meant to surface it.

Travel has never been just travel for me.

It’s where I find clarity. Where I shift perspective. Where I come back to parts of myself everyday life cant quite capture. The right hotel, the right pace of a place, reminds me who I am when everything else is telling me something else.

That’s why I care about hospitality the way I do. Not as an industry but as somewhere thats actually changed me when I needed most.

For two decades, I worked at the intersection of brand, identity, tech, and luxury hospitality: showed up, paid attention, did the work underneath the work we’ve all very much know about it yet I didn’t always feel recognized the way it should of in return.

Not unrecognized entirely, just recognized through a lens that wasn’t mine.

That experience shaped me before I could even name it, but once I could of, I started seeing a version of it everywhere I looked in travel.