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.
What I keep noticing now
I love travel that has a point of view, and after working with and for global brands (Oracle, Four Seasons, The Ritz-Carlton) I keep watching boutique hotels get flattened into categories they don’t belong to.
Independent properties misread because the language was built for something else.
Good brands poorly translated by the systems meant to surface them.
Real value reduced to the wrong metrics.
None of it is small, all of it is structural, and the more I look, the more I see the same wrong pattern.
What the system actually misses
Most discovery was built around comparability, not distinctiveness.
Every hotel gets asked to ‘declare’ itself in the same terms: star ratings, amenity checklists, price tiers, category filters, and those declarations get presented as if they’re the whole truth.
Well, they’re not.
Personally speaking, the most interesting places (and the ones I’d book a trip with) aren’t legible in that language. Their strength is specificity (more on this), and specificity doesn’t survive a template.
A hotel with a clear point of view loses something real the moment it’s forced to describe itself through the same generic categories as a property three times its scale and half its intention. The checklist works against it, the filter excludes it, the lens flattens it.
And here’s the part I’ve been repeating all along: a hotel read through the wrong lens doesn’t just lose accuracy, it loses its audience because it fits no one. The people who’d have loved the place never learn it exists, because the filter they used filtered it out wrongly. The hotel is present in the inventory and absent from the discovery. Both sides lose, and neither of them knows it.
A property that can’t be described correctly eventually starts ‘adjusting’ to the description (and within the same topic, AI gets lots in the shuffle, too). It softens the edges the system can’t see, because the system only rewards the edges it can measure and over time, the thing that made it worth finding becomes harder to find in the place itself.
That’s how misrecognition turns a structural problem into a cultural one.
Why I care
I think part of why I care so much about broken discovery is because I know what it feels like when something valuable gets seen only through the wrong lens.
It’s a structural problem but to me it lands personally: on the founder who built the place, on the traveler who would have chosen differently with better information, on the word-of-mouth chain that never starts because the match was never made.
What I’m working on these days
Some of this is what I’m trying to address in something I’m building right now. A different way of thinking about hospitality discovery: one that begins with the traveler instead of the inventory.
I’m not ready to talk about it properly yet but it exists because I kept running into the same question - why are the best places so hard to recognize from the outside?
Sojourn is where I write about why any of this matters, but not just whats changing, but what those shifts mean for the people building inside it.
Takeaway:
My hope is that if you’re here you also believe that recognition is a form of hospitality.
When it’s accurate, it opens things up. When it’s wrong, a ‘quiet’ kind of loss sets in for the property, for the guest, and for the industry as a whole.
The right lens doesn’t create value, it lets value reach the people it was built for.
If you’re building something the current systems aren’t quite describing yet, how are you thinking about it? Lets connect and talk.