Exclusive Feature: I heard the number first at a hospitality trade event last year, somewhere between a panel on revenue management and the coffee break — a chain executive mentioning, almost in passing, that their group had just rolled out AI-driven demand forecasting across two hundred properties.

A week later I was back on the Adriatic coast, sitting with the F&B manager of a thirty-room family hotel who was still doing next week’s fish order by calling three suppliers and comparing prices in a notebook. Same industry, same year, two different centuries.

A recent industry study put a number on something most independent hoteliers already feel without needing the data to confirm it: 78% of hotel chains are already using AI in some form, and 89% plan to expand that use within the next 12 to 24 months.

The research covered more than 11,000 properties and 1.3 million rooms worldwide. Business intelligence came out as the most valued application, ahead of guest-communication chatbots and digital marketing.

Read that statistic from a 30-room property on the Adriatic coast, and it doesn't land as encouragement. It lands as a gap that has already widened past the point where catching up looks realistic.

But the gap isn't about ambition, and it isn't about whether independent operators understand the technology. It's about what a 78% chain-level adoption figure actually requires underneath the headline — and why most of that requirement doesn't transfer to a family-run property with forty rooms and one F&B manager who also writes the wine list.

What chain-level adoption actually buys

When a hotel group reports AI adoption across its portfolio, that number sits on top of infrastructure most independent properties never built: standardized PMS and POS systems across every location, a central data team that cleans and structures the numbers before any model touches them, and IT staff who can run a months-long integration project without pulling anyone off guest-facing work.

Chatbots are the most common current use case in these chains, at 42% — and chatbots are also the application most dependent on a centrally maintained, accurate menu and service database. Get that data wrong across forty properties and a chain has forty versions of the same support ticket. It has the headcount to catch that before a guest does.

A single independent property usually does not, simply because the same person who manages F&B also manages a dozen other things before lunch service starts.

A different starting point, not a different ambition

Separate research tracking hotel AI sentiment more broadly found that 82% of hotel operators plan to expand AI use in 2026, up from 63% in 2024 — a sharp rise in interest across the sector as a whole, not only at chain level. Independent and boutique hotels are clearly part of that curve; the question is what they're starting from.

The Adriatic region is a useful illustration. Online travel agencies control roughly 53% of all hotel bookings in Croatia nationally — a share that climbs closer to 60% for smaller independent properties without the marketing budget to drive direct bookings. Add a structural seasonal labor shortfall on top of that: Croatia issued more than 56,000 work permits to foreign hospitality staff in 2024 alone to cover a gap the industry estimates at roughly 10,000 workers a season. In that environment, the scarcest resource in an independent hotel's F&B department isn't appetite for better tools. It's the manager's time.

Where the real cost actually sits

The expensive part of hotel AI adoption has never been the model itself. It's the integration — getting a PMS to talk to a POS, getting that to talk to a channel manager, and validating that the data moving between all three is clean enough to trust before any AI layer is added on top. That process costs chains real money and real time even with dedicated IT teams behind it. An independent property attempting the same integration path is choosing the most expensive route available to solve a problem that, for a single property, often doesn't require it at all.

What does scale down to a single, independently-run hotel is a different category of signal — one that doesn't depend on internal integration at all: guest review sentiment analysis, public food market pricing used to benchmark incoming supplier invoices, and competitor OTA rate tracking.

These are publicly available data sources, analyzed externally. They tell an F&B manager what guests are actually saying about the food this week, or whether a supplier's latest price increase tracks the market or simply tracks opportunity — without the hotel's internal systems changing at all.

The actual question for 2026

The honest framing for an independent hotelier isn't "can I afford AI." It's narrower than that: which of the signals chains get from their integrated, centrally-managed systems can an independent property get instead from data that's already public, without touching its PMS at all? For F&B specifically — where margin erodes quietly, week by week, long before it shows up in a quarterly P&L — that question has a more accessible answer than the 78% headline number suggests.

The gap between chains and independents in hospitality AI is real. But it's a gap in infrastructure and headcount, not in what's available to a hotel willing to start with the data that's already sitting in public view.

Leo Ljubičić is a master chef and master pastry chef with over 25 years of experience in food and beverage operations across Croatia's Adriatic coast. Since 2013, he has taught professional kitchen operations at RCK Dubrovnik and serves as a certified evaluator for WorldSkills Croatia. He is the founder of LPI LABS, a hospitality intelligence platform for independent hotels and restaurants. Leo can be reached at legal@lpilabs.io.

References

h2c GmbH, in partnership with Cloudbeds and Apaleo, "AI & Automation in Hospitality: Navigating Today's Challenges, Shaping Tomorrow's Gains," October 2025 (189 quantitative responses and 26 executive interviews across 171 hotel chains, 11,000+ properties, 1.3 million rooms).

BCG / PR Newswire, hotel AI expansion sentiment data, cited via OtelCiro, 2026 (82% of hotels planning to expand AI use in 2026, up from 63% in 2024).

Mordor Intelligence, Croatia hospitality OTA dependency data, 2025 (52.78% of all Croatian hospitality bookings; 61% for independent/SME properties).

Croatia Week / Croatian Ministry of Labour, seasonal tourism workforce data, 2024 (56,000+ work permits issued to foreign hospitality workers against an estimated shortfall of approximately 10,000 seasonal workers).

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