With a distinguished career in the travel and tourism industry, Katarina Railko has become a key voice in hospitality technology, known for her sharp insights on market dynamics and commercial strategy. Today, she joins us to dissect the remarkable success of Lighthouse, a company that has not only dominated the HotelTechAwards for six consecutive years but has also set a new industry benchmark by unifying four award-winning solutions into a single, powerful commercial platform.
In our conversation, Katarina will unpack the strategies behind building unwavering customer trust in a competitive tech landscape. We will explore the complex process of integrating an acquired company while maintaining peak performance and discuss how a platform can effectively serve a diverse global client base of over 80,000 hotels. Finally, we will look to the future, examining the launch of groundbreaking AI-driven booking tools and what they signal for the evolution of hotel revenue optimization.
Winning a customer-driven award for six consecutive years across categories like rate intelligence and parity is a remarkable achievement. What specific strategies do you use to consistently earn such high customer trust, and can you share an example of a recent innovation driven directly by that feedback?
Earning that level of trust, especially for six years running, isn’t about a single strategy; it’s about embedding the customer’s voice into the very fabric of the company. It goes far beyond annual surveys. It’s about creating a continuous, open dialogue through deep partnerships where our clients act more like development partners than customers. We treat their feedback not as a suggestion box, but as a mandate for our innovation pipeline. The HotelTechAwards are so meaningful because they validate this approach—they’re based on real-world impact, integration compatibility, and customer support excellence. A perfect example of this in action is the very unification of our platform. Hoteliers were telling us they were tired of juggling multiple logins and fragmented data streams. They wanted a single source of truth. The integration of The Hotels Network into the Lighthouse platform, creating one seamless solution for pricing, parity, BI, and direct booking, was a direct answer to that collective call for simplicity and power.
Integrating an acquired company like The Hotels Network while maintaining award-winning performance is challenging. Can you walk us through the key steps you took to unify your four solutions into a single commercial platform and how you ensured a seamless transition for your hotelier clients?
That integration was a monumental task, and the key was approaching it with a client-first obsession. The first step was to map the entire customer journey, identifying every potential point of friction. We knew we couldn’t afford a single dip in performance or support for our clients who rely on us daily. We ran parallel systems for a period, ensuring stability, while our engineering teams worked to create a truly unified backend, not just a cosmetic dashboard. This meant harmonizing different data structures and workflows. Simultaneously, our customer success teams underwent extensive cross-training so that any client, whether they were originally a Lighthouse or a The Hotels Network user, could get expert support from a single point of contact. The goal was for our hotelier clients to wake up one day and find their toolkit had become exponentially more powerful, without them having to learn a whole new system or experience any disruption. Maintaining award-winning performance through that transition is what makes us proudest; it proves that thoughtful, customer-centric integration is not just possible, but a benchmark for the industry.
Your platform serves over 80,000 hotels across 185 countries, a diverse customer base. How do you tailor your business intelligence and rate shopping tools for such varied local market needs, and what key performance metrics do you track to ensure their success is your success?
That incredible diversity is our greatest strength and our biggest challenge. The needs of a hotel in Tokyo are vastly different from one in New York. The solution isn’t to create a thousand different products, but to build a single platform that is intelligent and flexible enough to deliver hyper-local insights. Our core mission is to transform overwhelming, complex market data into simple, actionable insights. For a hotel in a competitive urban market, that might mean real-time rate shopping against their direct competitors and short-term rentals. For a remote resort, it might mean analyzing broader demand trends and flight data. The platform is designed to ingest and process these varied data signals, providing a tailored view that matters to that specific hotelier. The ultimate metric we track is our clients’ revenue growth. We truly live by the ethos that their success is our success. When we see our partners increasing their RevPAR and making more confident commercial decisions, we know our tools are delivering real, tangible value on a global scale.
You recently launched Connect AI, which allows bookings through platforms like ChatGPT. What was the biggest technological challenge in making hotels bookable this way, and how do you see this feature fundamentally changing the direct booking landscape for hoteliers in the coming years?
The primary challenge with Connect AI wasn’t just the technical plumbing of an API connection. The real hurdle was translating the incredibly dynamic and complex world of hotel commerce into a fluid, conversational format. Think about it: hotel pricing, availability, room attributes, and restrictions change by the second. The challenge was to build a system that could interpret a user’s natural language query—like “I need a king room with a view near the Eiffel Tower for my anniversary next month”—and instantaneously query real-time data to provide an accurate, bookable option. It required teaching the AI the nuances of hospitality that we take for granted. This feature is a game-changer for direct bookings. It meets the customer in a new and rapidly growing environment, moving the booking process away from traditional websites and OTAs and into the conversational AI tools they are starting to use for everything else. It creates a powerful new, frictionless channel for hoteliers to capture demand at the very first point of inspiration.
What is your forecast for the future of hotel commercial platforms and the role AI will play in revenue optimization over the next five years?
My forecast is that the era of siloed, single-function tools is officially over. Unified commercial platforms like Lighthouse will become the non-negotiable standard for any successful hotel. Hoteliers simply don’t have the time or resources to stitch together disparate systems. Over the next five years, AI’s role will evolve dramatically from a passive analytical tool to an active strategic co-pilot. It won’t just show you data on past performance; it will run predictive simulations on different pricing strategies, automate competitive responses, and dynamically adjust distribution across channels to maximize profit, not just occupancy. The role of the revenue manager will be elevated from crunching spreadsheets to true strategic oversight, using AI to execute complex tactics flawlessly. The platforms that succeed will be those that empower this human-machine partnership to unlock unprecedented levels of revenue growth.
