Hospitality Gamechanger Summit
15.-16. May 2025
Fiera Bolzano (Italy)
The BEAM Summit is the networking platform for ambitious innovators who want to inspire and change the hospitality industry with their visionary solutions. BEAM is a Think Act, more than a Think Tank - not just thinking, but also acting! - and drives interdisciplinary exchange in the hospitality industry.
2024: Empowering Teams & Thrilling Guests
This year, we focused on people - both as employees and as guests. It was about our visions and solutions for: industry attractiveness and labor shortages, talent management and employee leadership, digitization and human-machine interaction, corporate culture, and brand positioning.
Would you like to dive into the talks from the BEAM Summit 2024 again? Or were you unable to attend this year? Here are brief abstracts of some interesting keynotes and talks.
Generation Z are challenging customers, both as guests and as employees. Yaël Meier's most expensive piece of clothing is a shoe that exists only in the metaverse, a filter on Snapchat. "For me and my generation, this is normal," says Meier. This presents the entire industry with completely new challenges. The life of Generation Z is characterized by rapid change. New trends emerge, and every day brands that fail disappear. Or does anyone still remember Nokia? However, Generation Z is not homogeneous. Max Verstappen and Greta Thunberg both belong to this generation but could not be more different. "The life context is crucial," says Meier.
Generation Z is always connected, and movements like Fridays for Future or Black Lives Matter emerge from this connectivity. GenZ is socialized by the climate crisis, not by 9/11. "Sustainability is fundamentally important to us," says Meier, "but we don't adhere to it when consuming." GenZ has money. GenZ is disloyal—but this is an opportunity, says Meier, because it's easy to excite young people about new brands. GenZ sets trends, like vegan food. Does GenZ not want to work? "That's not true," says Yaël Meier. "Hospitality simply isn't attractive to young people." Salary is one of the main reasons for job changes among GenZ, says Meier. But future possible earnings are more important than the starting salary. Meier introduces her Love-Job model: the three pillars of earnings, internal appreciation—what does the entrepreneur do for me?—and external appreciation—how does my environment see me?—can balance each other out. Jobs unattractive from the perspective of internal and external appreciation must be paid accordingly better.
Artificial intelligence will turn hospitality upside down. But how it will do this is still completely open. Where is AI going? In ten years, artificial intelligence will manage the booking of an entire vacation on its own, create interactive menu cards with photos and videos and ingredient selection, support employees, and pass on knowledge. But today? Everyone is struggling with it. The integration of AI into business is full of pitfalls. Chatbots, price optimisation, and tailored customer loyalty already work well. A large hotel chain had its recruitment completely managed by AI, resulting in 25 per cent less turnover and 12 per cent fewer unfilled vacancies. However, 72 per cent "blindly believe" in AI's recommendations. "If you ask a chatbot to tell me the best hotel in town, 70 per cent will book the first match - even if they know it might not be right," says Moritz Schröder.
AI's role in the hospitality industry must be customer-centric. The key to every successful experience lies in customisation and exceptional customer service. Therefore, the development and empowerment of expert teams are vital for maintaining high-quality service. "AI will not replace us - I hope," says Moritz Schröder, "but it will help us." Necessary for this: address the fears! Build AI applications around the user and their workflow. AI must adapt to us, not us to it. Build on what is already there. Be pragmatic. What bothers you the most? Tackle it! Get started! The tools are springing up; now is the time to get started.
Sara Abdel Masih defines her concept of luxury not by the presence of material objects, but based on perception and the sense of humanity encountered. Sara was a successful hotel manager, but at one point, she realized that people around her only saw her titles and successes – but no longer the person behind them. They saw the hotel, but not Sara. For this reason, Sara decided to step back and shift her focus to another set of needs, those arising from our perceptual abilities: seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling, listening. How should we define luxury? What makes a hotel a "luxury hotel"? "It is not recognized by the size of the rooms or the number of saunas," says Sara Abdel Masih. "It is recognized by the flavors of the restaurant, the feel of the surfaces, the smells, the beauty of the location, and the background sounds. Smells, details, food, silence.
Luxury is not recognized by material things, but by excellence in every detail. For instance, the art of cooking is such an excellence because it is created by people. Excellence must be human to truly be so." New technologies will come, Abdel Masih says, but that's not the most important thing: "We need to show our closeness to the employees of tomorrow. They are talented; we need to awaken and recognize that talent. We need to listen to them, we need to relate to them first as people, then as employees. This doesn't require titles and recognitions but relationships that involve empathy and sensitivity. "Technology will not take over if we act appropriately."
Claus Sendlinger wants to break new ground in hospitality with his Berlin campus: sensitive,
local, organic, and wise. What good can hospitality do for the world? "Hospitality can help if it focuses on people and not on Excel tables," says Claus Sendlinger.
"Not growing in size, we don't need 40 more rooms, we need new ideas." "Hospitality is taking care of people, not renting a room." Many hosts have understood this, says Sendlinger, and growing their food alone has a huge impact.
Sendlinger has developed a campus in Berlin where people can work and live on 14,000
square meters and where hospitality is being rethought. This is where ideas are born on how to attract new employees. "But 90 per cent of the students on campus don't want to work in gastronomy," says Sendlinger. You have to appeal to new people and get them excited about the industry, even if it's anything but easy: "Don't stop believing in yourself. It sounds easy, but after COVID, the war and the explosion in construction costs, it wasn't at all."
After the information age comes the age of psycho-social health. "We can no longer keep up with the flood and speed of information. We are experiencing a continuation of crises like I have never seen before. Everything is somehow broken," says Sendlinger. We can't expect any help from outside: "We have to react ourselves, not wait for politicians. Hospitality has the means to do this." Sendlinger, who kicked off BEAM, had a mes- sage for the audience: "Everyone will soon be talking about the topics we are discussing here. But we can't just preach, we must act!"
Beyond an event, BEAM is a platform for hospitality visionaries and achievers. We offer a stage to showcase global solutions, ignite transformative mindsets, and promote cross-industry collaboration among game-changers. Join our BEAM community on LinkedIn and stay in touch with the future of hospitality!
