Nobody wants to be first: hotel owners and the AI clause in HMAs

Hotel owners keep signing management agreements (HMAs) without a single line about who owns the AI agents that will soon run pricing, guest messaging and distribution. That is the warning in a recent opinion piece on Hospitality Net, which argues owners must sit at the table now, before operators turn AI clauses into boilerplate they dictate on their own terms. The trap is simple: nobody wants to be the first to raise it, and by the time the second and third owner do, the template is already written.

The source does not quantify how many HMAs already include AI language, and it does not name specific operators or owners. What it does say is that the three things owners should negotiate today are agent ownership (who owns the models and the prompts that produce revenue decisions), data portability (whether the owner can take guest and performance data to another operator or tech stack) and performance-based fees tied to measurable outcomes, not just base fees on gross revenue.

Look at the market. Hotel tech is moving toward embedded AI in PMS, RMS and CRM. Operators and third-party vendors are building agents that learn from a property's own data. If those agents sit inside an operator's stack and the underlying data cannot be exported, the owner loses leverage at renewal. This is not a theoretical risk. It is the same story we saw with channel managers and legacy PMS contracts, where exits were expensive and data was slow to leave.

The counterargument is that AI clauses are premature because the technology is still settling. Fair. But management contracts run five, ten, fifteen years. The clauses being negotiated in 2025 will govern assets in 2035. Owners who wait for a standard will get the standard the operator writes. The opportunity is on the owner side: bring a short, clear addendum on agent ownership, data export formats and fee triggers, and use it as a differentiator when choosing between operators. The ones who do it first will set the reference point for everyone else.

What to watch: whether the big management companies publish their own AI policy in the next 12 months, and whether any owner association turns this into a model clause. If neither happens, the first mover advantage belongs to whoever writes the first template, and it will likely be the operator, not the owner.