Patrick Ahler

Restaurant availability is currently scattered across dozens of systems that don’t talk to each other, so customers never see everything in one place. We didn’t want to build another manual search layer. We wanted to remove the work for consumers entirely. You say exactly what you want, and Ambl. finds real availability across platforms and confirms the availability at the venue. Agentic AI is the future because software shouldn’t tell you what to do. It should do it for you. As AI becomes standard, the real advantage will be the ability to transact, not just recommend.

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$1M raised. Yipy closed its pre-seed round, led by Great North Ventures and Ollin Ventures. We're building the hotel industry's first Hospitality Standards Management System. Why does that matter? Hotels have invested heavily in systems that optimize revenue, distribution, and guest data. But the way service standards are managed? Barely changed in decades. Standards still live in PDFs. Binders. Spreadsheets. They fragment across teams and properties. They make consistency nearly impossible at scale. That's the gap we're closing. Yipy treats standards as operational infrastructure—not administrative afterthought. One centralized, mobile-first system. Define standards once. Distribute them across teams. Audit execution in real time. Measure performance continuously. Leading brands are already using it—including properties affiliated with The Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott. This funding fuels what's next: continued product development, team expansion, and go-to-market growth. Huge thanks to Grant Gibson at Great Northern and the team at Ollin Ventures for believing in what we're building. Standards shouldn't live in binders. They should live in systems that make excellence executable. That's what we're scaling. Congrats to the Yipy Team, especially our founders: Adam Tuttle, Philip Erickson, and Todd Marchant.

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Hotels are sitting on margin and still chasing volume. SiteMinder’s latest data shows hotel websites generated an average booking value of $516 in 2025. OTAs generated $312 . That’s a 65% delta. Before commission. This isn’t a channel detail. It’s an economics divide. Here’s what actually happens: Guests go to OTAs for discounted standard rooms. But when they decide to upgrade, to add breakfast, to stay one extra day, to book a suite for an occasion... They go direct. OTAs capture transactions. Websites capture valuable guests. Yet most acquisition conversations are still volume-led. Why? Because occupancy is visible. Margin is hidden. When discovery is outsourced but margin depends selling "right", your future profitability depends entirely on the strength of your direct presence. OTAs capture demand. Direct captures yield. Your highest-value guest is already booking on your website. Why is that website still treated like a support channel instead of a power asset? Volume fills rooms. Margin builds hotels. ----- Link to excellent study by long-time Guestcentric partner SiteMinder in the first comment.

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Marketing at it very best, give your system away for peanuts and watch it grow and be adopted by the masses. pretty simple marketing that will have amazing results AI discounts for the govt.: OpenAI is making its enterprise-grade ChatGPT available to U.S. federal agencies for just $1 annually, aiming to boost government adoption. Anthropic also plans to offer its Claude AI platform to U.S. federal agencies for just $1. Sources: Bloomberg / Axios.

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Catherine at Sparkfly said it well 👏 🚨 Nearly 30% of restaurant traffic is happening on a deal, the highest level in decades, even as overall traffic continues to decline. Your customers are already making decisions based on value, whether you want to participate in that conversation or not. The paradox is real: ❌ Avoid offers entirely, and you lose relevance in a value-driven market ❌ Overuse discounts, and you train guests to wait, eroding margin and long-term value The issue isn’t discounting itself, but indiscriminate discounting. Strategic offers should influence behavior, generate learning, and protect margin not just chase volume. ✅ A practical implication of that thinking is recency-based intent: 1) guests who purchased recently are often responsive to relevance and ease, 2) mid-recency guests benefit from contextual value nudges, and 3) deeper promotional reactivation tends to make sense only as recency declines. When offers ignore this, the paradox accelerates instead of resolving. (Comment on this post if you want me to share some tactical plays from our RFM (recency, frequency, monetization) framework 😇 ) #RestaurantTech #PricingStrategy #RestaurantMarketing #FirstPartyGrowth #CustomerBehavior #LoyaltyStrategy #DataDrivenGrowth unPLUG Dining https://lnkd.in/dETz-QTK

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Excited to share an exceptional client success story: California Fish Grill This is what happens when two best-in-class platforms stop operating in silos and create one seamless guest journey. Sparkfly powers the offer engine. unPLUG Dining owns the ordering experience. Together, real-time engagement lives inside the order, at the exact moment a guest is making a decision. The California Fish Grill results don't just beat industry benchmarks. They lap them. This is the kind of work that makes me excited to come to work every day. Congrats to the teams at unPLUG Dining and California Fish Grill. More to come! #RestaurantTech #GuestEngagement #LoyaltyMarketing #Sparkfly #unPLUG #Partnership

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Restaurants in the U.S. generate up to 33 billion pounds of food waste annually — enough that recovering just 30% of all wasted food nationwide could feed every food-insecure American. That stat sits behind every fragmented back office described above. Ordering perishable food without a proper sales forecast leads directly to spoilage and it's the single largest driver of the gap between your actual and theoretical food cost. But it doesn't stop there. Without data-driven prep and production guidance, you're also generating prep waste, which accounts for roughly 20% of total food waste. That's raw ingredients that consumed labor, water, gas, and electricity, and ended up in a landfill producing CO₂ emissions. The margin problem is the waste problem. Connecting purchasing, inventory, and forecasting isn't just a financial decision. It's an operational and environmental one. When operators have visibility into what they're ordering versus what they actually need, the P&L improves and the waste shrinks. We're on a mission to change how this industry drives value, with a mindset rooted in people, planet, and profit. A framework I carry with me, learned from great mentors, Joni Thomas Doolin and Wally Doolin. The back of the house doesn't get the spotlight. But it's where the margin lives, and where the waste starts. For operators reading this: what's the one area in your back office where you feel the most blind right now? Purchasing, prep, inventory, or the connection between all three?

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From green houses to red hotels like in monopoly, Morris Jackson II shares how he got into hospitality working with Wyndham Hotels & Resorts! What started as a venture into hospitality has become a journey of ownership and growth. Working with Wyndham Hotels opened doors to minority ownership programs. Now, with hotels in Blackfoot, Idaho, and Wildwood, Florida, the path from Monopoly fan to hotel owner has been an exciting one. Sometimes, the most unexpected turns lead to the greatest opportunities. Consider hospitality if you're seeking a new venture. When Morris isn’t too busy launching new ventures, you can find him innovating esports with Valhallan and expanding financial opportunities for entrepreneurs with Looking Inward For Tomorrow #Hospitality #MinorityOwnership #Entrepreneurship #WyndhamHotels

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