Podcast guests to customers. What 62 invited hotels became.

What came of 62 invitations

guestjourney.ai sells software to hotels. Its co-founder, Arjan Eikelenboom, called and emailed the hotels he wanted as customers: nobody picked up and nobody wrote back. guestjourney.ai then started Future of Hospitality, a video podcast for the hotel industry, and invited the same hotels as guests. Nearly all of them said yes.

Of the 40 warm relationships, 28 became customers: 70%. The rest still counted. Some guests were never going to buy and were invited for the show, because a well-known name makes the next yes easier. Some moved to another hotel and became a customer there. And not one guest failed to show up.

What the show itself shows

Future of Hospitality is where the invitations led. On 3 November 2026 it had 131 episodes in 11 series and 146 guests: general managers, owners, asset managers and revenue leaders, talking about their own work. Not every episode was hosted by guestjourney.ai. The show now has ten hosts, which made it feel independent and made more guests say yes.

We measured the length of all 131 episodes: the median is 38 minutes, and half of them run between 32 and 46. The shortest is 20 minutes, the longest 88. The six roundtables run longer, with a median of 54. More in our guide to podcast length.

How we counted

The guest figures come from guestjourney.ai, the company that did the inviting. They count the hotels it invited onto Future of Hospitality and, of those, how many became a warm relationship, how many became customers, and how many did not buy but referred a customer who did. Customers count as warm relationships too. "Warm relationship" is guestjourney.ai's own term; the figures don't define it further.

The period runs from the start of the show in 2025 to the count in November 2026. The sources give the year the show started, not the month, and not the date of each invitation.

The show figures we checked ourselves on futureofhospitality.org on 3 November 2026: the episode list, the series and the guest page. Episode length is the length published on each episode page, read the same day.

What these numbers don't tell you

• Deal size, revenue and how long a customer stays. They are not in the data.
• The time between the recording and the purchase. Not in the data either.
• What would have happened without the show. Apart from the calls and emails that got no answer, there are no figures for hotels approached another way, so the data can't show how many would have bought anyway.
• Where the six referrers sit. The data doesn't say whether they are among the 40 warm relationships, or whether the customers they referred are among the 28. In the picture above they stand apart.
• Hotels per guest. A hotel is a company and a guest is a person, and the 146 guests include those of the other hosts. Don't divide one by the other.
• Your market. This is one company in one industry: 28 of 62 is what guestjourney.ai saw in hospitality, not a promise for yours.

We are not neutral: we produce Future of Hospitality, and Alon Shkuri, our producer, is one of its hosts.

What to do with it

If you sell into one industry and can name the customers you want, an invitation to your show can open a door that a cold call doesn't. Who to invite, and how, is in our guide to podcast guests. The follow-up and the arithmetic are in Podcast for sales and in the free white paper Give the mic to your prospects. We run the invitations for clients with Lead engine.