Virdee

The room key is moving to the phone.

Today, Virdee is announcing an expanded integration with Salto that lets hotels deliver room keys directly to guests' mobile wallets.

Here's what that looks like for a guest: check in on your phone or at the desk, add the key to your wallet, then hold your phone or watch near the reader. No app to open. No screen to unlock. On most phones, the key still works for hours after the battery dies.

Here's what it looks like for a hotel: shorter lines at the desk, fewer plastic keycards to encode and replace, and remote key issuance that works whether your arrival model is traditional, hybrid, or fully digital. Access extends beyond the room to elevators, fitness centers, pools, and other authorized spaces.

"Mobile room access is not simply a replacement for the plastic keycard," says our co-founder and CEO, Branigan Mulcahy. "It is an essential part of a more connected arrival experience, one that gives guests greater control while giving hotel teams better tools to manage operations."

Paired with the identity verification, payments, registration, and upsells already running through Virdee, hotels get one connected path from reservation to room.

Available now for qualifying deployments on compatible Salto access technology.

Hotel energy management can no longer be a “set it and forget it” exercise.

As electricity costs rise and grid conditions become more dynamic, static guestroom thermostat schedules may be leaving significant savings on the table. HVAC can account for more than 1/3 of a hotel's energy costs.

Modern technology can help reduce costs while also customizing settings for guests.

🔹 Smarter controls can adjust to actual occupancy, weather conditions, and more
🔹 Mobile check-in can provide more detailed information on guest arrival time and temperature preferences
🔹 AI agents can log check-outs and communicate with smart controls to adjust thermostats

The opportunity is not simply to use less energy. It is to use energy more intelligently while protecting guest comfort and even improving the guest experience.

Virdee's mobile check-in solution combined with AI agents that can link to various property systems to provide a smoother, faster, and more customized guest experience.

Mixed-use development is giving hotels something every operator wants: demand that is already built into the destination.

Mixed-use projects combine hotels with residential, medical, retail, dining, and entertainment uses.

For hotel owners, developers, and operators, several advantages stand out:

🔹 Embedded demand
🔹 More balanced occupancy
🔹 Stronger ancillary revenue

👉 Another benefit of these developments? The right technology can be embedded from the start, providing easy, reliable, and differentiating impacts for guests, residents, and customers.

Mobile wallet keys don't just open hotel doors. They also open residential doors.

Check-in technology can go beyond just checking in guests and can also check in residential visitors, immediately providing them with a key, property information, and more.

Virdee is here to help you unify your technology across multiple property types, making every experience smoother.

U.S. hotel performance continues to move in a positive direction.

• Occupancy: up 3.0%
• ADR: up 4.1%
• RevPAR: up 7.2%

Demand and pricing are both contributing to RevPAR growth, but market-level performance remains uneven.

That makes local demand intelligence, disciplined revenue strategy, and agile commercial decision-making increasingly important as we move through the second half of 2026.

Virdee makes every stay an easy one. Don't let old technology, staffing shortages, or missed upsell opportunities mess with your hotel's success.

The future of hospitality may be powered by technology, but it will still be defined by people.

The goal should not simply be to add more technology. It should be to create more capacity for great hospitality.

🔹 Start with operational reality. Solve the friction employees experience every day, not just the technology opportunities that look impressive.

🔹 Know what to automate and what to augment. Routine processes can be automated. Complex decisions often benefit from technology-supported human judgment.

🔹 Protect human interaction. Empathy, care, discretion, and thoughtful service remain essential parts of the guest experience.

The leadership question is changing from “Where can we use AI?” to “Where can technology give our teams greater clarity, capacity, and confidence?”

👉 That is a much more powerful starting point, and Virdee Intelligence AI is designed to do exactly that. It automates where appropriate, getting guests the answers they seek and staff the analytics and recommendations they need faster than ever before. At the same time, it connects humans at the right moment while giving staff more time for those meaningful interactions.

The smartest hotels will not use technology to remove hospitality from the experience. They will use it to give their people more opportunity to deliver it.

📈 The U.S. hotel outlook is getting stronger.

🔹 Occupancy: 2026 forecast increased to 63.1%
🔹 A record number of room nights were sold during the first half of 2026, up 11.4 million from 2025
🔹 Revenue: Room revenue increased by more than $5.4 billion

Stronger leisure and business travel, the World Cup, America 250 celebrations, and recovering group demand are helping drive the momentum.

But the opportunity comes with a challenge: expenses are still expected to grow faster than inflation.

For hotel operators, the message is clear. Demand is strengthening, but protecting flow-through and profitability will require disciplined revenue management, cost control, and operational ex*****on.

👉 Virdee is here to help smooth lumpy staffing costs caused by seasonality. Staffing shortages continue to impact most hotels, and a self-service check-in solution helps hotels do more with less while protecting (and even improving) the guest experience.

For years, the hotel room key has been something guests had to remember to carry.

Now it's becoming something they already have.

With room keys in Apple Wallet, guests can unlock their room using the iPhone or Apple Watch they carry every day. There's no app to open, no plastic keycard to keep track of, and no waiting at the front desk just to get access to a room.

For hotels, the benefits go beyond convenience:
🔹 Faster, frictionless arrivals
🔹 Fewer lost keycards
🔹 Lower operational costs
🔹 A more modern guest experience from check-in to check-out

Digital room keys aren't about replacing hospitality. They're about removing unnecessary friction so staff can focus on creating memorable guest experiences instead of issuing replacement keycards.

The future of hotel access is already in your guests' pockets.

The future of hospitality isn't self-service.

And it isn't full-service.

👉 It's giving guests the freedom to choose.

1️⃣ Some travelers want to walk straight to their room after a long flight.
2️⃣ Others appreciate a personal welcome and local recommendations from the front desk.

The best hotels don't force every guest through the same journey. They offer multiple paths to the same great experience.

Choice is quickly becoming one of hospitality's most valuable amenities, and that's exactly what Virdee provides every hotel, every guest.

What options are you giving your guests?

The first five minutes of a hotel stay shape the rest of the guest experience.

⚠️ A long wait at the front desk creates frustration before a guest even reaches their room.
👉 A seamless arrival creates confidence.

That's why the arrival experience deserves just as much attention as the room itself. Every minute spent waiting is a minute guests could be relaxing, exploring the property, or enjoying the destination.

Hotels invest heavily in guestrooms, restaurants, and amenities. It's time to invest just as much in the guest's first impression.

Let Virdee help your hotel start every guest's stay off right.

There's a lot of discussion about AI replacing jobs.

Hospitality should be having a different conversation.

What if AI simply handled the repetitive work?

✔️ Identity verification
✔️ Registration
✔️ Payment collection
✔️ Routine guest questions

That gives hotel teams more time to solve problems, build relationships, and create memorable stays.

The best use of AI isn't replacing hospitality. It's making hospitality more human. Virdee's AI-powered tools automate mundane tasks, provide detailed analytics, and optimize upsell offers... All working together to give valuable time back to staff while delighting guests with fast and easy self-service options.

Hotels that understand this balance will be the ones guests remember.