Hospitality was never short of data. It was short of proof.

Oskar Smith, Chief Technology Officer at Airship, on why Ask Airship answers a question operators have been asking for years.

When I sit with a hospitality operator and ask what they genuinely cannot do today, the answer is almost always the same: they cannot prove the outcome. We have spent years giving marketers brilliant creative tools, but a tool that helps you send a beautiful campaign is not the same as a tool that shows the campaign worked. For a multi-site operator, with data spread across more integrations and touchpoints than ever, that gap is where the real value gets lost. What we're building is meant to close that gap: a marketing manager who becomes a superstar to their CEO, a marketing director who walks into a board meeting and has their budget increased, not cut, because they can see, provably, that their marketing is working.

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Never a shortage. A joining-up problem.

Years ago, sitting with our CEO Dan Brookman, we were a broadcast email platform, and we went looking for something more. We found it in e-commerce, where every purchase is a clean signal, giving marketers something concrete to act on: recency and frequency marketing becomes possible. A bricks-and-mortar hospitality venue generates the same kind of signals, digital fingerprints from across its systems, but until now has had no reliable way to read them. That is why we built Proof of Presence®: to bring that same capability to physical hospitality, giving operators the ability to see who visits, across which sites, how often, and what they're doing while they're there.

Proof of Presence was close to one-size-fits-all. What has changed this year is that the platform has become almost infinitely flexible, giving operators the ability to interrogate and explore their data like never before, and to shape it around their own outcomes rather than ours.

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Four jobs, not four features.

We built for four jobs an operator comes to us to do. Metrics lets you define exactly what matters to your business (first-time visitors, repeat rate, opt-in by site, spend per visit) and track it, instead of being boxed into someone else's idea of a report. Segments builds dynamic, always-updating audiences from that data, and can trigger the right email or SMS automatically when a guest lapses, joins, or edges towards their next reward. The Performance Dashboard gives you a granular, customisable view at a glance, tracked over time. And Ask Airship sits over the top of all of it: the brains that let you ask a plain English question and get back a real answer, not a menu of where to go looking for one. For years we've clicked around software trying to find the answer. Now we just ask for it.

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Behind the build.

What you experience is an effortless conversation. What sits behind it took years to get right. You take a shower at 3am in a hotel and expect hot water. In a 400-room hotel, having it ready at 3am on a Tuesday takes an enormous amount of thought no guest ever notices. Ask Airship is the same, and two invisible problems mattered most. The first was privacy: we hold tens of millions of contact records of personal data, and we built Ask Airship so that personal data never touches the language model behind it. The second was speed: we don't know what you'll ask, and it still needs to come back quickly, so years ago we re-platformed onto cloud infrastructure and partnered with SingleStore to run fast queries across very large data sets. We made that bet before we knew AI was coming.

To give a sense of the scale we're working at right now, Ask Airship draws on something in the order of 120 million contact records, around 96 million booking records, roughly 151 million Proof of Presence signals, and in the region of £1.84 billion in transaction value. Those are the levels the platform is passing today, not fixed numbers, and they keep climbing.

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What it means in practice.

Ask a question. Get an answer. Build the segment. Launch the campaign. Track what changed. A report that took an hour now takes minutes, and across a team that adds up to weeks returned over the life of a customer. Not every operator has a data analyst, and those who do rarely have one sitting with marketing. Ask Airship is a data analyst who is always there and never on holiday, it lets a marketer reach into the data without waiting on anyone else.

This matters to us because we are hospitality. We are not a business that did well elsewhere and wandered in because hospitality looked like a market. We have decades in the industry, and this launch carries that with it. Ask Airship isn't just a tool that performs tasks; it's that expertise, made reachable by every operator.

We are in this industry every day, and we are our own customers too. Operators and suppliers aren't on opposite sides of a transaction; we're in the same boat. Everyone in this industry cares about the same things: good service, sharing what works, building places worth working in and worth visiting. That understanding is what gave us the ability to build something that finally joins all of that data together.

Hospitality businesses have always generated the data. Now they can finally use it. And this is just the beginning.

By Oskar Smith, Chief Technology Officer, Airship & Toggle.

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