Welcome to our new content series “In Conversation With”, where we sit down with industry experts, executives and thought leaders to discuss all things travel, technology, trends and more. In the first installment, we sit down with Klaus Kohlmayr, Chief Evangelist & Development Officer for IDeaS. Klaus is also involved with a number of advisory and educational roles including the Cornell School of Hotel Administration and Hotel Business Magazine.

We hear his predictions surrounding over-tourism and find out what it’s been like to live in 8 different cities.

I think you win the unofficial award for coolest sounding job title. Can you walk us through a day in the life of a Chief Evangelist and what that normally looks like?
Yeah, there's not too many of us. I think there's 1 more, maybe 2 more in the hotel tech world. My role is really to bring thought leadership to the industry. So a typical day in the in the life of a Chief Evangelist is kind of what I did today. I spent the morning researching, for example, AI and technology developments in the travel tech world, and then I spent some time on content for my presentation next week at our annual client summit. And then also doing things like this; podcasts and providing content to our partners and the broader industry. So this day is actually very typical; researching, looking at trends, looking at themes, understanding kind of where the world of hospitality and travel, tech and technology ecosystems are going. All of that then influences our product strategy, our marketing strategy, and we use that in conversations with our clients and sales organization.

During your research, has anything surprised you with regards to new technologies?
Yeah, I think adoption of these technologies and the change that comes with it is still going slow, slower than I thought. You know, we started talking about a project involving attribute-based shopping back in 2012 and we all got really excited about it. So we were helping a big brand work their way through the requirements, how it would look and what it would feel like, and here we are, 12 years later and the industry still doesn't have it at scale, and still doesn’t have all the technology pieces in place. And we're still only talking about moving things to the cloud now, which is accelerating. It’s been slow, but I feel I'm an internal optimist, so I do feel it's accelerating recently. It is just taking a very long time to get change to happen at scale.

Switching gears a little, let’s dive into your personal background. You've lived in Idaho, Paris, Geneva, Vienna, London, New York, Singapore, and Minneapolis. How has experiencing so many different places and cultures framed your life and how you think about hospitality?
I went to hotel management school starting when I was 15; being in Europe we had these specialized “alternative high schools”. So I went to one of these schools to learn about hotel management and hospitality. The reason why I wanted to do that is because, one, I didn't want to sit still in a regular school, but I also wanted to be able to work globally and be able to have an international journey and career. When I graduated from the hotel management school, I got hired by the Sun Valley Resort in Idaho where I worked for a couple of years. Perfect in your twenties, right? You work in a ski resort, what better place to be for an Austrian? And then I worked my way around independent hotels. Around this time I figured out that to have a real, truly global career, I needed to join a brand, which I did. I joined Intercontinental Hotels at that time, and they kept moving me around the world. So they moved me from Vienna to New York, and London, and Singapore, and Paris. I was able to have a journey with a large organization and that facilitated me getting exposure across different cultures which is what I had set out to do in the beginning. I then joined IDeaS in 2007 in Singapore, and in 2010 they moved me to Minneapolis where I am today.

Since you do some teaching with Cornell, what would your advice be for a new graduate entering the workforce in 2024?
I think there are 4 main pillars to think about. The first is curiosity. You have to be curious to advance in a career. The second one is flexibility. Be flexible to take on a new role when it comes up, or flexibility in your in your geographic location, and how you're approaching your job and always putting up your hands to go after new opportunities. The third is ambition. And the last one is luck. If you sit next to the right person at a dinner or at a bar, and you never know who can enable you to get to the next level.

Give us a prediction on anything hotel, hospitality, tech or tourism related.
I think over-tourism is going to continue to be a front-page topic. You can see that in Europe over the last few weeks, especially as people are starting to get annoyed with too many tourists, which is a shame . I think we’ll see more and more cities that are suffering from that putting some form of restrictions in place. I saw last week, a McKinsey report that predicts that Dubrovnik will double the number of visitors in the next 7 years, which is incredible. If you've ever been to Dubrovnik, you can already not move in the summer. They're expecting to double that, so over-tourism is going to become a bigger issue in markets like this.

What is one book everyone should read?
Probably a little bit older now, but it's called The Leadership Pipeline, and it describes how people need to change their behavior as they step up in their career, between an individual contributor and managing people or becoming a manager, a leader, a VP, CEO, you have to leave some behaviors behind, and you have to adopt others.

If you were going to open a hotel today, which market would you choose and why?
I would probably have a smaller, independent type of hotel. That would be a passion project of mine, so this is not necessarily coming strictly from a profitability perspective. So if I go by my passion, it would be a small, independent hotel somewhere in Southern Europe.