Five-Star Service Is Still Being Run on Pen and Paper. ChatBlu Is Changing That.

It is the 28th of the month at a beautiful resort in the Caribbean. The general manager is in her office at 9pm, three hours after her shift ended, hand-keying invoices into a spreadsheet so she can close the books. The F&B director is across the property doing physical inventory with a clipboard, counting bottles of wine that may or may not match what the POS system thinks was sold. The HR manager is downstairs printing rota sheets for next week. At the front desk, the phone rings out while the only receptionist on shift checks in a family of five, and the guest on the other end books somewhere else.

This is a property that delivers world-class guest experiences every single day. The reviews are excellent. The team is exceptional. And it is being run, in 2026, much the same way it would have been run in 1996.

This is a common challenge in hospitality, and it is the problem ChatBlu was built to help solve.

A $110 Billion Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

Hospitality is one of the largest service industries on the planet, and it is losing money in places nobody is looking. Out front, hotels lose over $10 billion a year on abandoned bookings: the guest who started a reservation, hit a question nobody answered, and quietly went to a competitor. Out back, another $100 billion disappears into food waste, missed enquiries, broken handoffs between departments, payroll errors, supplier overpayments and finance teams reconciling numbers by hand.

The teams losing this money are not bad at their jobs. They may be spectacular at them. The problem may be the systems around them. The average mid-sized hotel runs a PMS, channel manager, booking engine, CRM, POS, accounting package, maintenance log, HR and scheduling tool and several messaging inboxes, and few of them talk to each other well. In practice, staff become the integration layer, and whatever the software misses ends up on clipboards, Post-its and spreadsheets.

What ChatBlu Does

ChatBlu is an AI operations platform for hotels and resorts. Rather than adding one more tool to the stack, it puts a team of specialised AI agents to work across the property, each built around a specific department and connected to the systems the hotel already uses.

At the front desk, ChatBlu’s voice and messaging agents answer calls and guest messages around the clock and in multiple languages. They take reservations, handle guest requests and run pre-arrival communication, and they pass anything that needs a human to the right member of staff.

In the back office, finance agents process invoices, reconcile bank lines against PMS revenue and flag variances in the daily P&L, while HR and operations agents build rotas around forecast occupancy, monitor overtime and process leave requests. In F&B, agents track consumption against the POS, forecast demand, support supplier ordering and flag waste. Housekeeping and engineering agents triage maintenance tickets, update room status and keep work orders moving.

The agents share context, hand work to one another and to staff, and leave an audit trail behind every action. For a general manager, that means one live view of the operation instead of a dozen logins, spreadsheets and paper notes.

How It Works

ChatBlu does not ask hotels to replace the systems they already run. It connects to them, from Oracle OPERA Cloud, Mews and SynXis to accounting tools such as QuickBooks, and its agents can write back into the property management system rather than only reading from it. That is the difference between a chatbot that answers a question and an agent that completes the task.

The platform is modular. A hotel can start with a single department, usually the front desk, and switch on back office and F&B modules as results come in, property by property. ChatBlu says its standard is to have a new property live in under a week.

Under the hood, ChatBlu runs its own small language models trained for hospitality, and it can be deployed on-premise for hotel groups that need guest data to stay in-house. The product was also shaped on the ground: the team reports visiting more than 50 hotels in person to see how the work actually gets done before automating it.

Already Live in Hotels

According to the company, ChatBlu works with hotel groups in Mexico, including design-led properties affiliated with major international hospitality collections. Its agents answer guest calls and messages at several properties, with the company expecting more hotels to adopt the technology under the same contract.

ChatBlu also reports working with internationally branded hotel properties in the Caribbean and the United States, while maintaining memberships and partnerships with hospitality industry organizations including the Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Association.

The company says hotels using its platform have reported significant savings in staff time and operational costs in the departments it covers.

That footprint is deliberately varied: design-led hotels, Caribbean resorts with a limited labour pool and multilingual guests, and US properties with high service expectations and tight margins. This range of operating environments could support the platform’s broader adoption.

The Team Behind It

ChatBlu was founded in 2025 by Kristian Lukauskis (CEO), Alexander Dillon (COO) and Sairam Vangapally (CTO). In 2026, Lukauskis and Dillon were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Spain list, the only founders on it building technology for hospitality.

ChatBlu is not a generic AI company entering hospitality from the outside. Its team brings together professionals with experience in luxury hospitality, hotel operations and technology development. Vangapally has built systems at Amazon and Shutterfly, and Dillon has experience in hotel development projects in the Caribbean.

That combination is part of the pitch. Most hotel software is built either by operators who understand the pain but cannot ship robust software, or by engineers who have never worked inside a hotel. ChatBlu was built to have both.

The company is backed by Matador Venture Capital, which led its 2025 pre-seed round, alongside angel investors.

What This Means for Hospitality

Hotel AI often stops at the front desk. ChatBlu’s bet is that the bigger opportunity sits across the whole operation, in the invoices, rotas, stockrooms and maintenance logs that still run on manual work. With hotels already live and a team that has worked inside the industry, ChatBlu is making that case in real hotels rather than on slides.

For hotels, the potential benefits are practical: fewer missed calls and lost bookings, faster month-end closes, less waste, and teams with more time for the part of the job only people can do, which is looking after guests.