After four months of live customer deployments, Ernest gives hotels the first enterprise-grade AI built specifically for hospitality, not adapted from a generic model
DENVER, CO / ACCESS Newswire / October 7, 2026 / Lighthouse, the AI Commercial Operating Platform for the travel and hospitality industry, today announced that Ernest, its AI teammate for commercial teams, is generally available. Since the initial launch in June, Ernest has become a proven way of working inside the commercial teams of real hotels. From today, every group, chain and management company can use Ernest with the hospitality data, skills, connectors and routines that take care of the groundwork, so teams start the day making decisions.
Ernest is already in daily use at leading brands including Viceroy Hotel Group, Stonebridge and Maine Course Hospitality Group. His capabilities keep growing, guided by Lighthouse's hospitality expertise and shaped by what teams need from him in production, so he gets sharper with every deployment.
"The customer response to Ernest over the last four months has been incredible," said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of Lighthouse. "We're moving past the hype and seeing real, demonstrable ROI right now. Ernest is working alongside hotel commercial teams like a true teammate, closing the gap between insight and revenue. With general availability, we're excited to put that advantage into the hands of every hotelier worldwide."
Ernest's difference from general-purpose AI comes down to what the model reasons over. General-purpose AI works from public internet knowledge and whatever a team supplies it; Ernest applies the same class of AI frontier models to Lighthouse's live, governed hospitality data, including over 3 billion hotel data points monitored daily across more than 80,000 hotels, with customized skills built and maintained by Lighthouse's hospitality tech experts. Ask both the same commercial question and only Ernest has seen real-time comp set, pick-up and demand data to make the recommendation.
Wiring generic models into hotels' own systems is an option, but the initial build is around 10 percent of the effort; the other 90 percent is keeping connections, definitions and security intact as systems and policies change. Lighthouse has carried that work for Ernest's first customers, and these live deployments have helped shape the standard library of skills, connectors and routines that every Ernest customer now starts with. The library covers the foundations, and from there, Ernest learns the specifics of each organization, its properties, its portfolio and the way its team works.
"Every skill we've shipped since June combines our vision for hospitality with real requests from real commercial teams," said Juanjo Rodríguez, Chief AI Officer at Lighthouse. "That work is now off-the-shelf capability every customer gets from day one. Some hotel groups will want a Lighthouse Crew of specialists embedded with their team to tailor Ernest around how they operate, and others will get started on their own and let Ernest learn their business as they work. Both paths lead to the same destination, an AI teammate with the data, the systems and the hospitality judgment built in, which no generic assistant can offer."
For commercial teams, the change shows up at the start of the day. Rather than opening a laptop to a blank screen, teams arrive at competitive analysis, forecasts and management-ready reports that Ernest prepared overnight, on the schedule they set. Jeff Hinkle, VP of Revenue Management at Stonebridge, commented: "Hotel commercial teams have more data than ever, but it lives across multiple platforms and takes significant manual work to turn into a clear strategy. Ernest brings those signals together, making them easier to interpret and act on." Samantha Claridge, Revenue Manager at Maine Course Hospitality Group, added: "What impressed us most was how quickly Ernest understood our business, from Group Displacement to forecasting and budgeting. He's become a genuine part of our team, not just a tool we log into."
Availability
Ernest is generally available from today to hotel groups, chains and management companies worldwide. Learn more at: www.mylighthouse.com/platform/ernest
Contact Information
Jonathan Gough
pr@mylightouse.com
+447468490754
SOURCE: Lighthouse
View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire:
https://www.accessnewswire.com/newsroom/en/travel/ernest-lighthouses-ai-teammate-for-hotel-commercial-teams-is-now-generally-available-1232833
