The hotel industry is evolving. Guest expectations are shifting, behaviours are changing, technology is reshaping the customer relationship, roles are being transformed, and hotels must rethink how they create value.

Faced with these changes, one question stands out: What will tomorrow’s hotel look like?

This is the challenge that INNTO France has set students enrolled in Hospitality Master’s programmes across its network as part of the NextGen Hospitality Challenge, organised in partnership with EquipHotel.

The challenge invites students to take on the role of a consulting and foresight team. Working in groups of three to five, they select a major issue from a predefined list and develop innovative, well-founded and actionable recommendations. But the exercise goes beyond forward thinking.

Each team tests its ideas with a real partner hotel to assess their relevance, feasibility and implementation requirements.

The objective is to generate proposals that provide tangible value to an individual hotel while remaining transferable enough to inspire the industry as a whole.

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• Participants: Students enrolled in Hospitality Master’s programmes within the INNTO France network, working in teams of three to five
• Theme: “What will tomorrow’s hotel look like?”
• Format: Forward-looking, transferable recommendations tested with a partner hotel
• Final: Wednesday 4 November 2026, from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m., at EquipHotel, Paris Expo Porte de Versailles

Participating institutes

• INNTO Angers – ESTHUA
• INNTO Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne – IREST
• INNTO Gustave Eiffel – IFIS
• INNTO Toulouse Jean Jaurès – ISTHIA
• INNTO Savoie Mont Blanc – IAE Savoie Mont Blanc

Students can choose from four key themes:

1. New Guests, New Behaviours and New Experiences
How can hotels respond to evolving guest behaviours and expectations?

2. Talent, Skills, Management and Organisational Performance
How can the hotel industry become more attractive and high-performing while adapting to changing roles and professions?

3. Customer Experience, Digital Technology, Artificial Intelligence and Data
How can technology, personalisation and human interaction be successfully combined?

4. Business Models, Brands, Quality and Value Creation
How can hotels develop successful, distinctive business models in a rapidly changing environment?

Whatever theme they choose, teams must also incorporate the environmental, social and local dimensions relevant to the hotel of tomorrow.

The NextGen Hospitality Challenge is based on one key belief: foresight delivers its greatest value when tested against real-world conditions.

Students analyse a hotel, its positioning, guests, environment, constraints and future plans. They can then refine their recommendations by confronting them with operational realities.

This iterative approach transforms an idea into an actionable proposal, covering the expected benefits, conditions for success, resources required, potential barriers and performance indicators.

Four hotels have chosen to partner with this inaugural edition, keen to entrust their challenges to the students and benefit from their curiosity, creativity and recommendations. The participating hotels are highly diverse: some are located in city centres, while others are set beside a lake; some are heavily affected by seasonality, while others have more than 300 rooms. Together, they provide a rich testing ground in which students can develop and put forward their ideas.

Partners hotels :

o   Hôtel de la Cité, Nantes

o   Hôtel du Bout du Parc, Versailles

o   Villa Seren, Hossegor

o   Mercure Charles de Gaulle Airport, Roissy

For students, it is an opportunity to work on the real transformations shaping the sector, develop their skills and meet industry professionals.

For partner hotels, it is a chance to gain a fresh perspective on their challenges, explore new avenues for transformation and meet emerging talent.

For the wider industry, it serves as an ideas laboratory, fuelled by a new generation of professionals and grounded in operational realities.

The grand final will take place on 4 November 2026 at EquipHotel in Paris. The projects will be assessed by a panel of hospitality professionals chaired by Vanguelis Panayotis, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of MKG Consulting and the Hospitality ON media platform.