AI Hospitality Leader TakeUp Deepens Trade Relationships and Prospect Visibility Through Industry-Oriented Research
The Objective
Hospitality AI leader TakeUp secured a firm position of industry thought leadership in late 2025 into early 2026, leveraging agnostic research that measured how artificial intelligence was being adopted and used across the hospitality ecosystem. Partnering with Escalate PR, the PR program built around the research featured an intentional focus around hospitality trade press, with the goal of capitalizing on the rising influence of AI-powered search.
Founded in 2020, Ohio-based TakeUp carved a specific leadership position in hospitality, focusing its AI-powered revenue management platform on smaller, independent venues (e.g., boutique hotels, bed and breakfasts). TakeUp’s “causal” AI engine gave independent venue managers continuous pricing recommendations, based on more than 40,000 microanalyses per day, allowing the managers to make dynamic pricing decisions based on real-time market conditions. Thus, securing media coverage directly relevant to the property owners was paramount.
The Strategy
TakeUp and Escalate partnered on the quarterly research from ideation through distribution, the connective tissue of each report being that the research was agnostic and industry-driven. From September 2025 through March 2026, TakeUp issued reports looking at the adoption of AI by hospitality properties, AI use by consumer travelers and overall consumer travel sentiment to start 2026. From there, Escalate focused its efforts on deepening TakeUp’s relationships with hospitality trade press, mindful of growing PR industry opinions that LLM-powered search places a premium on vertical coverage.
