Follow one visitor through a Miami weekend and five South Florida AI companies show up, from the hotel room to the flight home. #MiamiAI #HospitalityTech #TravelTech #RestaurantTech #MiamiTech #SouthFlorida
Imagine one visitor’s weekend in Miami. She lands Friday night and books a hotel room that was hours from going empty. On Saturday she orders a glass of wine from a lounge chair. That night she picks a restaurant from a feed of local offers. On Sunday she grabs a quick bite and rebooks her flight home.
The weekend is imagined. The companies behind it are real, and Miami hospitality AI runs through all five. She would notice some of them and never see the rest. Follow her path, and the seams of the industry show. Hotels, restaurants, and airlines all run on thin margins and tight timing, which is exactly where software pays off.
Friday night: the room that was about to go empty
Friday night starts with LastKeys. The company runs a private dark-pool marketplace for hotel rooms close to expiring unsold. Travelers name a blind bid, hotels set a hidden floor, and a reinforcement-learning engine clears the match in under 30 seconds. The hotel is revealed only after booking. Hotels can’t discount publicly without breaking rate parity and their brand; the hidden floor lets them fill the room without touching the published rate.
LastKeys is led by founder and CEO Max Hodin, who spent years in fixed-income trading at Morgan Stanley and Fidelity before applying that market-structure lens to expiring hotel inventory. The company is starting with independent and boutique hotels in Miami Beach and South Florida, with a signed 10-hotel pilot LOI with Trust Hospitality and Tran.vc as its first institutional investor. For a hotel, the pitch is revenue from rooms that would have earned nothing.
Saturday afternoon: a glass of wine from the lounge chair
Saturday afternoon belongs to Xina AI. The Miami Beach company, launched by Quartile 3 Robotics, built a voice and visual ordering system for hotels. Guests use it for room service, housekeeping, and concierge requests. Her glass of wine reaches the lounge chair that way: she scans a QR code, orders, and the request routes to staff without her leaving the shade.
Xina also sells a digital wine sommelier menu that answers questions about each wine, including food pairings. A voice ordering chatbot covers the restaurant side. Carl Sconnely is its CEO, and its office sits on Alton Road in Miami Beach.
Saturday dinner: where should we eat tonight?
Saturday dinner comes from ARO, short for All Restaurant Offers. The Miami app pulls restaurant events and promotions into one feed. It uses AI to match them to each diner’s tastes, and the feed answers the question for her before she has scrolled far. It is live in Miami and free for diners, while restaurants pay a tiered subscription for the marketing and analytics side.
A separate partner app serves the restaurant side. The pitch to restaurants is to spend less time promoting and more time hosting.
CEO and co-founder Jake Pelayo studied at Babson and lives in Coral Gables. His co-founder, CTO Sebastian Brunet, studied at Boulder. The two met in middle school at Ransom Everglades, a Miami school, and reunited years later to build the company.
It is Miami hospitality AI at its most local, answering the question every diner asks: where should we eat tonight?
Sunday: the kitchen she never sees
Sunday’s quick bite leads to Clave, the kitchen she never sees. Brothers Mateo and Tadeo Acosta-Rubio, who grew up in their family’s churro business, ChurroMania, founded the company to build AI agents for multi-unit quick-service restaurants. The agents connect to a restaurant’s existing systems to answer questions, automate reports, and take approved actions. Operators get answers without digging through separate dashboards.
Clave’s integrations include Toast, Square, Restaurant365, 7shifts, and Olo, and its customer list includes Wendy’s, Ben & Jerry’s, and Auntie Anne’s. That is a long way from a churro counter.
The company has raised more than $1 million in pre-seed funding, and is headquartered in Coral Gables.
The flight home: fixes after the booking
The flight home belongs to Deal Engine. The Miami-based travel software company automates flight changes and refunds for airlines and travel agencies. If her airline or agency runs on its tools, the change happens in an app, not a phone queue.
Skift reported that the company raised a $5.3 million seed round in 2022. It also sells OnePoint, a tool for booking GDS and non-GDS content in one place. Its site claims a single person refunded 15,000 tickets in two days. It lists ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II compliance.
Its customers are airlines and travel agencies, not consumers. CEO Alex Jara leads the team.
The pattern: software tourism never sees
Five companies, five stops on one weekend. One filled the room, one took the order, one found the table, one ran the kitchen, one fixed the ticket.
Tourism gets the credit for Miami’s economy. Software gets none of it, even when it decides who fills the room and who gets the table.
Miami hospitality AI is what keeps the weekend running. The guest never sees most of it, which is the point.