Your Group Inquiries Don't Need a Salesperson, They Need an Answer With Mina Singson-Brightman

Mina Singson-Brightman is the Co-founder and CEO of HotelBlock.ai, an AI-powered platform helping hotels respond to group inquiries faster, automate repetitive sales tasks, and convert more group business. HotelBlock.ai was selected for Plug and Play's Travel & Hospitality Batch 21, building on Mina's experience with 40hammocks, which participated in the Techstars Atlanta program in 2024. Before launching HotelBlock.ai, Mina built 40hammocks and ran destination event planning businesses in Hawaii, bringing hands-on hospitality and events expertise to her technology ventures. In this episode… A group inquiry is worth the most in the hour it arrives. Hotels lose that business because a lean sales team cannot get to the inbox, not because the rate was wrong. The fix is to automate lead intake, qualification, proposal drafting, and follow-up so an answer goes out in seconds, which leaves the salesperson free to do the relationship work that actually closes. Kin Sio sits down with Mina Singson-Brightman, Co-founder and CEO of HotelBlock.ai, on The Lights On Podcast to walk through how that works. Mina did not plan a career in hospitality. She came to the US from the Philippines, studied at the University of Southern California, and worked as a business broker buying and selling businesses in LA. When she and her husband moved to Hawaii she came across a destination events company and bought into it, which is how she landed in the events industry. She describes the whole path as serendipity, one step leading to the next. Running that business for close to a decade, she heard the same request over and over. Groups coming to Hawaii for a wedding or a retreat needed 20 rooms, or 50, did not know the market, and asked her to connect them with hotels. Event coordinators are not travel agents, so the honest answer was a few suggestions and a recommendation to do their own research. The gap was obvious enough that she built 40hammocks, a mobile app connecting group travelers directly to hotels, while still running the events company so she could test it on live customers. The idea was conceptualized during COVID, when Hawaii's restrictions were strict enough to ticket people for coming within 10 feet of each other and the events industry stopped. Rather than wait it out, she went back to the problems she had been hearing and started building. Crisis awakens creativity, as she puts it. The pivot came from a complaint that turned out to be misdirected. App users compared the experience to booking a normal hotel room online, where pricing appears instantly, and blamed the app when quotes took days. It was not the app. HotelBlock was waiting on hotels, who had to confirm availability for 20 rooms before they could price anything. When Mina went back to her hotel partners and asked what would make the process faster, she found the real bottleneck sitting inside the property. One sales manager told her at three in the afternoon that she had not opened her email that day, having been in trainings, meetings, and phone calls, while two leads sat waiting. Smaller hotels feel this more sharply than convention properties, because one or two salespeople absorb every task. That discovery turned a consumer marketplace into a hotel-side product, and HotelBlock.ai evolved out of 40hammocks. What the platform does is map the group sales journey and remove the manual steps. Inquiries from a hotel's website or email are ingested and organized into a pipeline with no retyping into a CRM. The system qualifies each lead against the property's own parameters, minimum nights and minimum rooms, and when a lead qualifies it drafts the proposal automatically. Teams can review before sending or let it go out untouched, and follow-ups continue on their own until the prospect replies. Because it is cloud-based, one customer pulled up a drafted proposal on a phone during a live sales meeting and presented it on the spot instead of promising to get back to the planner the next day. Mina is firm that none of this is about headcount. Hospitality runs on relationships, and a salesperson who can turn a proposal around instantly is a salesperson who should be out having lunch with meeting planners rather than sitting at a computer. Against Cvent and Delphi she does not argue features, she argues that those are enterprise products priced and scoped beyond many independents, while HotelBlock aims to be running the same day rather than after days of training. For operators who have never worked groups deliberately, Mina's starting argument is that the room block is the smaller half of the opportunity. She cites a study putting group business at up to 50% more revenue for hotels, not from rooms but from ancillary services, on the logic that a block of guests fills the restaurant and the spa. Group demand is also steadier than transient. Weddings and reunions are booked far in advance and rarely cancel, and her own evidence is COVID: she expected the events business to be wiped out and kept 80% of it, because people held on and gathered later. Kin frames that against what Lights On sees in revenue mix, where independent properties lean heavily on transient OTA business and booking windows in Hawaii have compressed from the classic 45 to 60 days to something far harder to forecast. Group business booked months out is what makes the remaining inventory a pricing decision instead of a scramble.