A look at how faculty scholarship in AI and hospitality management is elevating Western Community College’s Bachelor of Hospitality Management program — and preparing the next generation of industry leaders.
June 2026 | Western Community College Insights
When students sit down in Rajesh Regmi’s accounting and finance courses at Western Community College, they are learning from someone whose ideas are shaping conversations at the highest levels of global hospitality education. This past month, Rajesh traveled to Osaka, Japan, to present his peer-reviewed research at the APacCHRIE 2026 conference — one of the most prestigious hospitality and tourism academic gatherings in the Asia-Pacific region — and his experience there underscores something we believe deeply at WCC: that exceptional teaching and active scholarship belong in the same room.
What Is APacCHRIE, and Why Does It Matter?
The Asia-Pacific Council on Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Education (APacCHRIE) is the leading academic organization advancing hospitality and tourism education across the Asia-Pacific region. Its annual conference brings together educators, researchers, and industry leaders from across the globe to share knowledge in hospitality management, tourism, and food service education. The 2026 edition, held in Osaka, drew faculty and researchers from leading universities and colleges worldwide, covering topics ranging from sustainable tourism to artificial intelligence, workforce leadership, and the evolving psychology of travel.
Being accepted to present at APacCHRIE is a meaningful achievement. Papers submitted to the conference undergo rigorous peer review, and those selected represent research that contributes something genuinely new to the field. Rajesh’s paper cleared that bar — and it will be published in the 2026 conference proceedings, a permanent record of scholarship that practitioners and academics alike will reference for years to come.
The Research: AI, Digital Transformation, and What the Numbers Actually Say
Rajesh’s paper, “AI-Driven Digital Transformation and Financial Performance: A Case Study of Marriott International,” tackles a question that every hospitality manager, investor, and educator is quietly asking: does investing in artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure actually move the bottom line, or is it expensive noise?
To answer it, Rajesh conducted a longitudinal analysis of Marriott International’s financial performance between 2021 and 2023 — a period during which the company committed roughly $1 billion to a sweeping technology overhaul. Rather than relying on industry surveys or anecdotal reports, he worked directly from Marriott’s annual reports alongside a body of peer-reviewed academic frameworks, giving the study a rigor that is often missing from industry white papers on the same topic.
The findings are striking. Over the three-year window, Marriott’s net income margin expanded from 7.9% to 13.0% — a gain of 5.1 percentage points — while its Adjusted EBITDA margin climbed from 16.6% to 19.4%. Crucially, operating costs also rose over this period, but they rose more slowly than revenue, meaning the company was extracting more profit from each dollar of sales. Capital and technology expenditures grew from $183 million in 2021 to $452 million in 2023, and yet profitability accelerated rather than stalled. Revenue per available room (RevPAR) grew 8.9% in the US and Canada and surged 32.6% internationally in 2023 alone.
What drove this? Rajesh identifies several interconnected technology initiatives: the adoption of Oracle’s cloud-based OPERA property management system, which replaced fragmented legacy infrastructure and centralized guest data across thousands of properties; AI-powered revenue management tools capable of real-time dynamic pricing; the RenAI generative AI virtual concierge launched by Renaissance Hotels; IoT-enabled smart rooms; and continuous investment in the Marriott Bonvoy mobile app, which grew to over 196 million loyalty members by 2023.
The theoretical lens Rajesh applies is the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework, which examines how technological readiness, organizational culture, and competitive pressure collectively determine whether a firm’s AI investments pay off. His analysis finds strong support for what he calls the “synchronous double dividend” — the idea that when AI is deployed thoughtfully and at sufficient scale, it can simultaneously drive more revenue (the Demand Effect, as guests pay more for personalized, seamless experiences) and reduce costs (the Productivity Effect, as automation handles repetitive operational tasks). Existing literature had often treated these two outcomes as sequential — one comes before the other — but Marriott’s data suggests they can and do happen at the same time.
Equally important is what Rajesh flags as the human factor. AI systems do not deliver financial value on their own. Marriott’s AI Incubator program, which received over 150 internal submissions from employees, and its digital literacy training initiatives played a measurable role in ensuring that technology enhanced rather than undermined the workforce. The paper argues that “human factor readiness” is not a soft add-on to a digital transformation strategy — it is a critical mediator that determines whether the strategy succeeds at all.
For aspiring hospitality managers, the practical takeaway is clear: understanding how AI-driven pricing, revenue management, and guest engagement systems work is no longer optional knowledge. It is a core professional competency.
Why This Research Lives in the BHM Classroom
Rajesh is not a researcher who operates separately from his teaching. He is an instructor in Western Community College’s Bachelor of Hospitality Management program, where he teaches accounting and finance courses that form the analytical backbone of the degree. The same frameworks he applies in his research — understanding how capital expenditure decisions translate into margin expansion, how to read financial statements critically, how to evaluate the return on technology investments — are the frameworks he brings to students every semester.
This matters because hospitality management education has a long history of prioritizing operational skills: service delivery, food and beverage management, event planning. Those skills remain essential. But the industry has moved. The person overseeing revenue management at a major hotel group today is expected to understand predictive analytics, interpret KPIs like RevPAR and EBITDA, and make decisions informed by real-time data. Rajesh’s courses, and the research that informs them, are designed to prepare students for exactly that reality.
When Rajesh teaches accounting in the BHM program, he is not teaching an isolated technical subject. He is teaching students how to follow the money inside a complex, technology-driven industry — the same skill his Marriott case study demonstrates in action.
A Conference Beyond the Podium
Presenting his research was only one dimension of Rajesh’s time in Osaka. He also attended advanced sessions at APacCHRIE 2026 spanning artificial intelligence applications in hospitality, sustainability strategy, workforce and leadership development, and tourism psychology. The insights he brings back from these sessions will find their way into course materials, guest lecture frameworks, and discussions about where the BHM curriculum needs to go next. This kind of professional development — staying current with the field’s leading thinkers — is what separates instructors who teach from textbooks from instructors who teach from the edge of what the industry is actually doing.
Rajesh also engaged directly with the leadership of APacCHRIE, including conversations with the Chair of the organization and with the Dean of Ritsumeikan University in Japan. In these conversations, he represented Western Community College not as a small institution asking to be noticed, but as a program with a clear vision — one preparing graduates for the analytical, technology-forward demands of modern hospitality management.
Building Partnerships That Benefit Students
Perhaps the most consequential outcomes of the conference are the partnerships now in development. Rajesh initiated discussions with faculty from the University of Delaware and the University of Hawaii — both recognized as leaders in hospitality education in North America — around collaborative work in Revenue Management and Financial Analytics curriculum design.
These conversations are ongoing. The immediate focus is on sharing assessment approaches and establishing ongoing dialogue between institutions, with the longer-term possibility of collaborative curriculum development. For WCC’s BHM students, the potential benefits are significant: a program informed not only by internal expertise but by connections to research universities at the frontier of hospitality scholarship, and ultimately a degree whose reputation is anchored in those relationships.
Rajesh is also in active follow-up with these institutions, working to translate initial conversations into formal collaborative agreements. This is the kind of institutional relationship-building that takes time, but the foundation laid at APacCHRIE 2026 is real.
What This Means for Western Community College
Western Community College’s Bachelor of Hospitality Management program was designed on a straightforward premise: that students at a community college deserve access to the same quality of education — rigorous, current, industry-connected — that they would find anywhere. Rajesh’s participation at APacCHRIE 2026 is evidence that this premise is being realized.
Faculty who publish peer-reviewed research, who present at international conferences, who engage with the deans and chairs of leading institutions, and who bring that experience directly back into their classrooms — that is what makes a program genuinely excellent rather than merely adequate. The BHM program is investing in that kind of faculty, and in doing so, it is investing in every student enrolled.
The conversations Rajesh began in Osaka about a potential Master of Management program reflect the same ambition. WCC is not standing still. The question being asked internally is not “how do we maintain what we have” but “how do we grow into what the industry needs us to be.”
A Final Note for Prospective Students
If you are considering a career in hospitality management and wondering whether the analytical, financial, and technology-oriented dimensions of the field are something you will be prepared for — the answer, for WCC’s BHM students, is yes. The accounting and finance courses taught by Rajesh Regmi are not theory-only exercises. They are grounded in the same kind of real-world, data-driven analysis that he presented to an international audience in Osaka, and they are built to give you a genuine competitive advantage when you enter the industry.
The hospitality world is changing fast. The institutions that are preparing the next generation of its leaders are changing with it. Western Community College is one of them.
Rajesh Regmi is an instructor in the Accounting and Finance department within Western Community College’s Bachelor of Hospitality Management program. His research paper, “AI-Driven Digital Transformation and Financial Performance: A Case Study of Marriott International,” was presented at APacCHRIE 2026 in Osaka, Japan, and will be published in the conference proceedings.
