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 comp