TORONTO — Tata Crocombe, owner of three South Pacific resorts, says the travel and hospitality industry is not even scratching the surface yet on how impactful generative artificial intelligence can be in the long-term. Still, he said, it can be massively useful as a productivity tool.
During the "Rise of AI-Powered Language Generation" session at the 2023 HITEC conference, Crocombe said he's already pushing employees at his three resorts — The Rarotongan Beach Resort & Lagoonarium, Sanctuary Rarotonga and Aitutaki Lagoon Private Island Resort, all located in the Cook Islands — to make use of tools such as ChatGPT.
"I gave everyone [on my team] a presentation [on generative AI]. Some people run with it, and some people don't," he said. "There's no requirement to use it, but I'll tell you one thing that's interesting is that the ones who are running with it, their performance is going through the roof," he said. "And the ones who aren't, their performance is static. We run a quarterly review process, and that's going to come through in the pay raises pretty quick."
Crocombe said he's optimistic about the overall potential.
"It's going to lead to a golden age in hotels," he said. "With all respect to all the vendors [at HITEC], nothing that I've seen down on the floor has got anything like the potential of ChatGPT. ... The large language models are going to be the thing, I think, that cracks open AI for wide distribution."
He said it's already become a factor at his resorts.
"We're using it in every single part of the business," Crocombe said. "We're finding significant value that we can derive ... and the barriers to entry are very low."
The low barriers to entry give Crocombe confidence that this could help level the playing field in technology between independent hotels like his and large international chains.
"The folks at OpenAI spent $30 billion to build the stuff, and they let us use it for $20 a month," he said. "In terms of independent hotels, we're on the same starting line as Marriott. In terms of previous technologies, they were always far ahead of us, so there's going to be a big change in technologies and how things work."
Despite his big picture belief that it's a game changer, Crocombe said hoteliers need to think smaller to get the most out of it today. That starts with using it as a day-to-day productivity boost and to provide assistance in generating ideas.
"We're just resolving problem after problem after problem quickly," Crocombe said. "Pain points that have been bugging us for decades literally have been resolved."
He said generative AI is especially useful in guiding group discussions.
"This is a very powerful productivity tool, and it gets more powerful when you use it in a group," he said. "We actually will do brainstorming and discussions, frame out an issue and say: 'OK, this is what we think the alternatives are. These are the considerations. These are the strategic options. This is the one we recommend and why.' Then we run it through ChatGPT, and sometimes it comes back and says: 'Hey, here's one modification to your thought process.' Sometimes it comes back and says: 'You've forgotten about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.'"
Crocombe said the tools can provide input on scenarios from scheduling employees to restaurant menus to analyzing a hotel's performance against its budget.
One of the simplest use cases that has provided value to Crocombe's resorts, though, is in guest interactions and answering questions. Since his properties have a significant time difference from many of their guests, connecting with someone on property to answer questions has historically been a pain point, and generative AI helps bridge that gap.
"90% of our calls come outside of our time zone and outside when we are open," he said. "They're usually quite complicated questions because people are coming a long way. It's their holiday, so they want to get it right and it's quite an intensive type of interaction."
Crocombe said he's encouraged by the fact that online travel agencies, which drive a significant amount of demand for his hotels, are using generative AI more to handle those questions and deliver more comprehensive answers than traditional chatbots.
Similarly, he's started crafting responses to customer reviews online through ChatGPT to streamline the process.