LOS ANGELES — Travel patterns and behaviors have changed in recent years, so technology is critical if hotel companies want to keep up with what guests want from hotel stays.
Chris Silcock, Hilton’s president of global brands and commercial services, shared how the company is strengthening its tech backbone in order to personalize elements of leisure and business travel.
“Customers have quite a different set of requirements when they’re there for the weekend than they may have when they’re there in the week for business,” Silcock told Hotel News Now in a video interview at the recent Americas Lodging Investment Summit. “So we’re enabling them to customize that one single stay with different elements for the different business or leisure parts,” such as breakfast, early check-in or late check-out.
And that’s just the beginning, he said.
While Hilton has been using artificial intelligence for years in revenue-management systems, pricing algorithms and more, Silcock said the “most exciting” near-term opportunities lie in personalized content.
“In the future, we’ll be able to use generative AI to take the content we have and make it relevant to you, for that search, including what images you see,” he said. All guests today see the same Hilton website and mobile app home page, but personalizing that experience with data means showing golf resorts to golf enthusiasts right from the beginning, as one example.
Hilton has been modernizing its legacy technology systems over the past decade, opening up capabilities for the company that just weren’t possible before, Silcock said. Over the past few years, loyalty club members have been able to choose specific rooms at the hotel and received advance notice of confirmed upgrades — two examples of what an uncoupled, cloud-based tech stack can achieve for guests, he said.
Another recent achievement he cited is the ability for meeting planners to book room blocks and meeting rooms for small events digitally, bypassing the traditional request-for-proposal process.
He called the technology, which continues to roll out at Hilton properties, “a game-changer for a booking process that quite frankly has needed modernization.”
Silcock said this type of tech-enabled personalization and smoothing-out of the travel journey has plenty of runway.
"Our customers are looking for enhancements to all of our brand experiences," he said.
Hilton is approaching that idea of enhancement in three ways, according to Silcock: Making the stay more personalized by showing guests everything available in the hotel, connecting guests to experiences such as restaurants and entertainment close to the hotel, and connecting them to "broader or bigger" experiences in the region.
"The stay is the most important thing for us, because that's what we're known for — a superior stay," he said. "But then we're enhancing it with giving access to experiences in the vicinity of the hotel or local region. That's coming. That's what's next."
For more from Silcock on how Hilton is approaching AI, the company's recent brand launches and more, watch the video above.