The hotel industry is still feeling its way through how to best incorporate artificial intelligence, but much of the early focus is on how it can best interact with the human side of the business.
Here are some highlights from Hotel News Now's recent coverage of artificial intelligence.
Many hoteliers are looking at ways that artificial intelligence can serve as a tool to boost customer interactions with hotel employees.
Dina Belon, president of Staypineapple Hotels, said her company is using "AI significantly already, but none of it is guest-facing."
"We have something called Chat Pineapple, and any team member can put a question into Chat Pineapple and ask it any number of things," she said. "It can be something as simple as 'Can you give me the confirmation number for Mr. and Mrs. Smith in room 202.' ... It can be something more complicated like 'I need to understand what my overtime hours are and what the rule is,' and it taps into our policies and procedures. There are no more [standard operating procedures]. It's an app."
Arlene Ramirez, regional vice president of finance at CoralTree Hospitality, said that AI can be a useful tool in training and personalizing experience, but hoteliers need to still know when a face-to-face interaction is vital.
"These are things the technology can't do," she said. "It can't personalize or have that emotional connection."
In recent opinion pieces on HNN, several hoteliers have extolled the potential boosts to customer service from AI, with ISHC members Michael Bare, Linda Amraen and Aviraj Puri writing "the human touch remains indispensable for building genuine guest loyalty, highlighting the unique requirement for the human element in this industry."
The most successful hotel companies will be the ones that find the right balance, the columnists added.
"At The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, the AI-powered chatbot 'Rose' communicates with guests via text message, providing information about the hotel's amenities, making dinner reservations and offering personalized recommendations. However, the human concierge team steps in to handle more detailed or unique requests, showcasing the crucial balance between AI efficiency and human empathy."
Mercedes Blanco of The Hotels Network writes that leveraging AI and pre-stay data will be vital for better on-property personalization.
"By leveraging big data effectively, we can subsequently personalize the experience for individual guests, leading to increased customer satisfaction, better loyalty and ultimately higher revenue," she writes. "This would be in effect the Holy Grail, improving customer retention with optimized pricing strategies and operational efficiency."
Experts note it's important for hoteliers to be open to adopting AI because this is more than a short-term phenomenon. This can be see in how big tech companies are approaching it.
"AI is being built into everything that Microsoft does," said Michael Goldrich, chief advisor at Vivander Advisors. "AI is being built in everything that Google's doing. ... So AI is a thing. It is not just a fad; it's a trend."
Distribution experts foresee their discipline coming into greater focus as the industry moves into an era of heightened automation.
"As an industry, we've been looking at automating for years," said Chris Murdock, director of distribution strategy at Accor and current president of industry distribution association HEDNA. "We've talked about this for decades. But you still need that manual input. There have been a lot of things around that do automate and help. It does reduce team size to some extent, but then you find you can focus on the other manual aspects."
Similarly, revenue managers are still trying to wrap their minds around the full implications of AI in hotels, and some worry that AI-powered trip planning through third parties such as online travel agencies could have a negative effect.
"If we just become a supplier, and [OTAs] are able to push a spa service that's outside the hotel, the [food and beverage] if they're integrating with the recommendations that they're getting from Toast instead of the hotel ... we have to make sure that we're reaching out to the guest and customizing so that it's not a third party in between us and a customer," said Harry Carr, senior vice president of revenue management at Davidson Hospitality.
On a more hopeful note, columnist Robert Rauch writes there are some signs the widespread corporate push to more AI could be a business travel demand driver.
"Companies developing language models or those that embed tools will drive the applications," he writes. "A new wave of technology could usher in the next boom period after some settling in during 2025 and 2026."