Will Automation Be the End of the Hotel Check-in Desk? By Benjamin Graham

By deciphering patterns and predicting demand, AI enables hotels to optimize staff schedules and efficiently manage resources. This translates to a smoother, more compelling experience for guests. From trip planning to digital concierge to luggage storage on check-out, AI is changing the hospitality industry. As part of its 2024 roadmap, Maestro PMS will also announce new mobile tools for housekeeping designed to improve the employee experience and boost loyalty in this labor-intensive department. Enhancements to its popular digital gift card program will also be revealed, including offering new “themed” options that enable hotels to customize gift card designs by holiday, promotion, or location. Selling gift cards, both on property and using Maestro’s online gift card feature, redeemable for hotel stays and amenities is a viable way to drive millions of dollars in untapped revenues without impacting service.

I’m not just talking about spas; I’m talking about holistic wellbeing — mind, body and soul. If they’re working and traveling, consumers want to blend both work and wellness. They want to make sure that from a nutrition, movement and meditation perspective that they have facilities, and we have hotels that do that quite well. We have a hotel in Cabo, for example, called the Ritz Carlton Zadún. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. They have this great experience where they provide ancient healing, spa rituals, and mindful practices. Guests can go there and get all of that, but also just be on the beach with their family.

Another potential drawback of a chatbot is AI hallucinations, which is when the chatbot provides false information. Improvements in revenue forecasting accuracy alone are significant for hotel revenue management, hotel chatbots but there are additional AI use cases that can improve customer relationships. Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the hospitality industry and improving core aspects of hotel management.

Personalized Marketing for Guest Loyalty

Digital payments are trending and transforming the way guests are engaging with services and settling transactions. AI technology is making its mark in hotels in numerous ways. Smart devices and AI-powered applications are enhancing the guest experience by providing personalized services and improving operational efficiency. The next step for hotels is to become AI-ready by carefully planning and implementing AI solutions that align with their specific service goals.

• Beginning with the pattern identification of rulings and affiliated answers, the discussion was carried on.
• Moreover, guest satisfaction scores improved by 15% due to fewer disruptions and quicker resolution of issues.
• Surprisingly, it appears to have improved, too, from 50% to 55%.
• Maestro PMS users can register for the event by clicking here.
• Once a trip is booked through the app or website, a user can then send a voice or text message to request travel adjustments, such as cancellations.

What you’re trying to do is create desire for your brand that is prompting people to buy. We’re nowhere near that, which is unfortunate because we do need it badly. I mean, look at what just happened the last couple of days, where things go down, people are upset, and customer service numbers go off the charts. Then you have to try and figure out, “Okay, how are we going to fix this? ” and it requires a lot of humans to do it as opposed to the AI. At Booking.com, I’m the one who’s responsible for that, so I guess I have conversations with myself about that.

The head of online hotel and flight giant Booking Holdings on how competition, regulation, and AI are changing travel.

Companies like Rasa have made it easy for organizations to build sophisticated agents that not only work better than their earlier counterparts, but cost a fraction of the time and money to develop, and don’t require experts to design. In the meantime, interest in chatbots began to rise as a result of technological advancement in chatbot design that passed in 2016. So what it did was tone down on the chat side “which is not the most intuitive part of all transactions” and started adding functionalities such as ordering food and other services such as spa, pool and restaurants. During Covid, this functionality has come in handy because hotels had to manage capacity. Curious to see how these innovations can elevate your hotel’s performance? Read on to discover the concrete ways AI is shaping the future of hospitality—starting now.

The integration of AI in the hotel industry is not without its challenges. Addressing these concerns head-on is crucial for successful implementation. Gamification offers a powerful tool to make the transition to AI-enhanced operations more engaging and effective for employees. Long-standing challenges such as overworked staff, outdated systems, and resistance to change have left many establishments struggling to keep pace with the dynamic hospitality landscape. In an era of rapid technological advancement and evolving consumer expectations, the hotel industry stands at a crossroads. A boutique hotel group found that implementing AI for staff scheduling resulted in a 12% reduction in labor costs without compromising service quality.

However, as AI continues to evolve, hotels must focus on AI readiness, ensuring a harmonious integration that enhances service delivery without displacing the human touch that remains at the heart of hospitality. Another interesting example comes from where else but Japan. Parts of the travel industry are embracing them with open arms.

Leonardo Hotels save 14,000 hours using HiJiffy’s conversational AI

Apple’s ‘Siri’, the intelligent computer program that also happens to be a personal assistant, has already been around for five years. She’s now being joined – and, in some cases, surpassed – by developments like chatbots and actual robots. Which as far as I know at least on the trip planning/content side, none of them have. Give me two developers and I can build this on top of GPT-4 in a week. The new Expedia tool offers fewer links, but they go directly to a booking page. However, the user does have to input all details from there.

Security is a top concern for many travelers, especially in airports and other populated areas. As the weather gets warmer and the school year comes to a close, many families are gearing up for travel this summer. But the emergence of AI in travel has significantly changed the travel experience. It sounds cliché at this point, but the pandemic changed everything. We’re not waiting, because we don’t know what the future holds.

The introduction of Xiao Xi now provides an additional online platform to provide exceptional services to guests. Born on February 19, 2020, Xiao Xi, Hilton’s first AI customer service chatbot, provides Hilton Honors members and all guests with a quick and convenient one-stop source for travel advisory services. Honors members and guests can ask Xiao Xi various travel-related questions such as hotel information, local weather, Hilton Honors checking and promotion details. Xiao Xi is able to provide additional advice on travel and will even entertain guests throughout their journeys by continuously offering smart suggestions and tips through intensive trainings. Since AI grows its capabilities alongside its stores of available data, it’s not difficult to imagine how prompts and chatbots could guide guests through the entirety of their journey in the near future.

We have not done as much of that as I would like; we’ll do more of that in the future, I think. It’s really giving people new opportunities and different opportunities that would be an important thing, I think, for a lot of people. Plus, I think people also enjoy new challenges and coming up with new things.

By analyzing guest data, AI can predict which perks and offers are most likely to resonate with individual members, increasing program engagement and repeat bookings. Labor costs typically account for a large portion of a hotel’s operating expenses. AI-powered workforce management tools are helping hotels optimize their staffing levels based on predicted occupancy and service demands.

We just wanted to quench our curiosity and create something we could be proud of. AI-powered technologies can help streamline many areas of travel, such as airport operations and hotel booking. In fact, one of the reasons people say, and I don’t know, I’ve never gotten this from Google, a lot of people say, “You know what reasons Google does not go further into the actual transaction? They don’t want to deal with that actual messy, messy part of customer service.” Now, that may be true, may not.

One use of AI in travel and beyond is real-time translations that can make understanding a different language much easier. Whether written or verbal, AI can translate any language into another without manually inputting any text. Translation apps — such as Google Translate — can also use augmented reality (AR) to help translate text. When a device’s camera is pointed to a block of ChatGPT App text, trained AI can quickly translate the words into the user’s desired language. One of the most frustrating parts of traveling to a new country can be trying to understand another language in real time — especially when navigating a new area. Only 29% of American travelers learn basic phrases in a country’s native language before visiting, according to a survey from Promova.

According to LinkedIn, many current software engineers have completed advanced computer science and software development programs with organizations including Galvanize, University of Colorado Boulder, and Turing School of Software & Design. This demonstration video shows how young professionals and other company employees can use Pana’s free app to plan and make adjustments to their business trip. The company is privately held and does not list full funding information. However, Pitchbook suggests that it has received roughly $4.5 million in funding from angel investors.

Well, no, we are making huge investments because you won’t be able to create these without working on it to make it happen. Some of our customer service stuff is already going through, so we’re able to do simpler things with that. And I imagine, boy, the rate of advancement is going so rapidly, maybe it’ll be sooner than I think. For example, if you have a flight that is delayed, being able to have an AI agent go through all the permutations, what the right things are, and all the other parts of the trip, because a trip is a chain of many different things.

The future is now: How robots are storming the travel industry

The AI revolution in hospitality is not about replacing the human heart of the industry; it’s about empowering it to beat stronger than ever before. It’s about creating a future where technology handles the routine, allowing human creativity and emotional intelligence to soar. In this future, hotels will become more than just places to stay – they become hubs of innovation, incubators of ideas, and showcases of what’s possible when human potential is unleashed through technology. Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing hotel loyalty programs by offering hyper-personalized rewards and experiences.

Accor has signed a master development agreement with Saudi Arabia’s Amsa Hospitality to develop and franchise 18 hotels across second-tier cities within Saudi Arabia over the next 10 years. Each hotel brand will cater to a different target audience. The current direction of travel suggests that AI will make hotels a more pleasant and personalized place to be.

Voice-Activated Assistants for Seamless Guest Experiences

So, while I also run the top, the Booking Holdings, I’m also CEO of Booking.com. But it does require some coordination because what you don’t want to do is waste time, energy, effort, money on doing things that are duplicative and things that you don’t think are — that are going to give you incremental benefit. Glenn was also surprisingly open with me about regulation. Booking.com is based in Amsterdam, and Europe’s big new tech law, the Digital Markets Act, classifies it as a gatekeeper just like Apple or Google. Glenn is not thrilled about that, as you might expect, but at the same time, it means competition with Google might be on a more even playing field. Surveys regularly report communication struggles for tourists in Japan, but the change is slow.

As millennials and younger generations are more engaged by products that provide “instant gratification,” the strategy of offering recommendations and immediate booking in one chat period may entice this audience. This has been the case mainly because luxury hotels pride themselves on their heritage of high-touch, face-to-face customer service. The idea of relegating even a small percentage of those interactions to a machine has proven to be hard for executives at some upscale hotel groups to swallow.

Once AI systems are in place, the focus shifts to optimizing their operation. This involves fine-tuning the technology to better serve guests’ needs and operational requirements. Data collected by AI systems can provide invaluable insights into guest behavior, preferences, and operational bottlenecks. By analyzing this data, hotels can make informed decisions to enhance service delivery, streamline operations, and improve overall guest satisfaction. While AI in hospitality brings numerous efficiencies and enhanced guest services, it also poses challenges, particularly in terms of employment.

• So far, Trip.com’s TripGen does not offer any links at all.
• The ministry plans to pave 15 mountain trails in total, with the majority located in the Hajar Mountains, such as Jabal Shams, Jabal Akhdar, and Wadi Bani Awf.
• Yuzo Takamatsu, president CEO of Time Design, said previously travellers were only able to book hotels and airline tickets at the same time through a travel agent or Online Travel Agency (OTA).
• As AI takes over more routine tasks, hotels are faced with the challenge of redefining roles for their human staff.

His product caught the attention of the then-general manager of Andaz Singapore, Olivier Lenoir, who paid (hooray) Vouch to create a digital concierge for his property. From increasing direct bookings by 25% with AI-powered chatbots to reducing energy consumption by 40%, these AI tools are already helping hotels achieve incredible results. The impetus behind developing AI for the workforce was to improve pattern recognition within business intelligence tools and increase a business’ competitive standing. Hotels with a unified tech stack can use AI to gather data across multiple departments and support hotelier decision-making through forecasts, suggestions, and alerts. The hotel PMS can serve as a natural nexus for digital decision-making, the driver’s seat for on-property AI. Travelers are engaging with hotels via text messages and digital interactions, with the PMS serving as the central hub for behavioral guest information.

I’m not sure that Europe’s any better at this at all, though. And I certainly can tell you that — I’ll give you a lot of examples in Europe, where, unfortunately, this goes back to politics, where the protection of certain vested interests are much worse in Europe than they are in the US. So, it depends on which industry, which thing you want to talk about.

These systems can create more efficient schedules, reducing overtime and overstaffing while ensuring adequate coverage during peak times. As the hospitality industry navigates the digital age, the integration of AI provides a golden opportunity for hotels to enhance their ROI through automation, augmentation, and analysis. By performing a thorough assumption-implication analysis—focusing on risk-return, target customers, and business scope—hotels can make informed decisions about how to integrate AI into their operations. By integrating AI into travel planning and customer service strategies, hotels can not only improve operational efficiency but also differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive landscape. Imagine a world where your hotel’s ability to thrive doesn’t depend on competing for the same slice of pie but on creating an entirely new pie.

From business intelligence in the hospitality industry to automating front desk and back-office tasks, AI is here to stay. Artificial intelligence embedded in the software you use every day, such as your PMS and POS, enables better efficiency, a deeper connection with your ChatGPT guests, and, ultimately, more success for your hotel. For instance, an AI chatbot added to your Facebook Messenger can answer guests’ questions and take basic information and add it to your database. That can then be used to personalize further interactions with the guest.

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