AI for Hotels: Your guide for hospitality in 2023 and beyond

AI could save time for your housekeepers – and perhaps other areas in your hotels as well. People like Kris Leszczynski at Edwardian Hotels in the UK are using technology to aggregate and synthesize guest feedback for insights to constantly improve. I love the citizenM brand and have stayed at many of their hotels, but I dislike checking into a hotel on a kiosk. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. There’s something about being welcomed to the hotel by another person that gives me a sense of arrival. “The opportunity with AI is in augmenting and embedding new insights into existing processes. It’s about supporting your people by automating tasks in their jobs that aren’t value-added so that they can focus on what they can do best,” Rothaus added.

Ensuring a diverse representation on the teams developing AI technologies is a critical step toward developing and evolving AI algorithms to recognize a broader array of linguistic expressions. “Conversational intelligence is the constellation of features and technologies that enable humans and machines to take turns exchanging language and work toward accomplishing a discursive goal,” says Bennett. Likewise, AI can be used to predict customers’ future actions based on their past behaviours. For instance, if the customer has travelled to different places during the summer holidays, the AI can predict that the customer is likely to cross again during the same month and offer recommendations for trending places to visit.

Of course, that’s not to say there aren’t other ethical and practical concerns surrounding the expanded use of AI. Privacy concerns, responsibility, transparency, and accurately and appropriately delegating decision processes are all still relevant. It’s a growing field in which significant parameters still need to be defined. Now that AI is capable of allowing for a greater degree of variation, it should be able to account for broader contextual relevance and be more inclusive.

For direct bookings: Opaque sourcing, personalized offers

Although natural language processing has come a long way, automated speech recognition technology continues to face challenges in recognizing the full range of linguistic variations. “There are all these different English accents, all of them are robust and valid and should be celebrated,” says Bennett. Other linguistic variations that challenge AI include different slang or colloquial expressions to convey similar meanings and other paralinguistic features like tone, intonation, pacing, pausing, and pitch. According to research conducted by management consultancy Korn Ferry, conversational intelligence is a collaborative effort. And that collaborative effort is reciprocity of two participants to communicate in ways that lead to a shared concept of reality. That closes the gap between the individual reality of the two speakers—and helps businesses help customers.

Let’s take a quick look at where we are now and how this should guide the way we evaluate artificial intelligence. Investments into downsized infrastructure can help enterprises reap the benefits of AI while mitigating energy consumption, says corporate VP and GM of data center platform engineering and architecture at Intel, Zane Ball. AI systems have the capacity to allow for a greater degree of variation. When the systems can accurately interpret those variations and generate a contextually relevant response, AI will have evolved to a greater degree than ever before. “That’s really where I think the evolution [of the field] has taken us,” Bennett says.

AI will primarily be inside the software you’re already using

Whereas with conversational AI, the response has been thought through beyond text, structured, and written by a linguist who adapts it to their culture and can rely on rich content, with direct responses,  images, carousels, etc. It makes sense that a standard AI would be able to answer a basic question like “Do you have parking? `There is no need to elaborate on the response to this question, in the first instance. In the same way that you would not need to take a plane journey to buy your daily loaf of bread, especially if the plane’s GPS is not reliable. Within all three situations at different points of the guest journey, you can see that the name of the PCHC game is speed and simplification. Conversational AI can also be used to create front desk receptionist apps.

AI will likely continue to be a layer in existing technology such as the property management system, instead of a separate application. We take consistency for granted and expect a baseline of quality, cleanliness, and service. “Revenue management was the first major function to deploy advanced analytics at scale, with practices like dynamic pricing now an industry standard. As artificial intelligence increasingly powers these predictions, we expect to see a new wave of pricing and revenue-management strategies come into play,” McKinsey shared. We’re a little skeptical that something as human as hospitality can benefit. But we’re wondering what this means for our business as we’re trying to navigate a challenging environment to operate a hotel business.

With more than 80% of travel, today being booked online, the e-commerce and booking process is one of the best use cases of AI in hospitality today. Stop looking for a one-size-fits-all “AI app” and start asking your technology partners how they’ll leverage AI capabilities in the software you’re using. I’m writing this article in Google Docs in a library I drove to using Apple Maps.

For example, instead of calling the reception, a guest can send a WhatsApp message to the hotel letting them know about needing extra towels or requesting to change a lightbulb. Conversational AI platforms specialising in hospitality offer a range of integrations with popular hotel tech solutions, such as hotel maintenance systems. The virtual concierge would ask the guest necessary follow-up questions, combine all information and seamlessly pass it directly onto operational systems or alert a relevant staff member. Many organizations are already using chatbots and virtual assistants to help better serve their customers. These intelligent, automated self-service agents can handle frequently asked questions, provide relevant knowledge articles and resources to address customer inquiries, and help customers fill out forms and do other routine procedures.

And the more an AI system engages with humans, the more effective its algorithms become. By interacting with humans, an AI system can gather the data required to improve natural language understanding to better understand intent, helping to facilitate more nuanced human-computer conversations. Human interaction also helps these AI systems improve recognition and predictive capabilities to deliver more personalized content.

Once the traveller decides to stay at your hotel, they will want to make the booking. Here, implementing conversational AI can boost the number of direct bookings and increase revenue from upselling. Your marketing and distribution teams need to ensure the properties are attractively displayed on the official website and across social media channels and OTAs platforms if you use them. Once you capture their interest – with multimedia materials and unmissable offers – most travellers will move on to do some further research. For your future guests, it all starts with the idea of travelling.

Best chatbots powered by such technology can be installed not only on your hotel website but also on social media, messaging apps, and other platforms. Look for a solution that streamlines all guest communications in one place, like an omnichannel inbox, to reduce the workload for staff and enable browsing queries and collecting guest data quickly and efficiently. Voice AI technology is providing a solution for hotel operators that may be facing a challenge in finding people to employ in contact centers and in front line customer service roles. This reinforces the need to automate and encourage customer self-service because the low rates of staffing equate to longer wait times and diminished customer support experiences.

For all the hype around AI-powered chat now, it’s a poor example of where it should be used. “One of the most common misconceptions about AI is that anything powered by AI is good and that it works,” said Sahar Cain, CTO at Mogul Hospitality – and AI Research Scientist at California State University, Los Angeles. “AI can seem really impressive, but it’s actually quite narrow in what it’s actually accomplishing,” Rothaus says. “The reality is we’re a long way off from Matrix-style sentient, self-aware, all-encompassing AI models that can do everything that a human brain can do, but better and faster,” Rothaus said.

ML is pivotal in predicting and fulfilling guest needs in such a sphere. By analyzing vast datasets, such algorithms discern patterns in guest preferences. These algorithms continuously learn and adapt, ensuring a dynamic understanding of guest behaviors. conversational ai hotels It is from predicting room preferences to anticipating service requirements. Machine learning in the hotel industry enhances guest centricities. When consumers think of conversational AI, they most likely think of Siri, Alexa and Google Home.

However, the modern hospitality industry is undergoing a rapid transformation. Thanks to Conversational AI-driven tools like hospitality chatbots, businesses now have the means to revolutionise customer experiences, streamline operations, and boost efficiency. So, the future of guest services holds promises of unprecedented personalization and innovation. It further solidifies the reformative impact of artificial intelligence in the hotel industry.

It can generate revenue with any cross-selling offers, but most of all, it is one more opportunity to delight your guests with excellent service. At this stage of the guest journey, you should use AI to build up the excitement of arriving at the hotel. Continue laying the foundation of excellent guest experience with helpful suggestions to make the arrival as convenient as possible and maximise the opportunities to generate revenue from tailored upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

Explore 9 examples of artificial intelligence for hotels:

It can help with various tasks for guests, such as suggesting restaurants and making reservations, booking concert tickets. It can inform guests about things to do at the hotel and recommend them to visit the hotel’s casino, spa, swimming pool, etc. The AI system can be trained to recognize the guest’s voice, preferences, and patterns of behavior. It can then use that information to provide the guest with a personalized conversation. Take a look at this tutorial to see how a hotel booking conversational AI app is built. Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.

If we consider the Sprout Social Index findings, this benefit of using AI can be a game-changer for hoteliers. This chatbot is the most basic conversational tool that communicates using clear rules (“if/else” statements). Some advanced chatbots of this type operate by detecting specific words and showing relevant messages before the user types the question based on the established rules.

They can also translate scripts on the fly and manage simultaneous guest inquiries from all over the world. Tools such as Bebot go a step further and enhance guest experience through automated guest review collection, onsite restaurant renovations, and booking confirmations. All of the available tools add up to create a powerful booking engine but, at the end of the day, it all supports the same goal. As Barss says, “It’s simple — we want to fill out blocks.” To do that, hoteliers need a group booking software that helps them work better and smarter. The use of Big Data is key to offering highly personalised services for elevated guest experiences. By accessing both real-time and historical data, hoteliers can easily track the performance of each department and recompense top performers, as well as understand which team members may need improvement.

Our chatbot solution for hotels is equipped to handle voice-based communication in English with a high degree of precision. Our solution is more than just a simple hotel chatbot – It can handle a variety of tasks for guests including answering FAQs, handling pre-check-in, taking guests’ room service orders, and much more. To begin with, artificial intelligence refers to the ability of computer software to imitate human behavior. Machine learning is when programmers add a layer of statistics to artificial intelligence that helps the software and AI models to improve with experience.

With over 700,000 hotels worldwide and a contribution of $3.41 trillion to the global economy, the hotel sector is on the rise. The hotel industry suffered a number of setbacks, travel restrictions were put in place early on, which limited the number of potential guests. The hotel industry did not have the infrastructure to quickly make accommodations for the number of people who were at risk due to the disease, and many hotels are struggling to adapt. The room rates for hotels dropped significantly, and low room rates are likely to continue to cause issues in the industry. As your guests’ stay at the hotel is approaching, ensuring the final moments at your property are as convenient as possible is essential. Those last few interactions can determine the guests’ overall impression that they may be inclined to share in an online review.

You can also tell your developers about Dasha so they can take on the task of automating your business processes, be it an automated hotel reservation system, customer support automation, or something else. The hotel booking AI app can help reduce wastage of time and resources by helping in reducing the number of customer support inquiries. It will make the customer support team more productive and reduce the number of inquiries. This is exactly what the hotel booking conversational AI app is meant to do.

Apart from their websites, hotels can connect multiple communication channels, including the most popular social media and messaging apps, from WhatsApp to Facebook or Instagram, and from Google My Business or WeChat, Line or Telegram. Considering these facts, it’s easy to understand why each day more and more hotels and adopting AI to improve their guest experience. A hotel chatbot interprets or understands such interactions and responds with the best answer. If it cannot resolve the query, it can be programmed to pass on the conversation to a human agent.

They provide seamless interactions, efficient services, and customized experiences. As pioneers in integrating AI, these establishments redefine the hospitality area. It sets a benchmark for innovative, guest-centric solutions in the industry. AI for hotels introduces tailored apps that revolutionize the industry.

Let’s look at some steps you can take to help your hotels thrive in this environment. Jeremy Wells is one of the leading experts in doing this, as Managing Partner at Longitude°, a branding group that has helped companies like 21c Museum Hotels, SALT Hotels, and Real Hospitality Group showcase their unique approach to hospitality. “When you create something different and unique it’s memorable, and people spread the word for you,” Fertig shared. Hotel operators can learn from people like Richard Fertig, who are innovating in the short-term rental industry. “What will thrive in the future is unique experiences, high touch that AI can’t give us,” Paterson says. Now that we’ve looked at what AI can and cannot do for us in hospitality, we have to look at one of the most common questions on this topic.

I constantly hear people talk as if the progress of AI is inevitable but many of those closest to the technology, such as Larsen, do not share this belief. The movies recommended by your favorite streaming service, the music suggested to you, and the online shopping experience you had today were all powered by AI. Machine learning is a subset of AI and one that many hotels have been using for a while. This adds a layer of complexity to the discussion of artificial intelligence. It’s been a while since I experienced technology that felt as magical as this did.

Because of this, hotel owners – and the operators and brands that work for them – are focusing on top-line revenue growth now more than ever before. “Protecting RevPAR and generating profit in the face of changing market conditions, changing mix of travelers, and overall uncertainty has driven a lot of the technological change from hoteliers over the past few years,” Rothaus observed. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT reached mass adoption in record time, and reset the course of an entire industry. Not only is the use of AI automation becoming more widespread, it is also proving to be a significant business driver. Gartner anticipates that in 2021, AI augmentation will generate $2.6 trillion in business value. Sentiment analysis is an NLP technique that determines the emotions behind the text.

But there may well be a significant increase in robotic support over the coming years. Don’t worry about replacing your human front desk staff — tools like Connie are meant to prevent long queues from forming in lobbies, create memorable experiences, and help teams perform better. “Wow” event planners with products such as Cvent Event Diagramming — an intuitive tool used to create 3D diagrams of event spaces. Templatize layouts from past events, host virtual walkthroughs, and collaborate with multiple teams at once all in one place. Chatbot translators can quickly identify languages used by website visitors based on their location.

That helps the AI make calculations, process data, and identify patterns automatically. Hotels and travel businesses use a chatbot to automate routine tasks such as answering FAQs, taking reservations, providing recommendations, etc. Automating these repetitive tasks alleviates the work pressure on staff and frees them to focus on other crucial tasks. The impact of AI in the hotel industry extends beyond improving operational efficiency.

Enter conversational AI, a solution that promises to combine the simplicity of chatbots with the depth of AI to surface information that previously required poring through search results. For guests, this means more efficient travel planning (with some tradeoffs) and instant communication with the hotel. For hotels, this means personalization at scale, improved productivity and streamlined customer service. Another benefit is increasing RevPAR and cost per available room with upselling and cross-selling (American Hotel & Lodging Association, 2023). The AI-powered virtual concierge can recommend personalised activities and special offers to hotel guests by leveraging data from previous conversations, enquiries, or data available in a PMS. Such a tailored and attentive service strengthens the connection to the hotel brand and boosts guest loyalty, resulting in potential returning customers.

Conversational AI can also help the hotel industry in providing services to guests. This can include having guests talk with the AI for simple questions and problems that they may have, which will help the conversational AI to provide simplified, personalized responses to the guest. Conversational AI can also be used to identify the guests’ needs to determine what services the hotel should offer them. As the conversation evolves, the conversational AI can use the guest’s prior experiences, preferences, and preferences to determine the most appropriate actions to take for the guest, such as booking accommodation or making food reservations.

• However, the modern hospitality industry is undergoing a rapid transformation.
• Thus, in addition to optimizing for query-based search, hotels need to optimize for chat-based search.
• When you digitize your operations on purpose-built tools, you set the stage to take advantage of the power of AI for your operations.
• Let’s look at some steps you can take to help your hotels thrive in this environment.

Guests don’t need to wander through a website, search for info and make the reservation independently. Chatbots typically recommend customised services and benefits when talking with customers based on their previous conversations and desires. During this process, the chatbot will upsell and cross-sell the services that customers may be interested in, which increases business revenue. At the same time, the chatbot offers 24/7 customer service, which reduces the need for hotels to have staff working odd hours. This also reduces the need for extra staff during peak periods and saves on labour costs.

The results are not on the same page because the cost of processing ChatGPT is much higher than traditional processing, so it is economically difficult to generate its results by default. So beneath the facade of Generative AI, be aware that there are companies who have one goal, and that goal is to make money. Communicate data, yes, but the basic, deep data must remain the exclusive use of the hotel’s own AI.

However, most of those language learning models never reached the level of sophistication needed to solve problems at scale. But it was many years in the making, and a direct result of the failures of voice search and chatbots that ushered in this next era of conversational AI. Indeed, it consumes more resources than conversational AI for, sometimes, the identical result.

Indeed, hoteliers have spent a considerable amount of time filling in Booking and Expedia’s characteristic sheets. However, as we have seen in article why you should focus more on google and less on OTAs, they are using them to compete in search results. The majority of the data ChatGPT uses is structured data from Booking, Expedia, etc., not from the hotel itself for the simple reason that it doesn’t exist with this system its not a ChatGPT for hotels. Why conversational AI bots like Annette™ should be prioritized for evaluation and implementation right now and ahead of other tech rollouts boils down to limited IT resources and the preference for the voice channel by baby boomers. Per the title, we consider the advent of Conversational AI to be the pinnacle of how bots can help hotels. With the help of conversational AI, hotels can also personalize the guest experience.

One key objection that was brought up during our chat with Smallwood was that hotel managers are initially in disbelief as to the capabilities of these bots. Before delving into the development process of the Hotel Ai app, it is important to first discuss its business objective. In short, the objective is to gather information from the users and let them select the best-suited hotel. Once they have selected the hotel, the app will provide them the chance to book it. This guide focuses on operations, but I would be remiss to overlook revenue management, which is one of the most valuable applications for AI today. Having worked for a company that processed guest feedback for sentiment analysis for years, I saw first-hand the power of AI for processing unstructured data for insights.