Unleashing AI: The Potential for Hospitality Brands

We’ve seen the flood of LinkedIn posts and professionals making confident proclamations about the future of AI. Truth is, this is a stage of learning, observing, and asking a lot of questions. There is not a lot of certainty, which means it is a fruitful time for travel brands to experiment and see what sticks.

The one true insight I’ve read coming out of the countless discussions about ChatGPT and AI is: “Mediocrity is now free of charge.” You can type up web copy, write blog posts and articles, and generally use synthetic intelligence to do a lot of low-to-medium-level things. But what are the larger opportunities for brands in hospitality in the age of generative AI? How will the staff and AI interplay work? A few thoughts on the opportunity spaces:

Break up visual homogeny with brand imagery and social
AI allows for interesting visual experimentation. Creatives can use prompts with tools like Dall-E2 to take mood boards from static constructs to evolving and highly nuanced territories. Hospitality suffers from a lot of brands looking the same, and with the right human creative and AI partnership, a unique and visually differentiated territory can be carved out. In the near future, logos and foundational elements of major brands will be created by generative AI (with the helpful hand of a human creative director.) This is already happening with the work of designers such as Otherword, former Pentagram designers who are the forefront of the space.

Experiment and push brand tone
Similar to visual exploration, tools like Chat GPT can be used to quickly evolve the brand voice and guidelines. Working with a copywriter, you can take existing brand and tone guidelines and add additional inputs to add more depth or new elements to copy to pop with younger audiences, all while respecting the master brand tone. Tools like Moonbeam AI can help with blog-focused social and web content, serving as a writing assistant. Tools like EZ newswire use AI to streamline the press release writing and distribution process.

Better understand your audience and reviews, quickly
There are tools to help sift through the mountains of consumer feedback, online posts, and reviews to help to derive actual insights and make changes to the customer or guest experience. This is a gigantic opportunity space for hospitality brands who need to iterate and action feedback as quickly as software companies. Tools like Synthetic Users allows for user research without the recruitment to optimize products and to identity potential blockers.

Ensure better brand governance
It’s a consistent battle at large hospitality brands to ensure content is on brand standard across markets, different hotel properties, and also in user-generated media. Brand governance will be a major territory where AI will take out some of the heavy lifting. Brandguard.ai is a series of AI models trained on a company’s specific brand guidelines allowing teams to both monitor and validate brand assets at machine speed. The system “scores marketing content for brand consistency and filters out off-brand messaging and spam.”