Alliants wants the hotel to feel like it remembers you

We started, as we do with every booth conversation, by asking Andrew Pirret, SVP of Customer Experience at Alliants, to explain the company to a stranger at a party. His answer was that Alliants is a platform built to enable great guest experiences. For a select-service hotel that might be a frictionless, contactless check-in. For a luxury property it's concierge and messaging. What it really does is connect everything that happens after the room is booked, for the guest and the staff both, and as an ex-hotelier, that's the part that speaks to him.

The walkthrough makes it concrete. After you book, the property sends you a link, by SMS, WhatsApp, email, or a push notification in the brand's app, and you can start planning the stay. You can book a restaurant, message the concierge, add early check-in or late check-out, or do a contactless check-in. None of it is the room booking itself; it's everything around the stay, before arrival, during, and after, and it works at enterprise scale while still being configurable property by property, so it feels local rather than generic. A concierge at Claridge's in London can be managing a guest's requests in real time, and the guest sees each thing land on their itinerary as it gets confirmed.

Getting guests to plan further ahead

Alliants doesn't do the room booking. It connects into the PMS, CRM, or the data lake, pulls the reservation out, and manages everything after that. We asked the sceptic's question: do people really book a restaurant before they arrive, when most of us just open TripAdvisor on the day. Andrew put a number on it: in luxury hotels, about 40 percent of the guests making requests are booking restaurants through the on-property teams, and they usually do it the day before or the day of.

Alliants is trying to move that thinking earlier. If a guest comes down on Friday night wanting a table for four at eight, that's hard to land at the best restaurants in town. Get them thinking days ahead and the concierge can actually deliver. It also learns as it goes: it can carry more than one guest on a reservation, so his wife can book too, not just the primary name, and the next time you stay anywhere in the brand it knows the kind of restaurants and activities that fit you.

Solving "have you stayed with us before"

Andrew kept coming back to guest recognition, the complaint we've all heard at a front desk. Alliants connects into the PMS, table management, spa, and golf systems, pulls all that in, and uses it to recognise a returning guest automatically rather than asking. We pointed out that this exact "have you stayed with us before" problem has gone unsolved across the 25-plus years we've been coming to HITEC. He agreed it hasn't been, and he thinks the information is usually there; the staff just aren't bringing it up at the right moment.

His example is Resorts World in Vegas, where Alliants runs the contactless and digital-key solution. The point is to get group guests checking in online and holding their key on their phone, so the room just pops up when it's ready and they never have to stop at the front desk. The card you enter at one property is tokenised in the wallet, so when you arrive in Tokyo it's already there. He says the profile belongs to the brand and the group, within whatever the management agreement allows.

The wallet key as a brand pass

On keys, Andrew said the wallet key itself isn't new, Hyatt launched it back in 2021, but Alliants has been doing it for about 18 months across the major lock vendors, ASSA ABLOY, Salto, dormakaba. The value is that one key stays in your wallet and just activates against whatever reservation you have. Move from a Salto-equipped Rosewood to one running ASSA ABLOY and you don't notice; it's becoming a kind of brand pass. New Apple features going live in September will let the whole itinerary live in the wallet too, so all your stay information sits in one place.

How the AI actually works

Andrew was specific about where it sits. Take messaging. A brand sets its tone of voice, hip and young like the Hoxton or more controlled, and builds that into what he called voice and tone skills, with local inputs layered in, so responses come through sounding like the brand. Underneath it uses RAG, retrieval augmented generation, pulling on all the property's information to generate the reply. A luxury hotel can run it in suggest mode, where a human reviews before anything goes out; other customers run it fully automated.

He's pushing toward agents from there. There's a morning report that reads every arriving guest's history and writes an AI summary for the staff, so the team can get ahead of what a guest needs instead of reacting once they ask. And it's guest-centric rather than booking-centric: the relationship is with the brand and it should persist, so after you leave you can just text and ask for your folio and it retrieves it, instead of you digging through emails.

What hospitality keeps getting wrong that other industries don't

Andrew returned to how hospitality makes guests repeat themselves in ways other industries don't. You don't re-enter everything to an airline, but a hotel loyalty member still gets asked if they've stayed before. The fix, he says, is to make it feel like the brand remembers you, in any platform and any language; "it should feel frictionless."

Language is harder than it looks. Alliants decides the language from the guest, not the phone number, and he stresses that distinction. A Dutch phone number doesn't mean the guest wants Dutch, and his own father lives in Spain on a Dutch number. So the language is either inferred from the guest writing in their own tongue, or set on the PMS profile, never guessed from a number. If a guest messages on WeChat in Chinese, the reply goes back to WeChat in Chinese. The original Four Seasons messaging pilot was SMS-only, and Alliants pushed back on that, because what about the WeChat guest, or KakaoTalk in Korea. It was about the experience, not the cost.

Building it from both sides of the desk

Everyone at Alliants came out of hospitality, and that shapes the product. The two co-founders started the company 17 years ago; Andrew worked with them when he was at Four Seasons. He spent 12 years in hotels, room-service waiter, butler, concierge, receptionist, and he kept coming back to one idea: you can't solve a problem you haven't lived. He and the CEO spend 180 to 200 days a year on the road, watching how airlines and Uber handle the same problems and asking why hospitality can't.

One example of that thinking is the payment piece, built to feel like e-commerce. Few hotel brands run a single payment provider across the whole group, the way Amazon does, because of different regions and regulations, so Alliants built toward a unified payment experience inside the journey. And the reason any of it matters is the oldest one in the business: free the staff from the repetitive work so they can spend more time with guests, and get back to actually being hospitable.