Artificial Intelligence (AI) can sift through and dynamically draw insights from mountains of data (operational, performance, guest, pricing, comp set, BI, marketing data, etc.) to allow hoteliers automate or augment operations, processes and decision making via various hospitality tech applications in guest services and operations, revenue management, CRM, guest communications, BI, digital marketing, personalization, inventory distribution, etc.

Obviously, it is up to specialized hotel tech vendors to carry the torch and create various AI-powered applications to solve concrete business needs and help the industry overcome its technology deficiencies. In the same time, hoteliers need to monitor, proactively familiarize themselves with and invest in the AI and other next gen technologies that are quickly making their way into hospitality.

The question is, what are the top five AI-powered applications that are must-have today and can solve the most immediate issues and deficiencies in hospitality?

Uli Pillau
Uli Pillau
Founder and CEO of apaleo

Personally I have rarely seen true AI solutions present in hospitality technology so far. Many people claim they are using AI, but when you dig into details you find out quickly that in many cases it is far from reality. However, there are some innovative apps within the apaleo Ecosystem which have taken excellent approaches. Here some great insight by Benjamin Devisme, Chief Evangelist Officer of Quicktext from Paris:

How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Can Solve Major Deficiencies in Hospitality.

Hotels are reopening and seeking ways to maximize direct bookings, reduce staffing issues and deliver a bespoke customer experience. In other words, hotels need to do more with less. Artificial intelligence is a key factor in solving this equation.

Maximize direct bookings

AI enables hotels to enlarge their direct booking funnel and conversion.

Smartphones redefine how people consume digital content. On desktop, people could sit down and search information on websites. With smartphones' smaller screen, search is cumbersome. Conversational interactions feel easy, natural and enable hotels to adopt a proactive approach to sales.

If a traveller doesn't book after a conversation with the hotel virtual assistant, an email follow up sequence can be triggered automatically and for high value booking requests the reservation team can be notified to follow up.

In addition, the hotel website is no longer the only hotel direct booking platform. That's where AI-powered virtual assistants such as Quicktext come into play and deliver content instantly on-demand on the hotel website, Facebook, WhatsApp, Google Business or Instagram.

Reduce staffing issues

For far too long hotel staff have been doing the work of machines.

Every guest is unique but most of them have the same questions and expect fast answers. It no longer makes sense to answer customers' requests manually when Natural Language Understanding algorithms enable to manage over 85% of customers' requests automatically.

Decision-making algorithms are also increasingly leveraging AI to reduce the time spent on collecting and analyzing data to help hotel executives focus on decision-making.

Virtual assistants such as infinito RMS are becoming better at communicating with hotel staff so that they act as a filter and draw attention to issues where human attention really adds value.

Deliver a bespoke customer experience

Many guests will not voice requests or issues at the front desk and hotels often find out about issues weeks after on TripAdvisor.

Virtual assistants connected to guest data sources such as the hotel PMS can proactively gather customer needs and feedback. Requests and complaints can be directed to the right member of staff in an instant facilitating and accelerating guest recovery and giving hotels a chance to reduce the volume of negative comments on review platforms.

Virtual assistants have no arms and no legs so good connectivity with hotel data sources and primarily the PMS are essential.

But all this is only the beginning of the value chain. Indeed, the creation of artificial intelligence requires the collection of large amounts of data... But in return, if it is well structured, it will generate even larger amounts of new data: the big data. What data and for what use, will be the subject of a future article.

View all 15 views in this viewpoint