INDIANAPOLIS — While many hoteliers are still wondering what they need to do to adapt to a new era of artificial intelligence, two experts speaking at the 2025 HSMAI Commercial Strategy Conference said AI-related success will boil down to consistency and efficiency.
Milestone Inc. founder and President Benu Aggarwal said one of the top focuses for hoteliers worried about how their properties will show up in AI-driven searches is to make sure their content is consistent across digital channels.
"Consistency is the biggest holy grail for success in AI," she said during the "Decoding the consumer journey: AI's impact on hospitality commercial strategy" session.
She noted this is a considerable shift in digital marketing for hotels, which has in recent history been very channel specific. But now, instead of having lots of images, videos and copy tailored for different places — like a hotel's website versus social media — hoteliers should focus on a small handful of images with written and video content highlighting the same small handful of bullet points you want AI large language models to pick up on.
"Decide [on] getting 20-plus amazing images and get every single channel to use the same images and same information because search at the end of the day is multimodal," she said. "Your images, your content, your experience, your videos, everything needs to be consistent and needs to have the same data."
Aggarwal said she understand the desire to make everything beautiful and perfect and to have more and more high-quality images, but in this new environment, that could easily dilute your message via AI.
"Less is more in AI-powered search," she said.
She said AI has significant potential to change the hotel booking journey for guests in several ways, with fewer touch points before they book and higher expectations for personalization.
"Your [large-language model] is becoming your new discovery layer," she said.
On the technical side, Aggarwal said it's more important than ever that hotel websites are optimized not just for potential guests but for bots crawling for information. This helps insure the AI large-language models are working with the most accurate and up-to-date info when conversing with potential guests.
During a separate session titled "Understanding today's customer for commercial success," Del Ross, senior advisor for McKinsey & Company, said AI will also be key internally for hotel companies, not just for guest-facing interactions.
He used the example of sales efforts by hotel companies, which have typically focused on only the largest clients and not the small-to-medium-sized enterprises that make up the bulk of the market. Hotel companies are likely already sitting on the data to identify these companies to sell to, but they will need the help of AI to sort through it.
"AI does this really well, better than anyone," he said. "So we can actually organize data and identify probable accounts, append that into ZoomInfo or even just LinkedIn, and find the key players."
He said moving forward the best hotel companies will be the ones that deploy AI strategically to remove the drudgery from day-to-day work to allow hotel employees to focus on hospitality.
"When we're at our best, we're facing people. We're people serving people," he said. "For most of us, the worst part of our day is the part where we're clicking and clacking on a machine. But if you use tools like AI properly, you can free up some of that screen time to enable us to do what AI cannot do, which is intuitively serve guests and make them want to return."