Now that the initial frenzy around AI is starting to settle down from flying cars and the end of the world to practical applications, one fact remains key: Data is everything.
If you don't have a profile on everyone that's staying in your hotel, then you can't personalize anything about the experience. And that means more than the primary booker, because when you travel with your partner or you travel with your family, you all want to do slightly different things. My preferences are not the same as my wife’s, and hotels would be unwise to assume this.
Trip purpose is important. You’ve got to understand the context. When are they arriving? What have they already got booked? What does their itinerary already look like? If they've got a restaurant booking for tomorrow night, don't recommend a restaurant for tomorrow night. If they have transportation from the airport, don’t offer it. It’s not about blindly offering products and opportunities to the guests. It is about gathering information and understanding what you have so that you can personalize.
I like to talk about the "second wallet." It's the money you allocate to your trip after you’ve paid for all the mandatory transactional parts, particularly on a leisure trip. The one that you open up after the initial booking, and you're starting to think ‘Actually, I'd like to do a boat trip.’ We try to pick that up in the pre-arrival experience and then through check in. Would you like champagne on arrival? Or six cans of beer in your room?
The final element is knowing what's possible. You know what’s on site, you know you have a hot tub, but for most hotels, it's actually about what's around the hotel, what's in the local area. Your AI engine needs to know this as well. It needs to have access to the concierge’s black book.
So understand the customer, understand the context, understand the local area. You get those three things together, you could make a really good recommendation which means something to the guest.
Then you bring in the agentic element, which creates actions and brings the system to life. If someone comes in and asks for three towels, it will automatically create a request for three towels, which are sent to the room, with a human in the loop, for verification.
It’s at this point where you start to see crossover with the online travel agencies' aspirations around the concept of a connected trip; where the customer journey is managed seamlessly from door to door. For example, if you have the guests’ flight information and you can see the flight is cancelled, you can rebook transportation. Again, it’s about quality of information.
As we know in this sector, where the OTAs go, the brands also want to be, preferably bigger and better, and we are now working with groups who are looking at how to embed their loyalty programs deeper into the journey.
We are able to share data across the program so that, as guests go through the check-in process, they can select which benefit they'd like, whether it's breakfast or extra points, depending on their tier. We’re also working on a way to burn points on upgrades. Guest who aren’t members can sign up to the loyalty scheme, which benefits the brand, and all of the data the guest generates during their stay is then used to enhance their profile and future personalization.
There's a huge amount of value to be added around loyalty, and as it evolves, I can see deeper integration and the potential to create household accounts in an echo of what you see in airlines, but with even greater possibilities for daily touchpoints and an ever-broader ecosystem of vendors.
Loyalty programs have plateaued in recent years, and the brands need to find a way to live up to their promise to owners of a membership which really will stay in their hotels every time they hit the road. Having an integrated rather than passive system and mining the acres of data hotels and brands have will deliver on the personalization promise we’ve been waiting for.
Tristan Gadsby is CEO of Alliants, based in Southampton, England.
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