SAN ANTONIO — Tanya Pratt said she doesn't have to look too far to learn about the hotel industry's future generation of customers because they are frequently in her house.
Pratt, who has spent over 30 years in the industry and currently serves as global vice president of strategy and product management at Oracle Hospitality, has a couple of kids in their 20s. She said she learns a lot about what their generation values and prioritizes.
"They care about the world, but they put themselves first," Pratt said at a HITEC panel. "They think that having time off and a vacation is a right, not a privilege."
As digital natives, Pratt's kids and their generational cohort are used to having endless information in their pockets and seek instant results, so they are less patient. From a travel perspective, they are seeking a specific experience and where they choose to stay is a secondary thought, Pratt added.
The growing importance of experiences is something Bree Carter, vice president of real estate programming and development operations at Anaheim Real Estate Partners, thinks about daily as she works on the OCVIBE district, a 100-acre entertainment district in California.
"The expectations of customers and consumers in general is that everything is an experience. It's not as bifurcated as this is a retail experience or go eat dinner and there is a movie playing on the wall," Carter said.
Looking at only the younger population as having these expectations doesn't show the full picture, said Denise Walker, chief information officer at SH Hotels & Resorts.
"We tend to focus a lot on Gen Z and younger generations, but they're also influencing the parents and millennials," she said on the panel. "As a technologist, when I think of the future, the future is here."
Where technology comes into play
The challenge hoteliers are facing is how to meet — or even exceed — the needs and expectations of this new and evolved group of travelers. The right use of technology can help do that.
For years, the personalization standard has had two buckets: business or leisure. But Pratt said there's just so much more to each individual guest, and hotels have access to their guests' information. With the rise of artificial intelligence, hoteliers also now have more tools to use that data to enhance the guest experience.
The front-desk associate should never have to ask the guest if its their first stay with the hotel, Walker said. They should know that and, maybe in the not-too-distant future, also know what their preferred room temperature is and how many pillows they like.
"From a technology perspective, the way to [provide a customized experience] in a way that is not off-putting to a guest is to get the right type of information into the right hands at the right time," she said, adding that the hotels and brands that get that will win.
The right way to use technology is to do it in a way the guest might not even be aware of, Carter said.
"We're using technology in the background to make that connected customer experience feel frictionless," she said.
Expectations for hotel technology have grown so much. Strong, reliable Wi-Fi and the ability to stream TV are "just like water in a pipe," Walker said, adding it's "table stakes."
"We have to be thinking of creative ways and the next level of utilization of some of this entertainment — how we provide entertainment, how we provide connectivity, how we provide a new experience," Walker said. "I think that's where it's going to be in the next few years."
The technology hotels do choose to implement should be intentional and should work. Pratt predicted hotel guests will be accepting of any technology that is consistent. If a guest is offered a self-check-in kiosk and it doesn't work and after trying and failing to check themselves in then has to get in line at the front desk, they won't choose that option in the future.
"If we don't get it right the first time, we will not get an opportunity to get it done the second time," Pratt said, adding that there's a time and a place for that type of technology. Some guests — maybe a business traveler — will prefer the independence, but in a leisure or luxury setting, that will be less appreciated.
In-room technology, too, should be a balancing act. Every hotel technology should be providing a frictionless experience and serve a purpose.
"The room should be elegant, not gadgeted," Walker said.
Hospitality as a whole is a human-led industry, and it will stay that way, so technology should be thoughtful and seamless, Walker added.
The broader impact
How technology is changing the hospitality industry is bigger than just the new tools hoteliers can implement. AI has changed how a lot of people do things — both for work and in their own personal lives.
"We've always had different technology disruptions that sort of came in, but I think it's the first time in a long time where learning new technology is happening in parallel professionally and personally," Pratt said. "We're getting it at work. It's also on our phones, and so the trust will come sooner than some other things of the past."
Historically, people turned to their friends, family members or neighbors for advice on where to travel to and what to do at certain destinations.
"Recommendations came from people that you trusted," Carter said. "But now I'll give you a recent survey that went out that said 74% of people actually make consumer buying decisions [more] with their AI chat bots than they do from recommendations from friends and family, and that is a monumental shift in the way that we're making buying decisions."
Pratt said that she's seen her children being influenced by the information they are able to access rather than just what they gather from their close, physical networks.
"It is not just a couple of friends that you know from school, it is the world telling you where you should go, what you should study, what you should experience," Pratt said.