How AI is Transforming the Hospitality Industry

A few years back, AI in hospitality was merely a dream. But now, it is unfolding many hidden revenue opportunities. 

The global smart hospitality market is expanding incredibly fast, and is expected to reach USD 44.38 billion by 2026. 

What is so special about this? 

With Covid in the picture for so long, you can’t ignore the importance of contactless deliveries. 

Artificial Intelligence helps hotels, resorts, restaurants, etc., to provide memorable travel experiences. 

Additionally, people love personalized services. 

Hospitality AI is commanding higher customer loyalty with machine learning and NLP.

Obviously, initial investment pinches a bit but compensates early in various ways. We’ll discover this further in this blog.

Let’s move on. 

Benefits of AI in the Hospitality Industry

AI plays a magnificent role in enhancing human operational efficiency. 

It tells you how to invite more guests with target services and marketing techniques. 

Further, the smart technology guides on maintaining customer retention rates to cash in their recommendations and high revenue. 

AI in the hospitality industry can:

• Compile data from online travel sites, social media, review sites. It shows where you’re lagging, where to improve and boost your strength areas.
• Upselling and cross-selling sometimes become a headache for the management team. But machine learning makes it like a cakewalk.
• AI ensures a warm welcome to the guests. It tells you how customers feel regarding your services by recognizing their emotions and gestures.
• Create better guest profiles on guest history, buying preferences, feedback, etc.  

11 Trends of Artificial Intelligence in the Hospitality Industry

Understanding AI trends don’t let you wander in the wilderness. You can focus on specific areas to get better results in less time. Let’s go:

1. Chatbots for automatic guest booking

Who wouldn’t love automatic hotel booking? 

Virtual assistants get you bulk-online booking orders without any other efforts.

A chatbot is a software application that can find its place anywhere on your website and social media to reach customers. 

Your customers can interact with AI assistants in their conversational language. This technology is effective for direct messaging and answering simple queries and requests. 

The awesome part is they can use both text and audio. You can provide the best booking deals and offers to invite more customers. 

Working examples are:

• Skyscanner chatbot messenger to install on Whatsapp, Facebook, Viber, etc.
• Create your bot booking travel with the Snatchbot platform.
• Sam, the intelligent travel chatbot. 

2. AI-powered Concierges to welcome guests

Providing 24*7 and warm customer services is the topmost priority for any hospitality management. 

Many hospitality businesses are using AI-powered concierges for in-person customer service. 

These robots have the potential to effectively deal with basic customer-facing situations. Further, the experiments are going on to embed:

Machine learning to better answer complicated queries with 

• voice recognition
• predictions
• previous experiences.

The main challenge is to imbibe emotions to give a human-like feel to customers. Further, deep learning equips them to handle complex situations.

Connie: IBM Watson is developing and employing this project successfully at Hilton. It provides tourist information to the guests and learns more speech words with every interaction. 

3. Face recognition software for security and check-ins

AI makes possible seamless check-ins and assures customer security. 

In contrast to traditional check-ins, the intelligent check-in process is a lot easier. 

Customers stand in front of a robot kiosk. It scans their face, saves data, and hand over keys within a minute. 

Guest feel better secured with face recognition AI. No one else can enter their room without their permission. 

With this, catching criminals become more effortless. Hotel occupancy and protection improve for travelers, professionals attending events at tourist destinations. 

You can use facial recognition technology to give optimal customer experiences. It improves efficiency while making processes faster.

Here, the significant concern is privacy and mishandling of data. 

Comprehensive research is going on to make systems leakproof. The best solution is to give guests the option to opt-in or opt-out of biometric scanning. 

4. Better lodging services with real-time feedback 

Hospitality AI takes care of how guests spend their time in their rooms as well. 

ML and AI can combine real-time feedback to deliver on-the-spot results. Better lodging services enhance customer satisfaction to a great extent. 

Hospitality management may provide room change options for problems like sanitary, noise, etc.

AI-powered smart mirrors privileges customers to see live information like news updates, weather, time, etc. 

How about a robot delivering basic amenities? Dash is a great example at Crowne Plaza, San Jose. It can take room orders, snacks, toiletries to the customer’s room. 

Dash’s unique features are:

• Making phone calls after reaching the room. 
• Monitoring its power and moving by itself for self-charging.

Real-time feedback and lodging services robots enhance the guest experience by 35%.

5. Revenue management with personalized recommendations

AI makes revenue flows smoothly without looking unnatural to the guests.  

How to generate maximum revenue? The answer is smart revenue management with upselling, cross-selling, and loyalty programs. 

Personalized experiences using AI make it all possible. AI compiles piles of data like customer buying preferences, intent, and behavior. 

Accordingly, you can email tailored promotional offerings with the welcome email. AI automatically updates the records regarding accepted offers on which occasion. 

After reaching the place, the hospitality team can give the maximum options like spas, a customized menu, and other leisure activities.  

ML calculates the smart options for customers based on previous purchases. It will ease their buying decisions and make them feel welcome.

For regular customers, customized loyalty programs prove to be of added advantage.      

6. Improve services through sentiment analysis

The hospitality industry can greatly benefit from how customers feel about their services.

AI digital assistants perform sentiment analysis from social media let it be negative, positive, or neutral. 

Gen Z and millennials are freaks about putting their selfies on social media. They put photos of almost every moment, especially the special ones. 

If they have good or bad hospitality experiences, they convey them among their social circles. 

Emotion AI collects the feedback data with image recognition of gestures, and nonverbal signals. The type of comments, likes, and subscribers is also a useful source for algorithms.

Sentiment analysis provides opportunities of detecting loopholes and build strengths of your services. It shows the real picture of where you need to improve and count on your specialties.

7. Video Intelligence for staff assistance

Everything is fine, but what about the engagement metrics of guests in the hotel?

AI-powered cameras boost your business and customer satisfaction levels. It recognizes:

• The footfall at different places within the area.
• Whether you’re serving every customer properly.
• The security aspect of all guests.

Video intelligence captures the density heatmaps of guests and employees. With this, optimizing workforce becomes unchallenging by 

• smart scheduling 
• locating staff at required locations

These insights are useful in increasing the productivity and efficiency of the staff. And manage hygiene and security on the premises.

8. Actionable reviews to maintain online reputation

AI in hospitality is extremely influential in managing online reputation management. Actionable reviews are not a fantasy but a reality.

Nowadays, brand reputation is of paramount importance. Beating your competitors and establishing your say in the market becomes painless.  

Online reviews have become widely spread across various channels:

• social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
• hotel review sites like Tripadvisor, Expedia, Booking.com
• google reviews and rating through local guides

If you have to collect this much information every day, it requires a team to manage the same. But AI executes review management side by side without errors. 

In case there are negative reviews, you can address grievances there and then. Otherwise, it leaves the trail of negative reputation to dent your long-term brand image.

9. Dynamic pricing with hospitality AI

How do you know the best time for launching special offers? Hospitality AI maximizes the possibility of people opting for your services. 

Prediction algorithms employ statistics to forecast future trends from:

Seasonal variations

AI collects the data on specific clothing and food choices on events like new year, Halloween, spring.

History 

Predictive analytics show collective information what guests would prefer using 

• weather 
• competitor’s pricing 
• user-behavior patterns

What is its advantage? 

Assign dynamic pricing of the services that will be in high demand. Also, the algorithm informs you which ingredients and items to keep in stock beforehand. 

It is like a magical hand at your back to guide what to do for high profits.

10. Provide safe mobility as a service

Hospitality management can’t ignore the importance of safe mobility for tourists. AI equips rental cars or cars allocated as services with security features like GPS, cameras, sensors, etc.

The Bottom Line

AI is at the forefront of technologies to revolutionize the hospitality industry. It is leaving its imprints at every part with automatic check-ins, security, optimizing workflows, chatbots, and intelligent agents. 

Making breakthroughs with ML, ANN is not stopping anywhere but will improve hospitality AI explosively by taking over boring operations.