Recently Revfine asked its Hotel Marketing Expert Panel the question: 'What are the most beneficial use cases of Artificial Intelligence in hotel marketing? Where are the opportunities and what are the pitfalls for hotels to be aware of?'.
There has been a lot of buzz and heated discussions about the role and impact of generative AI like ChatGPT in the hospitality industry and travel in general – from bold predictions that ChatGPT will “revolutionise the industry” and “liberate the industry from the yoke of the OTAs” to expert statements that it will lead to a complete overhaul of the hotel tech stack and help solve labour shortages in hospitality.
The opposite is true. The OTAs were the first travel players to immediately implement generative AI applications. Ex. Expedia already uses AI for some customer service features and to help property owners describe their homes and hotels.
The company hopes in the future that AI will help it recommend travel destinations to customers based on previous trips and bring more direct traffic to its site.
If you dissect all of the ChatGPT hype and actual implementations, they fall into the 5 categories that are already having significant impact on travel and hospitality:
- enhanced chatbots for the website to handle trip planning and customer service
- virtual assistants
- content translations
- marketing and website copywriting
- responses to customer reviews.
So nothing surprising here, except we have to give kudos to travel tech vendors for the speed with which they have come up with these applications!
Except for the major hotel chains, hotels do not have the financial, technological or talent resources to select, train, implement and maintain generative AI bots like ChatGPT on their own. The AI-powered hotel-specific chatbots like Asksuite and Quicktext are perfect for hotel websites of independents, midsize and smaller hotel brands, boutique and luxury brands.
The major hotel chains are already working on highly customised version of ChatGPT or Google Gemini AI on their brand sites to handle trip planning and customer service.
Ex. Accor Accor Hotels launched their AI Trip Assistant, meant to recommend rooms, special offers and make recommendations for local experiences like ticketed activities, wellness experiences, and food and beverage options.
Max Starkov
Hospitality & Online Travel Tech Consultant & Strategist
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