Using an AI-Powered Virtual Agent to Stay Ahead of Guests’ Wants and Needs

The idea of relegating even a small percentage of those interactions to a machine has proven to be hard for executives at some upscale hotel groups to swallow. Shanghai, China – Hilton today announced the result of a month-long competition for the design of its new AI chatbot cartoon character – part of a bid to give “life” to its newly launched AI customer service chatbot with a personable animated avatar. Change Chen from DoubleTree by Hilton Shiyan took the top prize, while Issa Li from Waldorf Astoria Shanghai on the Bund and Vicky Li from Hilton Chengdu took second and third place, respectively.

Meawhile, Henn-na Hotel’s management was so confident in the robots’ abilities that they didn’t equip rooms with phones. Later on, management made up for Churi’s limitations with the cutting-edge solution of placing a human employee at the front desk to answer questions. Faster service response time and faster problem resolution time are, of course, top drivers of overall guest satisfaction.

Guests only have to scan the unique QR code provided to them to be able to enter and enjoy their stay. We work with everybody — everyone you’ve probably ever heard of and probably some you may not have. We may not sign a contract, but we’re always discussing possibilities. Look, again, we meet a lot of advances, but I believe we are still in the very, very early stages of what the possibilities are down the road. And I’ll bet there some of the companies that are going to come, the big winners, haven’t been invented yet. For the listener, we can fall down a long rabbit hole of the CFAA, which we’ll avoid for now, but I promise it’s messy if you want to look into it.

Can a “Bot Experience Package” with Concierge Robots Increase Hotel Bookings? Ask Chicago’s Hotel EMC2

She does not see any people behind the reception desk. Instead, a robot takes her name, checks her in, and hands over her room key. Another robot takes her suitcase and escorts her to her room, which has just been cleaned by yet another robot. Legislators have also wised up to the scale of fake reviewing.

Last year, for example, Park Avenue Rochester Hotel deployed two robot housemaids. And the four-star Hôtel Monville, which opened last year, became the first hotel in Canada to provide room service using an autonomous delivery robot. The robot carries orders directly to guest rooms as well as the first hotel to offer automated check-in services featuring a room key distributor. Guests can order food and beverages from their TV and expect that their order will be delivered by robot in no longer seven minutes. The potential of the Routier + Zonetail partnership can have a significant impact on hotel revenue in 2021 and beyond. Routier plans to integrate and white label their solution for Zonetail, allowing Zonetail’s advertising clients to reach a significant percentage of North American travelers.

Ok for cold beverages, but food would be cold before it’s delivered given the necessarily torturously slow and cautious rate of the devices. In Yotel NYC we still have “Yobot” (a repurposed bot from a car assembly line) which puts luggage away and retrieves it, and it’s very popular, although more as an Instagram backdrop. Best to keep bots away from guest-facing activities like checkin, unless your hotel is a deliberate tech showcase like some of the Japanese pod hotels. Also, a good chef would throw a bot of of his/her kitchen window and rightly so. Bot food prep might work in a dark kitchen for pizzas. For example, in high-demand travel seasons or during major events, AI can answer inquiries about late check-ins, room availability, or transportation options, ensuring that guests promptly receive the help they need.

• “You should expect a lot more in the travel space, which is why it’s important to get moving,” Tharp said.
• However, with scale, the startup is also open to exploring more money-making avenues such as personalized advertising opportunities.
• The technology can also identify deals on restaurants, tours and more.
• The machine’s never going to yell back, it’s always going to be nice, and it’s never going to come with a bad attitude because it had a fight with its spouse in the morning.

The concierge is a doll-like hairless robot with voice recognition that prattles breakfast and event information. Robots aren’t good at finding keys if people happen to lose them. Reviews are processed automatically by a screening tool, and at that stage just short of 9% were not approved in 2022. Human moderators (working in 28 languages) then step in to take a look at many of the blocked reviews. Tripadvisor said it received 76m reviews (including pictures and videos) in 2022 and had a process to eradicate the fake or offensive. It produced reviews for us in the style of a business traveller, a couple, a solo traveller, families, LGBTQ+ travellers, etc.

You had to give them the sense that they still had some stake in how things were going to be done. However, can robots replace the human touch that makes hospitality ‘hospitable’? Can they replicate the socio-emotional skills of human employees to understand guests’ needs? Artificial intelligence automates and reduces the responsibilities of humans, but at the end of the day, hospitality is about more than just efficiency. It is doubtful whether it is a sustainable solution to the labour shortage in hospitality. Yes, 2025 will be the year for robots in hotels because thousands of new hotels will adopt robots for cleaning, room service delivery, information provision and other tasks to compensate for the labour shortages.

They say, “Wait a minute, you mean OpenTable, Priceline, Kayak, altogether, and then, the other ones are about 10 percent? ” And [I]say, “Yeah.” But it is a very big company, so even companies like Priceline, Kayak, and OpenTable are very big companies, too. Also on the property will be 40,000 square ChatGPT App feet of retail, with 21,000 square feet of inline retail which will include four planned restaurants — Lebanese, sushi, Mexican and Mediterranean, all of which tenants will be able to order from remotely. The hotel will also include traditional amenities such as a pool, fitness and business centers.

Microsoft Outlook now lets you create personalized AI-powered themes

Caesars Entertainment uses an AI text messaging concierge service called Ivy. The messaging bot can make dining, spa and entertainment reservations, request room service and maintenance and locate lost items after check out. As for the AI experience, the hotel plans to use an app called Kee to streamline and personalize the user-experience, down to what kind of coffee or towels people prefer. An artificial intelligence-powered “aparthotel” under construction near Allegiant Stadium plans to “disrupt” the hotel industry. InterContinental Hotels Group PLC is the Group’s holding company and is incorporated and registered in England and Wales. Approximately 345,000 people work across IHG’s hotels and corporate offices globally.

According to reports, the robot based in reception will also be able to give amazed guests information about the hotel and local area. A NEW fleet of butler robots will serve Brits with booze and food at an iconic Benidorm hotel – and they’ll even interact with guests. hotel bot The vision is that the chatbot will be able to answer general and specific questions based on Google’s swath of information paired with IHG’s data. As guest-led conversational AI continues to evolve, its role in hospitality will only become more critical.

Now, on top of that, our job is to get a bigger share of that, and we have benefits of scale and capabilities that enable us to do that. No, we are far and above where we were in 2019, before we went into the pandemic. As I mentioned, $151 billion of travel, that is a very large number. In the $130 billion market capitalization, these are enormous numbers for most companies, but it’s compared to the scale of the opportunity because travel is so big.

As soon as we opened our door, there’s this robot greeting us with our food. “It does free up labor to help other guests, but none of the hotels we’re in have used [Botlr] to replace jobs,” Cousins says. “They’re using it to enhance their guest experience, because from a value point of view, that’s a lot higher than trying to save a few dollars.” If marketers and advertisers equip machine learning with the right things to say, hoteliers can partner with local businesses to create brand strategies that feel authentic.

The Baidu DuerOS platform integrates AI-enabled technology with hotel operations customised for InterContinental Hotels & Resorts. The AI smart room technology will fully embrace voice control technology to deliver a more natural human-computer interactive experience. For instance, guests will be able to freely switch settings between work and leisure modes, and enjoy a more convenient and seamless room service experience. This solution will also further fine-tune the current backstage management system, including customizing information and resetting devices. A number of other advanced technologies are designed to deliver an optimal guest experience.

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The Group’s overarching brand promise is Every Moment Matters with a signature Yes I Can! Participating matchmakers will go through a series of profiles for the user. As always, they can swipe right on profiles that they think will match well with their friend.

Popular short-stay accommodation Hotel Sogo has revealed its AI-tech concept rooms, showing guests the future of its hotel rooms. The online travel agency’s AI assistant helps with planning, shopping and booking a trip — and steps in when plans go awry. The question is, how will we come up with what the fair way is so that we can best decide on how we handle all the different stakeholders in travel?

The Novotel Ambassador Dongdaemun Hotels & Residences in Seoul has rolled out its second-generation GiGA Genie hotel robot, four months after its introduction aimed at revolutionising the property’s room service. Layla feels that its differentiation lies in surfacing different kinds of content and not having a website-like structure where users have to apply filters to get search results. While the company is using large language models to parse queries and display answers, it has built its own recommendation engine. Plus, Saeed mentioned Layla is building vision tech to help it answer queries like “show me destinations which look like Mars” or surface recommendations that are similar to places in a photo or a video. Layla has partnered with Booking.com to show hotel options and with Skyscanner to show flight options. Currently, it is starting with a fee sharing for these transactions as a revenue stream.

In today’s tech-driven market, guests expect fast, personalized service, and hotels must meet these expectations while managing rising operational demands. Guest-led conversational AI offers a powerful solution by alleviating the pressure on staff, automating routine interactions, and helping hotels remain competitive. Of course, Hotel EMC2 is hardly the first hotel with robot concierges.

My biggest decision is really making sure that I’m hiring the right people, the best people, and even there, I’m using other people to help me make that decision. One reason I ask it that way — and it seems like we’re going to end up talking about AI… I thought I understood that trend, but Glenn’s view is that it’s actually an outlier.

The number of fake reviews that Google blocks or removes is astonishing – it told Guardian Money that in 2022 it blocked or removed a total of 115m fake reviews of hotels, restaurants and businesses. Consumers are being hit with industrial levels of fakery in an attempt to obtain their business. They were generated in seconds by the free-to-use artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT.

It is dotted with security cameras, and real people watch everything through a monitor to ensure guests are safe and no one makes off with an expensive robot. Robots have long been used in manufacturing but interest is also high in exploring the potential of robots in human interaction, including helping care for the elderly. Hideo Sawada, who runs the hotel as part of an amusement park, insists using robots is not a gimmick but a serious effort to use technology and achieve efficiency. The digital markets, competition and consumers bill, now at the Commons committee stage, is expected to make it illegal to pay someone to write a fake review or to host a review without taking steps to check it is real.

Until now, the fake review business has been largely centred on online sweatshops, where people are paid to write multiple posts to boost a business’s rating. The chain has suffered from a bunch of other robot-related issues, including problems with voice recognition systems reacting to guests snoring and a failure of the reception dinosaurs to understand the names of guests. By exploiting this vulnerability, anyone with access to the hotel room could use the robot’s cameras and microphones to spy on guests. Hong Kong Airlines will now have access to booking data from Sabre agents worldwide for all traveller origins and destinations where the carrier operates at least one segment of the traveller journey.

When the bot finds one for your destination, it sends you an email or alert on your mobile device. An essential part of the Tinder experience is getting your friends’ usually constructive critique of potential matches. If you’re someone who seeks a friend’s approval before swiping right, the dating service is making the experience official.

Once connected, certain guest requests that the front desk normally processes can be completed by Bebot. A recent traveler surveys show that over 85 percent of travelers feel comfortable using chat to contact a hotel’s front desk or to get local recommendations when traveling. Guests are likely to ask more questions over chat than face-to-face during their stay. Messaging is becoming a powerful tool for hoteliers to learn more about their guests.

” and it requires a lot of humans to do it as opposed to the AI. We’ll take the money from the customer in China, we’ll put Euros into the bank account of a Swiss hotel. Well, because Switzerland doesn’t use the Euro, we’ll put in Swiss francs for them. That’s the thing you have to think about, all the different ways things are done.

• As guest-led conversational AI continues to evolve, its role in hospitality will only become more critical.
• The Henn na Hotel—translated as “Strange Hotel”—is located near the Tokyo Disney Resort and is famous for being staffed by robots.
• IHG Hotels & Resorts is partnering with Google to create an AI-powered trip planning tool, set to launch in the second half of the year within the One Rewards mobile app.
• In the rooms, a lamp-size robot in the shape of a fat pink tulip called Tuly answers simple questions such as, “What time is it?

Glenn really got into it with me — there’s a lot going on in this space, and it’s interesting because there are so many players and so much competition across so many of the layers. AI is not a new concept in the hotel industry, especially on the Strip. Belarmino said the hospitality industry has been rapidly adapting to new technology due to issues with employment. Google Cloud’s approach to cybersecurity, data governance, and privacy also allows ChatGPT IHG to retain control over its data and enables data and applications to meet compliance and security standards, a key priority for IHG. Further, Google Cloud’s responsible and ethical approach to generative AI also means IHG has access to tools which enable direct review of model responses for appropriateness and accuracy. This access enables IHG to tune and update its applications, powered by Google’s models, to ensure optimal performance.

If somebody doesn’t want to work with us, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing. But if I can provide incremental value to them, they will generally want to do business with us. Yeah, but it’s not… that doesn’t come up much at all. And yes, really what I want to do more of — and we’ve done some, but I want to do even more — is the cross-fertilization of people, having people move from one of the companies to the other ones. We have not done as much of that as I would like; we’ll do more of that in the future, I think.

IHG Hotels & Resorts Builds a New Travel Planner Powered by Google Cloud AI

And unfortunately, when we have to spend a lot more money — not just with hiring lawyers, but hiring outside counsel, et cetera — that’s money that can’t be used to make better products and services for society. At Booking.com, I’m the one who’s responsible for that, so I guess I have conversations with myself about that. But the thing is, at the end of the day, and I say, it’s how do we make decisions? We make decisions, as I said, on data, but also, what’s really important to me is listening — really listening. And just because I have the title of CEO doesn’t mean I know everything.

Look, no hotel goes out and makes its own electricity. Because it’s cheaper to get the electricity from the utility, right? Well, we provide customers that they would not be able to get, or if they could, it would cost a lot more than us providing it for them. Yes, I’ll ask questions, and I’ll listen to the answer and see how confident that person is speaking, that person really knows what they’re saying, and that it makes sense what they’re saying.

With AI centered on texting, marketers can steer the conversation on behalf of restaurateurs and other stakeholders in hospitality, developing content strategies for AI-consumer interactions. It’s a rare out-of-home ad experience that can still reach consumers in an intimate setting and on their own terms. In 2015, Japan’s Henn na Hotel claimed to be the first of its kind to welcome an AI staff, with guests greeted by robotic dinosaurs as front-desk assistants. Four years later, the hotel laid off roughly half of its 243 robots.

Even the biggest chains in the world, he said — your Marriotts and your Hyatts —  benefit from online travel managers like Booking because the world is so big and complicated. From where he sits, the hotels don’t necessarily want to operate customer service in a hundred languages or take dozens of different payment methods, and that’s the service Booking is offering. By now, it is safe to say that robots are definitely taking over most hotel operations.

AI provides more than just operational efficiency; it allows hotels to meet guests’ needs faster and more effectively than ever before. Hoteliers who embrace AI today are investing not just in technology but in the future of their businesses. By leveraging AI’s ability to manage routine tasks, answer complex inquiries, and provide real-time support, hotels can enhance guest satisfaction, increase efficiency, and ensure their operations run smoothly—no matter what challenges arise.

Expedia also used additional algorithms and AI functions to limit the conversations to only travel booking. The beta version of the plug-in uses the latest GPT-4 technology and is now available for all iOS users of the latest version of the Expedia app. In case after case, these robots proved too annoying or broke down too often to be worth the trouble, according to the WSJ. The velociraptor couldn’t handle foreign guests, for instance; human employees had to come over to photocopy their passports. Since its launch in February, Xiao Xi has replied to more than 50,000 customer inquiries, with a 94 percent customer satisfaction rating, which far surpasses the average performance for a general AI chatbot. At present, Xiao Xi is available 24/7 via Hilton China mobile apps – including iOS, Android, and the WeChat Mini Program.

“We are also targeting the corporate market with SureStay, giving guests the opportunity to earn or redeem Best Western Rewards points, which is a real point of difference in the economy sector,” Richards said. Bespoke Inc said that the launch of Bebot at Narita Airport would see the use of AI technology by consumers and travellers significantly expand in Japan. Radisson Hotel Group is one of the world’s largest hotel groups with nine distinctive hotel brands, and more than 1,400 hotels in operation and under development in 120 countries.

To explore the IHG Hotels & Resorts global brands or book your next stay, download the IHG One Rewards App. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. As a whole, the economic fundamentals of robotic technologies play a vital role in their adoption by the hotel industry. My view has been that as much as there is opportunity for our humanoid friends, it’s more likely that the rise of adoption will occur through software driven robots or the term often used, Robotic Process Automation.