Josiah: Yesterday on the show, we explored some advanced use cases for hospitality, sales, marketing, and revenue management with Lou Zameryka. Definitely recommend you check out that episode if you missed it. But today we’re going to go simpler. We’re going to talk about using AI to help respond to online guest reviews on sites like TripAdvisor and Google. Why? Well, the single biggest thing that I want you to think about with AI is experimentation. How can you make it work for you? And I can’t answer that for you. It’s something you have to figure out for yourself, and that is why experimentation is so important. Why? Well, the only way to figure out how to make AI work for you, your hotel, your hospitality business, is through experimentation. You need to think about what takes up a lot of your time and then test how AI might help you do it faster so that It frees up time and makes you more effective as a hospitality professional. When I think about this, review responses are what first comes to mind, and that might be because I spent years at a company that was helping hotels manage their online reviews, worked with more than 30,000 hotels and hotel companies around the world, Starting with the rise of TripAdvisor, which of course changed the power dynamic in hospitality, all of a sudden hotels had to deliver great experiences to earn reviews that would make guests want to come back, future guests want to stay with them. And so it really was influential not only in the hospitality business, but how I think about digital communication and its impact across businesses on so many different levels. And so today I did something a little bit crazy. I partnered up with my friend and probably the industry’s leading expert in the area of online guest review management, Adele Gutman, to build an AI chatbot for hotel review responses. We did this live and totally unscripted. We were going to talk about something else and I said, hey, you know, why don’t we try building something like this live just to show people what the process can look like. And so you can watch us do this now on YouTube. It is about a 50-minute episode, but there are chapter markers. You can, of course, listen at 2x speed. But I wanted to show you from start to finish what it can look like to take a tool that is very simple, I have the paid versions of ChatGTP as well as Claude. Both of them are about 20 bucks a month. Not expensive, but it’s really important to test this out. And so we basically just pulled up a hotel on TripAdvisor. We pulled up these tools and we started building. And you can watch the whole process. They did a screen share and you can see how that whole process worked, you might pick up a thing or two, maybe you know how to do this, maybe this is brand new to you, but it’s actually quite simple. And so watch that video for insights into the technical elements to that. But I think going through that process live with Adele, the biggest thing that stood out to me was that the most important parts of hospitality are actually not what AI can directly help with. It indirectly helps with this. And, you know, I am, and you might be sort of tired of hearing all the talk about AI makes us more efficient, it speeds things up. It’s true. And I think you have to get into the details to see this. There’s absolutely value to this, but in the case of what we did today, building this bot and listening to Adele remind me and teach me and teach all of us about the real power of guest review management isn’t so much in the review responses. Those responses are really important so that the guest who left the response feels heard. It’s really important for the thousands or tens of thousands of people that look at that exchange to understand that you’re a hospitality provider that listens to guests and makes changes based on what you hear. But the real power was in the actual things that are done based on that guest feedback, right? And Adele did a really great job of talking through how she led her collection of hotels based in New York, but with properties in Toronto and in Europe. That whole collection was at the very top of the Global TripAdvisor rankings. And so she has done this herself. She knows what it takes. And what it takes is not just a smart guest review, right? There’s nothing you can say in response to a guest review that is going to improve your actual reputation. The actual improvement comes from making real changes to your hospitality business, to the operations of the hotel. And so I really appreciate what Adele shared today with regards to that, how she talked about empowering her team and cultivating their leadership ability to take ownership for any sort of lapse in service, anything in the hotel operation that needed to be fixed. It not only made them feel empowered, it cut down on things that could be frustrating to them on the operations of the hotel, but it also empowered them as leaders in their own career development. So, if I think about all of that stuff, all of that stuff is what makes hospitality so special. It’s what makes the business of hospitality so special. And to bring it full circle back to AI, you might be wondering, why am I talking about all this operational stuff? It’s because I found through this experiment, you know, just spending an hour actually building this chatbot, it’s very cheap. It’s something that all of us have access to and we can do. It’s actually quite simple. And it’s important because I think, done well, instead of spending an hour typing up responses to a couple of guest reviews, you can kind of build some best practices around this, you can think about how do we want to communicate with guests, you can take an expert maybe on your team, have their perspective on this, you can bring in information about your hotels, your hospitality business, and you can build the bot, and that’s why we did that technical walkthrough. But all of the other stuff that Adele was talking about, what she did at her business, and I think is the opportunity for you, is all in the interpersonal relationships. Obviously in the interactions with the guests, but it is, I heard a lot of focus on the team and the actual improvements in the operation, improvements in the physical building of these hotels, right? So that’s why experimentation is so important. Yes, you’ll learn things on the technical side of building something like the AI review response bot that we built today, but you’re also going to really understand where does this help me in my work, right? Again, I think that really the power here of AI is in helping you become more effective, and that might be freeing up time But that sounds a little bit like, that sounds very trite until you actually do it, right? So I encourage you, check out the video if this is interesting. I think you might be interested in the technical elements, you might be interested in Adele’s perspective on how to effectively manage guest feedback. But more than anything, if I can leave you with one idea, it is to think about what is time consuming in your work, in your business, and then block off an hour and then follow the process that we went through in this video to build yourself a little bot and just think about how can I speed something up in my work so that I can become a better hospitality professional. I’d love to get your thoughts on this. You can send me a message on LinkedIn, would love to hear your thoughts on this. What have you tried? What do you want to try? What questions do you have? And I hope you have the chance to check out the video that Adele and I recorded. Would love to get your thoughts on that. Thanks for listening.
