— But, wait a second, before you read the rest of this. Did you know that this is just an excerpt from the complete newsletter that is available here? Sent out once a week, original viewpoints, insights and interesting things to read.— If you think about it, we’ve gone from a world where you had to tinker with RAM, hello world
scripts, and endless if-else-end loops to…well, now you can tell a computer, Make me something cool,
and it does—without knowing a line of code. That’s new. Really new. For hotels, this means both opportunity and some risk. AI raises big questions around privacy and security, especially for an industry built on trust. But I don’t think this genie is going back into the bottle. Any tech that doesn’t understand context, typos, or guest needs will quickly feel outdated—frustrating both teams and guests. So, what’s actually going to change in 2025 thanks to AI? Here’s what I think:
- Content Creation on Turbo Mode: Marketing teams can crank out more content—faster. No excuses for stale Instagram feeds and outdated room descriptions anymore.
- Hotels Will Have Their Own GPTs: Imagine this—upload all your PDFs, price lists, event schedules, and local tips into an AI chatbot. Share the link with guests so they can ask for answers instead of calling reception to find out when the pool closes.
- Upselling Without the Pushiness: Guests will ask the hotel’s AI for recommendations—spa packages, late checkouts, dinner reservations—making upselling feel natural, not spammy.
- Automated Review Replies: Responding to reviews becomes a breeze, …AI-generated reviews might start popping up too.
- Communication Supercharged: AI handling guest messages, emails, and texts will go from “nice-to-have” to the norm. Guests will expect replies in minutes, not hours—and it will drive more direct revenue.
- Meetings and Events Will Get Smarter: AI will help sales teams respond to RFPs faster, suggest multiple tailored options, and close deals without the back-and-forth.
- Ending Repetitive Tasks: Many small, annoying workflows will get automated. They already are, but AI will expand what’s possible here, saving teams time on boring things that are slightly too unique to code, but too repetitive to be human tasks.
And personalization? I don’t think AI-driven personalization will feel like a revolution next year. Instead, it’ll be a slow, quiet evolution—things will gradually feel less and less irrelevant. One day, everything will just work, and the whole experience will seem “magical.” But it will not be a sudden shift.
Long-term? What we’re calling AI today will simply become…normal. Every system will interpret instructions and execute tasks more intuitively. The real risk for hotels? Falling behind. For guests, waiting at the front desk while someone clicks through 25 screens to check them in feels like a mystery. I’m sure it makes sense to someone who built the system. But it doesn’t make sense to the guests. They’ve given you their data, they’ve prepped their ID—why 25 clicks?
The great thing is that AI isn’t coming to replace hospitality—it’s coming to help hotels do hospitality better.
