Hello,

I am still trying to understand all the AI news that hit the world from Google’s IO this week. I just dont have the time to do it. So I guess I will ask Grok to give me a summary per topic and explain the use cases for hospitality, b2b tech marketing?

Best, Martin

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Personalization and emotional intelligence

There’s a theory that the reason AI doesn’t succeed at personalization in hotels is because it lacks emotional intelligence. I think the problem is a lot more basic than that. 80% of personalization is recognition and we mostly fail at that. It is a boring problem, but until we fix that, we shouldn’t worry about emotional intelligence. For example, in most hotel PMS solutions it is easier to create a new guest profile than to find the actual profile. Thus impossible for the check-in to even say “welcome back” which for most is epic level of personalization.

AI IN HOSPITALITY

Google I/O, an AI waterfall

Plenty of people have said AI is the end of Google Search. I agree it is likely the end of search in it’s current form. AI search is orders of magnitude better than regular search. But Google just announced so much AI news that they clearly know where the puck is going and with their unique access to data, I’m quite sure they will be able to iterate. Their announcements were so many it is hard to keep up, we’ll need AI for that.

GOOGLE AI ADVANCEMENTS

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies helping turn them into industry leaders. I'm also the co-founder of 10minutes.news a hotel news media that is unsensational, factual and keeps hoteliers updated on the industry.  

The awful digital advertising

Tom Goodwin (a digital business consultant and writer) critiques the current state of digital advertising, with a pretty simple question: what digital ad is the best? There’s a very valid case that digital ads have lost all creative wonder and turned into mostly performance ads (dare I say spam) with little emotional impact. But that critique isn’t new. How can we Make Advertising Great Again as he suggests? I think everybody wants to but we haven’t figured it out (I know I haven’t).

DIGITAL AD CRITIQUE

Challenges of Retail Media

A report, launched at the Retail Media X conference, aims to help professionals anticipate industry trends in the Retail Media space, in the hotel industry we have retail media through Expedia and a bit through Booking. The upside of retail media is that the audience is highly qualified. But it requires much more work to manage so many channels. How can we grow this in the hotel industry? Airlines? Tours?

7 RETAIL MEDIA CHALLENGES RETAIL MEDIA GUIDE

Booking vs Airbnb

Over the years Airbnb managed to convince people from outside the industry that they compete against hotel chains like Marriott etc. It was always a PR spin. But it worked, there are so many posts about how Airbnb disrupted the hotel industry, but none of that actually happened. It mostly annoyed the hotel industry and then things adjusted. What also adjusted however, is how Booking decided to grow the short term rentals offering. So much so that they soon have more than Airbnb (I guess why they’re moving to adjacent markets?). The numbers are impressive.

OVERTAKING AIRBNB

Media-mix Budget tool

The Media Mix Navigator is a free tool for media planning. Mostly for major budgets and to consumer level marketing. It helps assess budget impacts on revenue and ROI. We should create some tools like this for independent hoteliers.

MEDIA MIX NAVIGATOR

Podcast: I was invited on the Hospitality Daily Podcast and spoke about technology in hospitality, some thoughts on what wont change in hospitality, and why I co-founded 10minutes.news. Best, Martin

Opinion

Resistance and doubt, the real risks for AI in hospitality

Last week, speaking at a conference in Paris on AI in travel and hospitality—surrounded by experts, tech firms, AI researchers, airlines, and more. A great event in a great hotel. What surprised me was the atmosphere of some: cautious, skeptical, even mildly dismissive when it came to AI. A recurring attitude? “Let’s be careful,” or “Don’t change too much” sprinkled with a bit of annoyance by some. I think that is a counter-productive angle to AI.

Here’s the thing: any technology that reduces friction/effort and makes life easier will be adopted. That’s not a theory; it’s a law of behavior. Generative AI has one of the lowest effort-to-reward ratios I’ve seen. As a corollary, in my opinion the metaverse hasn’t taken off because the effort-to-reward ratio is too low. Type a request into a chatbot and you get usable response in seconds, on a device you already have. That’s already changing how we work and learn. Yes, the answers often contain errors, they’re still better and faster than anything we had before. And infinitely better than yet another mega-multi-level interface of most business tech solutions.

Some people say, “Let’s measure the risks.” But honestly, we can’t. When smartphones came out, no one predicted TikTok dances or teenage screen addiction. Many (even smart people) predicted smartphones would flop. So how exactly are we going to forecast all the societal effects of AI? We can’t. But we know there will be some and we will need to course-correct.

In hospitality, the risks aren’t about kids stuck on ChatGPT instead of playing outside. Our concern should be missing the opportunity to make our work faster, better, and more human by offloading the repetitive parts of the job to AI. Whether it’s guest messaging, maintenance scheduling, reconciliation of statements, pricing or the other ideas you will figure out. The AI shift has happened it is just a question of time for it to be embedded into everything.

So let’s stop worrying about whether we should use AI and start figuring out how we will, and let’s tackle this with enthusiasm not the cautious approach. Because the friction is low, the benefits are high, and our guests’ adoption is inevitable.

And as for the person at the event who warned me about AI’s carbon footprint? I get it, but maybe we could use AI to find other wasted resources, and inefficient systems, that could reduce our carbon footprints even more.

The future isn’t something we carefully move toward; it is coming at it’s own pace and we either get with it or get left behind.

I’d love to hear what you think AI could be used for in hotel technology.

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